Thursday, November 11, 2010

Before and After: Bulletin Board

This huge bulletin board has been hanging around my parents house.... since as far back as I can remember, which means since I was a teenager, because kids don't care about bulletin boards, teenage girls DO.

My sisters and I have used it in our rooms in the past, but it was looking pretty raggedy.  So I gave it a paint job face lift from this:



To this:


Now for the rest of the Bulletin Board Makeover...

I was all about finding a fabric or some contact paper that I (or my parental unit) had already purchased.  In fact, this project cost me ZERO dollars, because the primer, paint and contact paper I used were all just sitting around from old projects.  This contact paper was from... redoing my grandma's house I think??

Works for me!!

Sadly I cannot measure worth beans, but I had plenty of contact paper to fix my mistakes.

BEST TOOL EVER!  My pampered chef scraper/squeegy/picker-upper-thingy.  (I also keep one in my car for squeegy-ing my windows!)  It worked great for scraping the paper perfectly flat, no bubbles here!

Here is what the board looked in its final stages.

Now I have this fabulous, VASTLY improved Bulletin Board area.

I used it for staging much of my wedding stuff, (all those boxes, and TONS of stuff pined to the board eventually).  Now I am thinking about putting it back behind my desk to create a better work station.
Before:
After:

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Story of the Day

I substituted this morning for one of the first grade teachers at my school. (Sidenote, a few students have asked if this teacher is my sister) My school does walk to read, which means students sometimes go to other teachers, or come to me from other classrooms for reading time. I apparently forgot to tell the reading kids who came IN the classroom that I was subbing for their reading teacher. I just figured they knew who I was because I teach them science.

First grader comes to sit down at the reading table for small group instruction.
Student looks at me, "You look just like Mrs. Rude!"

Me, " .... I AM Mrs. Rude...?"

Student, "Oh..."

Apparently Mrs. V and I look alike. hehe



The other entertainment of the day was a comedy of catching the fly that was flying around. It finally got "cup caught" when it landed on a child, whose intrepid neighbor slammed a cup over it, onto the poor boy. The fly then went into a container with a caught daddy-long-legs spider. Gotta love teaching about spiders!!

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Choosing a wedding photographer

Okay I know my posts are all over the place topic wise this week, but who cares?  NOT ME!

I was thinking today, while browsing my wedding photographers blog, about how we ended up using Jerome for our pictures.

Ours was not a nice journey.  But it is a good example of not being a "YES" person.  In fact I am rarely, if ever, a Yes person.  Even my Mother will attest to that fact.  (sorry mom!)

My In-laws have had a family photographer that they have used for every event, senior portraits, family photo's, and weddings.  Needless to say, I was encouraged to meet with the photographer, and even bribed with "contributions" toward that area of the budget, if we went with this photographer.

Unfortunately for my in-laws (sorry Netty!!!) I have been following Jerome's wedding blog for some time now.  Jerome was my boss a few years back, when I attempted to work an hour away from home as a crepe chef.  A yummy job with a horrible commute.   Luckily when I quit, Jerome remained friendly towards me!  Because the kid has got some serious camera skills.  I knew from working with him that he was a hard worker, and spent TONS of time editing photo's from his weddings.  I knew from his blog, that his style was what I wanted in photo's.

When I met with my in-laws photographer, their photo's were unedited, and they had no RECENT (nothing since the 90's!!!) wedding prints/albums/etc. to show me!  Nothing said "WOW" to me, which I felt horrible about.

Compromise people.    I told my poor hubby that we needed to compromise.  We went with his pastor, my photographer.  This was not an easy decision, lots of conversation went into it.  I hope my MIL still loves me!  (Ok, I KNOW she does!)  Also... our pictures are AWESOME (even though it rained hehe).

Choosing a photographer advice:

  1. Find a style
  2. Find a price point (or a really nice friend who does wedding photography... :D)
  3. Find a photographer
  4. STICK TO YOUR GUNS!

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Story of the Day

Technically this story is from yesterday, but I still wanted to share it.

I teach science.  I'm kind of like a music teacher, but I come around to some of the classrooms at my school and teach science instead!  So sometimes during my teaching sessions we have school assemblies, as we did yesterday.   This assembly is where the story of the day comes from.

Time: 3:00PM
Location:  School Gymnasium
Event:  ASB elections.

After all of the ASB candidates had given their election speeches, the principal came on the microphone and asked the school to give all the CANDIDATES a big round of applause.

Second grader yells over the clapping to his neighbor, " CANADA'S?  Did she say CANADA'S?"
And then he proceeded to laugh hysterically over how funny Canada's was. He turned to me and said again, "What are Canada's????!!!?!?!"

Me, " I'll tell you later."  (smile)