Back from busyland...

A post from some of my friends on Facebook reminded me of my neglected blog, so I came back to  post about my busy month. Truly, I felt badly about being gone, but there was a lot tugging on my attention. Here's what I experienced in March and early April:

1. Grading. My school runs on trimesters, so we finish about the 10th and start the new trimester immediately. As an English teacher, this bogs me down for a variety of reasons. Last trimester involved a researched argument, and this trimester started out with a process paper, so every night I have been reading 10-15 student papers. There's a lull right now--I am only scoring theses and topic sentences--so I'm back!

2. Spring Break. For the first time ever, we shared a spring break with my SIL and BIL and families, so we met in Michigan and Chicago for some fun.

Truly a lark, but planning for this trip took some energy, as did the drive back, through blizzard conditions. Yowza.

3. Easter. I know this is a busy weekend for many, but as a church musician, I need to be at just about every service, from Good Friday to Easter Vigil to every service Sunday. This is why my husband and I decided years ago to always eat out on Sunday, which we did at Hell's Kitchen this year.

BONUS! We managed to get tickets to the Guthrie Easter night, one more wonderful memory making adventure:

4. Reading. This will sound crazy, but since I knew I would be unable to scrapbook much this month with my hectic schedule, I decided to put a dent in my To Be Read (TBR) pile. I've read January First, My Favorite Plant, Crimson Shore, Buried Prey, Empress Orchid, The Invisible Man, and The History of Love in the past month and a half. I'm hoping my bedside pile will be gone by September so that I can read some new books that have piqued my interest.

5. Scrapbooking. Truly, I have scrapbooked! In the next few days, I'll share pages I've made for Write Click Scrapbook and Simple Scrapper, plus some pages I made while on a retreat in Pine City, Minnesota. Here was my view from my scrap spot:

The Pine City Scrapbooking Retreat is a wonderful place, not too far from the Twin Cities. I went with a group of ten ladies and had a wonderful time. Here we are:

I will post pages and projects I made later this week.

There were a lot of other things that occupied my time--piano lessons, violin lessons, taekwondo, and I think there was a recital in there?--but I did some memory making and memory recording this past month. I'll share more this week.

Chairbound

This has been a week that  has left me in my chair more than usual but too exhausted right now to do much with that chair time, especially scrapbook. Here's what happened:

I have had a fairly big mole on the bottom of my foot--the arch--for a while. My doctor checked it out, said it didn't look cancerous, and told me just to "keep an eye on it," an interesting prospect, for how often do you really look at the bottom of your feet? Still, I periodically did, until I noticed this summer that the edges looked a little blurry. My doctor recommended I see a dermatologist, who recommended I get it removed. Not that they thought it was cancerous; normally, they would biopsy, then remove only if it's bad, but the doctor told me that they don't like to operate on the bottom of the foot more than once--and now that I've had that happen, I can see why.

Wednesday, the doctor showed me what she would do: she had drawn a circle around the mole, then a diamond shape around it. The diamond, she said, was how they would close the wound. She said it would be like a dart. Did I know what a dart was? Why, yes I did; I've seen Silence of the Lambs.

The surgery was minor, though for the record, the table was made for someone SIGNIFICANTLY shorter than I am. The surgery was alright; the shots didn't hurt nearly as bad as had been warned, and I read my book through the whole procedure. I was gimpy and swollen, though, and she warned me to stay off my feet for a couple days.

Now, if you're a mother or a teacher, those are hard things to do (not just mothers and teachers, I suspect!), but I did manage to get to my car, get my boys to choir then violin then home that night.

The next morning when I got up at 5:30 like usual, I went to change the bandages like I'd been told. They were awfully red, and the more I peeled off, the fainter I got. When I saw the dart, I told my husband that I was feeling faint and I sat down. He teased me, asking if I'd be like his brother who passed out at the sight of his own blood. And that is when I passed out.

I was out for maybe five minutes. When I got up, I was still woozy and had to call in sick for the day. It took me until about 10:30 to recover fully. (We figured my fainting was a result of low blood sugar, low blood pressure, which is normal for me, and the sight of the blood and dart.) I spent the day grading and scrapbooking and off my feet, like I was supposed to.

Two days later, my foot is still sore. I've borrowed crutches from my school nurse and am glad my mom left her ice pack here when she returned home to Maine. My foot is better today, though, and I haven't passed out in a couple days, so I'm good.

Here's a page I worked on while I have been chairbound:

I collected all of the reading photos of my boys from this past summer on this page. (My favorite photo is the one of my son asleep after reading Shel Silverstein, a bedtime favorite of his!) I used the remnants of my September Studio Calico kit on this page. Almost done with that kit! I'll post the journaling later for you to read it. I love this story.

ETA: Here's the journaling:

Summer of 2012 will go down in history as the summer my boys became Readers. They fell in love with Shel Silverstein, and Dominic often fell asleep reading him. We regularly went to the library, mostly visiting the graphic novels. Dominic fell in love with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and begged to buy the copy he could never find at the library. I agreed and told Rowan I’d get him a book too, but it had to be a chapter book. He grumped but eventually picked The Unwanted, and he’s just about done, a rarity for him and chapter books. This fall they kept reading, both boys returning to their unfinished Harry Potter books and still going back to the library for more. In the words of the Doctor, “You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!”

Other creative ventures

I've been scrapping, but I have a couple pages that require computer journaling sitting around--you know how that makes me feel--so I took a break from scrapping to take on other creative ventures.

• I finished Audition, Barbara Walters' book. Pretty good. Quite dishy.
• Rowan was his first grade class' Star student this week, so I helped him make a poster for it. We used leftover photos that had never been scrapped. I also let him play with my scraps and my punches, to his delight. And to the best of my ability, I resisted the urge to organize those punched stars in a visual triangle. He put them on in any order he pleased.
• I visited with some college friends over the weekend and enjoyed talking with them. I also enjoyed learning we have Saturday afternoons free and may be able to make those conversations a habit.
• I went sledding with the boys. Wow, did they have fun. Now that I scrapped.
• I celebrated my not-yet-fortieth birthday and enjoyed dinner at Buca's, some scrappy goodness from the fam*, and a lovely Hobbit teapot from my MIL. Now I just need to learn how to brew tea the old-fashioned way.

Especially since I finished the book, which was due at the library today (guiltguiltguilt), I now feel energized enough to go back and do some scrapping, particularly finishing the computer journaling.

*My big guilt involves those scrappy birthday gifts. I didn't buy them, so I haven't really borken my New-year's res to make 100 layouts before buying new supplies. Still, should I hold off on using them until I make the remaining layouts? Decisions...