Backsies Is What There Is Not: Toxic Waste Makes The Thankful List

October is in the rear view mirror, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and there are thankfuls a-plenty!

Halloween is over for another year. It's just not my favorite holiday, and I'm never sad to see it go.

I carved a pumpkin with my class on Monday. Carving pumpkins is yet another reason not to like Halloween, but I reached inside it and pulled out its ooky guts and let my students feel them and smell them. They chose a happy face over a scary face, and we used our little jack-o-lantern as a night light for two days.

Looking isn't enough; you have to
get in there and touch and sniff!

The day AFTER Halloween should be a national holiday, especially for teachers. My students were all kinds of wound up with residual sugar highs and lack of sleep and overall excitement of having worn a costume and gone trick or treating, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

My besties Nikki and Julie and I went out to dinner Halloween night, so we could avoid trick or treaters. I don't think we've been out together since Julie's birthday in March. We talked and laughed and ate a lot of food from the brown food group, and it was delightful!

Thursday, Nikki, my friend and co-worker Alyssa, and I left for St. Louis for a Conscious Discipline training. We had gone to one in June that was a week long and included an enormous amount of information; this one was only two days, but it was chock-full of information and tools that we will be taking back to use in our classrooms.

With Alyssa at the hotel

Cute little story: on our way to St. Louis, I got a frantic text from my husband asking where the car keys were. Long story short, the answer was in my pocket, and he had to go to a meeting and then to my dad's, and I was 120 miles away. There was a spare key for the vehicle, but it was (I thought) in the console of the car that was sitting in the driveway at the lake house. My husband kept his composure way better than I would have imagined, given the situation. He then looked for a house key (also in my pocket) and while searching, he found the extra key to the Tahoe, minus the key fob. He then remembered that something was wrong with that key fob and my dad had traded keys with me, and I was exonerated.

Our hotel in St. Louis overlooked the airport. We didn't get a lot of time to be in our room, but when there was a chance, I was standing with my nose pressed to the window, watching jets take off and land.

LOOK HOW CLOSE I AM

This is really cool, and I have no idea WHY it happened, but it did, and I was lucky enough to see it go down: a fighter jet swooped down from the sky and did a touch and go landing! No idea why, but what luck that I got to see it!'

I'm thankful that all my electronics were smart enough to change their times back to Central Standard Time, because I had already forgotten all about it by morning.

Before we left St. Louis this morning, I took my friends on a little field trip to see a nuclear waste site. I went there about five years ago with my dear friend Christine, and you will be glad to know the uranium is still safely encapsulated under its mountain of rock.