Last Friday I went to the Hollywood Bowl with my school. It is a field trip we take every year. Imagine this: 16 yellow school busses filled with teenagers and a few teachers. We roll up to the Hollywood Bowl and begin unloading coolers of drinks and piles of food. We tote our picnic down the hill to a nice park next to the Bowl parking lot and split into our family home room groups. Each group pulls out their food they've been planning for the last week and starts to chow down on piles of Panda express and pizza, along with a few homemade enchiladas and cookies. Then we spread out and spend an hour socializing and taking pictures and cleaning up our picnic. After every piece of garbage is picked up the students get their tickets and then 500 students and their teachers start walking up toward the Hollywood bowl. Somehow we all make it through the crowds and ticket boots and keep walking up to our seats. We fill up our two sections in the Bowl and wait for the Philharmonic Orchestra to start playing Tchaikovsky. The students quickly realize that it is just classical music and that the songs are kind of long, but love the ending as the orchestra plays the 1812 overture, complete with fireworks and cannons. Aftere the concert we all wait in the stands until most of the crowd is gone then sing the school fight song and make our way to the busses. Somehow we make it there without losing anyone and sit and wait for the parking lot to clear a bit. We get back to school around 11:30 p.m. relieved to still have all the kids and another school-wide field trip out of the way.

I really like my school. We do some crazy things and some fun things and some normal things. I enjoy going to the Hollywood Bowl every year.

Life is going well. Kirk has finals next week and then he's off for 3 weeks which he will use to study for the boards and go fishing with his dad and the Morris family in Ontario, Canada. I've been hanging out and making cards and trying new recipes (thanks Stacey). I feel like I haven't done anything super exciting lately, but we've been having fun.

My jury service ended late Friday afternoon, so I was free to go back to school today. It was a little crazy because I hadn't been there since the last day back in June, but I was teaching today! I think everything worked out ok. The classes were only 45 minutes and I just pulled out some activities that I did on the first day last year that worked pretty well. It was fun to go back and see my friends and meet new teachers. In some ways, it felt like it never ended, I just got new students. I'm looking forward to this year; I hope that everything goes well.