New Viola Player in town

Jenna and her new Viola

At our elementary school, fourth graders can pick a string instrument. Jenna was beyond excited to play an instrument. We went to the Loft Violin shop (which looked like Ollivanders Wand shop) so Jenna could look at the different instruments before making her choice. We also listened to different string instruments playing on youtube to help her narrow it down. Jenna has decided to play the Viola. I'm excited for her to begin playing in the school orchestra. I've also heard that listening to a beginning violin player is a form of auditory torture. I'm hoping that the viola will be less torturous.  

Austin and Matthew walking home from school

Every day we walk home from school and lately Matthew has become friends with our neighbor Austin. Austin is in 3rd grade and is 8 years old but he plays so well with Matthew, better even than younger kids. If you ask Matthew who is friends are, he will always say "Austin".

On Saturday the kids and I went to the Buckeye  Lake beach with Sunshine and her kids. It was fantastic since there were so few people there and we could play in the water and sand. After about 20 minutes I happened to see a sign that said "WARNING High Toxin levels, etc, etc, etc - Don't swim here stupid!" So our trip to the beach was shortened and instead we went to her house to play in the slip-and-slide. The kids kept talking about poison lake too. Not a good thing.

Lately Erik has had a lot of problems with his desktop. He has had to run chkdsk over and over again and still has problems.

It is affecting his gaming.

This is serious.

So I bought him a new desktop.

SHHHHHH..... It is a surprise. Luckily he will not check here. I bought him an iBuyPower Gamer Paladin F875 with 4 cores intel i7 3.7GHz processor, 256GB SSD + 1TB data drives, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB video card, and AVC liquid cooling (to help his geek cred). I'm so excited for him to get his new computer. Of course this is the opposite of trying to spend less, but I wanted to get him an awesome new gaming computer and alienware is way too expensive.

In other news:

• The Black Prism by Brent Weeks was a fabulous read. It was one of those books that I didn't want to end (since I'm on a list at the library for book 2). I really enjoyed this book.
• Fablehaven book 2 by Brandon Mull. I'm following in Jenna's footsteps and reading more of the Fablehaven series. Jenna has read and reread all these books. I can't keep up with her. 
• I turned in my grades and am now entering my unscheduled session. Yipee!! I love teaching and especially teaching online classes, but it is fantastic to just focus on course development and get caught up on emails, meetings, etc without also teaching tons of courses. This used to be my session off where I would do nothing for 8 weeks but since I'm so involved in the course developments and am on just about every committee I have a ton of other duties too. So it is not actually vacation anymore.
• Erik, Erik's Dad and I are running a 5K on Saturday. Erik runs 2 miles every day and I run about 4 times a week. So it should be a fun run. Saturday is also our 17 year anniversary. So we will run to celebrate.