Tis the season

I love this season when it changes to being more warm then cold more sunny then cloudy. Right now it is in the cloudy stages but I am not a fan of full on heat or full on cold. I like the in-between times when it is sometimes a little of each. Fall brings football and the renewal of a new school year. Spring brings tennis season and the completion of the school year. It is the middles that are less fun. The drudgery of the middle two quarters of school and the beat down of summer is what I don't like.
Speaking of tennis I am excited at how well this season has started. We have won more matches up to this point then we did at the 3/4 point of the season last year. Last year we lost to Alta all 5 matches and most of the JV matches too. This year we still lost but lost 3 to 2 and looked a lot better. Bingham this next week and this will tell us if we are playing for second place in the region or first and I am excited since I feel like we can compete and win against them. The biggest thing I think as we progress through the tennis season is seeing the development of good young men. I love working with them through the emotions of a pressure filled match and seeing them come out ahead and win or lose that they do it with dignity and respect for their opponent.

The Smell of Rain

I have always loved the smell of rain...unfortunately today that smell has been coupled with the smell of burnt popcorn. Morgan thought that not enough of the popcorn had popped so she put it back in "for like 3 minutes". Popcorn is one of those smells that is so good when it is done right and so wrong when it is done wrong. Rain is like that too. When you are inside and have the windows open it is great. When you are out on the tennis courts getting ready to start playing that same smell is not as good.

I do love the smell of rain though it brings me back to England. I loved all of the different types of rain that would be there. (misting, raining, pouring, and the times that it was just wet in the air and it felt like you were actually in the cloud.

My heart is pained for the people of Japan. It seems that they are getting a bad smell right now and I hope that they will comeback stronger.

My butt hurts but Emily is in worse shape

So when I asked Justin how his snowboarding trip with Emily went yesterday he said "I should have rented a tailbone protector". I asked him if he was okay and he said "my butt hurts but emily is in worse shape". I think he meant she was hurting worse. I am so glad that my kids have aunts and uncles who spend quality time with them. I can't tell you how excited Morgan is that her aunt Erin is coming to her career day. I had very little to do with my aunts and uncles on a day to day basis and I see how much that means to my kids. Thanks to all of their aunts and uncles.

So when someone points out your flaws and they are right....

I had an interesting discussion with a teacher this week. All of the things that I already know are my weaknesses were brought up and spewed at me with quite a bit of personal vitriol thrown in for good measure. I left that meeting feeling like some of the items were true and many were not and were simply personal attacks. It reminded me of working at the hotel complaint department when people would lash out at you personally for something that had happened at a hotel. I will say it is so much easier to take over the phone than in person. The things that I know were not true were not able to be defended because the teacher I was talking to was yelling (in volume, and tone) at me and did not want to talk together or have dialogue but rather a place to vent.
I thought for a while that the things that hurt the worst were the ones that were true but have since come to find that the things that hurt the worst were the things this person accused me of that were not true. The things that may have some truth to them are things that I have committed to improve on and am excited to rectify. The things that were a personal attack on me but untrue were hurtful in the aspect that a perception of me, that is incorrect, does exist and there is little that I can do to change that perception.
All of this in mind I know that the job that I do is valuable and that many people that I work with and for are extremely supportive and that a portion of the poor perception is caused by the person who is creating their own incorrect perception.

At the end of last year I was yelled at by a parent that I was the cause of her son's troubles and that I had necessitated his institutionalization for suicide watch. The vitriol that she brought was negated quickly in my mind and heart by what I know I had done for this student.

Sometimes when I think about our interactions as parents and teachers I think it is impossible to be on the same page when you are not in the same book.

So I don't know if Blogging is for boys or not...

So I got a chance to listen to Stephanie Nielson and left the assembly so much more in love with my wife and kids that I was crying. I found myself just so excited to see the people who mean more than anything after hearing her, and her husbands, story. I looked up her blog and watched her church commercials again and just was reminded that my life is pretty darn good. After looking at all of these blogs and talking to my wife about how she follows so many different blogs and gets different recipes and ideas for refurbishing every corner of our home that I thought about boys and blogs and if that happens and maybe what I should say is MEN and blogs. Are there any good blogs by boys about boy stuff. Like how to build a treehouse for your kids or how to sharpen dull drill bits, or how to repair a car with only bailing wire, or what to do if you are in the back woods of asia and a tiger attacks. There are plenty of sports update sites and even a few that get into opinions like the peter king but I want to know about general every day MacGyvers and how they are saving the world. Do they exist?

Also I am in the process of going disc free. I have been ripping all of our legally purchased and only slightly scratched discs and then I am putting our entire library of movies, music and Wii games on a network drive so we can access all of the time and keep the discs out of the kids hands. I wish that there was a DVD ripping appliance (you know like a toaster).