Ellie in action racing a Time Trial style.
Ellie and Lawanna (usually known as Lou). The photo is by Carrie, Arian's mother. She is a talented photographer. She also took the TT photo and the close-up of Ellie in this post.
Where have I been? In Stressville - and it is all my own fault. Last Monday I could have been the mayor of Stressville, but each day it is getting a bit better.
But first, let's talk about the weekend. It was a big one in the biking world in Colorado since it was the Colorado State Time Trial Championship on Saturday.
Ellie was awesome. She came in second place. She was cool with that since the girl who came in first, Marta, has been winning or coming in second place in the Womens 4 category. Many people remarked that it was great to see how happy she is this year. Last year was a rough one.
After the race she hung out with the kids from the team. Ariana had Ellie, Stephen, Maxl and AJ over to her house to jump on the tramp and hang out.
On Sunday she raced the Coalminer's Classic (a crit.) in Louisville and won.
While I was waiting for the kids to come around each time I looked for other interesting things to photograph. I thought these milk weed puffs were kind of neat.
Ethan spent all of Saturday at an airsoft battle. He and Tom have such fun doing that. They meet a whole group of guys who like to battle as well. When he came home he was completely spent - happily.
On Sunday he went to a meeting with Larr and then the two of them spent some time with a water rights man. A friend of ours needs to resecure her water rights and get some parts of the ditches cleaned up. Ethan will take that job on later in the week.
He is growing up and becoming so independent that I don't get many opportunities to have photos or direct stories of him on this blog. That is just how it goes. I miss my time with him, but I know that he is enjoying himself and doing what he needs to do as a young man.
In the spring I was offered the opportunity to write two online professional development courses. Now, this is a really cool offer and a rare one. Of the thousands of teachers in my district, only about may 20 or 30 of us teach online courses. Currently there are only about 7 of us who are invited to write the courses that will be offered. It made me feel pretty special. :)
My original plan was to write one session (there are six sessions) about every three weeks. That did not happen. To make a longer story short, I put it on the back of my priority list until about two weeks ago. Mari and I had plugged along nicely with the other one and got it done without the stress. This one, the online credit recovery course, is another story. I had it all outlined, so I thought it would go pretty fast. However, once I REALLY started to work on it, I found that it was much slower. It took me a very long time, about 1.5 days, to get my head around how I wanted to structure it and what the main readings would be. At this point I was down to 1.5 days to write each session. I needed that for sessions 1-2. Sessions 3-4 each took about a day (and I mean a full day working from about 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. with very few stops). I had worked myself into a headache frenzy. Session 5 is going along very nicely and will be finished today.
Here's the deal. The courses are due on Wednesday. I could ask for an extension, but I don't want to. Katie, Jill and Sherry say that Mari and I are their favorite course developers and I would like to keep it that way. I am enjoying it, but I know that this is not something I would want to do full time.
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