i.am.chabebe

Holy moly, I can’t believe it. I got my blog back!!!! Long story short, I forgot to pay my domain bill and lost it, couldn’t buy it back right away due to some technicality where it had to be available for purchase elsewhere for 45 days, waited it out and now here we are! So lets get to the updates!!

Before the end of the summer I went to a whole bunch of weddings including being a bridesmaid in my friend Amy’s wedding!

Amy’s Wedding!!!

Kristen, Amy, me and Steph

Caroline and Paul’s Wedding!

Wedding Shenanigans

Me with the giants: Ben, Amy me and Kristen

After all the wedding shenanigan fun, I had to say good bye to the summer and hello to a new school year. I was terrified to say the least of having to do it all over again. What if I do worse than last year? What if the kids aren’t as wonderful? What if grad school is more exhausting? What if I can’t get used to my new classroom? What if……..

Well, despite all my worries, things are moving along and going well so far. My schedule is pretty hectic since I teach 3 classes in a row at the end of the day, I have grad school 3 nights a week and I still spend a lot of time planning. The kids are wonderful and my students from last year still visit so I’ve felt very lucky. We were recently tasked with having to plaster our bulletin boards with student work and an obnoxious amount of color. After the most stressful 2 days I managed to throw the most color intense bulletin boards ever. I was one of the few teachers who had an acceptable board according to our principle. I guess I lucked out when only being able to find supplies in all mismatching colors!

Bulletin Boards

In other more serious news, my roommate Ari Spool is running for Mayor of New York City!! She is the smartest person I have ever met. She has an answer to ALL of my questions no matter what the topic. She was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.

Write-In Brings ‘the Ruckus’Ari Spool knew her New York mayoral campaign was making headway when her Klout score, a measure of social-media influence, rocketed. Her marquee endorsement is John Lurie, the artist and founder of the Lounge Lizards jazz ensemble. Her centerpiece policy is mandating lilac uniforms for the police department.

via Wsj

Check out her awesome website, built by no other than my awesomely talented brother

Ari Spool for NYC Mayorundefined

via Neocities

One of the perks of being a teacher is that after working insanely hard from September – June, I get the months of July and August off. Although I haven’t had to teach a class all summer, I have been in graduate school taking two classes as well as planning an getting ready for the next school year. But lets not talk about the less exciting things I have done this summer and focus instead of the fun things I have gotten to do!

The summer started off with an awesome journey to Michigan via Chicago to spend 4 days camping at Electric Forest. I went with a group of seven other friends and we spent 4 awesome days listening to awesome music and camping. Here are just a few of the pictures we took.

After the four days I spent one final day in Chicago before flying home.

With all my luggage at The Bean

Looking at Chicago from 96 floors up

Shortly after returning from that trip it was the fourth of July and I headed to the Jersey Shore with some friends. Spent four awesome days relaxing in the sun, in the pool and at the beach.

Fun in the Sun!

Not all was fun and games. I spent a lot of time doing school work and taking exams while all this was happening. I even completed an online exam on my phone while floating in the pool one afternoon.

A few weeks after that I took a trip to Montreal for my friend Amy’s bachelorette party. We spend 4 awesome days hanging out in one of my favorite cities, eating smoked meat at Schwartz, hanging out late night at the Saint Suplice, riding bikes 20 miles along Canal Lachine, eating delicious crepes, walking around Mount Royal watching the drum circle. hanging out on the Parc John Drapeau on St. Helen’s Island, eating delicious foie grias and pigs foot at Au Pie Du Cachon and walking around old town eating poutine.

Bikes, Notre Dame and Crepes

Clockwise from top left of long picture: Kristen, me, Amy, Bassey and Stephanie

And finally, the last adventure I have had until now was going out boating for the day with my old engineering design co-workers from Hamilton Sundstrand . We departed from  Old Lyme beach in CT and ended up at Napatree Beach in Rhode Island.

Unfortunately the summer is almost over and I just finished my last graduate class of the summer. I have a few weeks to get myself organized for the beginning of the next school year and then the craziness starts all over again, but with a new batch of kids! I’ll have to admit I am going to miss my old classes and will be lucky if this year I have students that are as awesome as they were.

Being a high school teacher, I have an opportunity to participate in school events and clubs. After chaperoning the senior trip, I somehow became an honorary member of the Student Honor Society.

I was so excited when a few of the Honor’s students came into my classroom and delivered this to me on Friday.

Property of Hillcrest High School 2013!!!

I still haven’t decided what I want my new years resolution to be. I think I should resolve to have an awesome year in all aspects regardless of what hurdles come my way. CHEERS!

One of the things I did decide just before the end of the year was to stop trying so hard to tame my unruly hair. My natural hair is somewhere in between wavy and lion mane and so I had gotten used to straightening it using copious amounts of heat. After going semi blonde I decided my hair needed no further damage done to it so I have decided to accept my giant hair as it is.

After my mom stopped laughing the first time she saw my giant hair she sent me the following picture….

This is a saint they worship in Ecuador called Little Curly Haired Girl. Apparently my new do reminded her of me. Honestly, I don’t see the resemblance. Sure we both have crazy curly hair, but I’m half blond and definitely not a saint….You decide:

bonus cat picture!!

CAT FOOD!!!

I have been away from school now and though I am enjoying te time off a whole lot I do miss my students. Just before leaving for break one of my students drew up a fun cartoon on my smartboard.

He called it, Bob the bodybuilder

Since it’s almost new years I decided to get festive!

Needed a break from all the teacher work I have been doing so I decided to do something artsy and holiday related.

They’re a bit sloppy bit it’s hard to paint tiny nails haha. That being said I was only able to paint my left hand because there is no way I could have tried this on my right using my non-dominant left hand

I don’ know what has gotten into me but after most of my life avoiding hair salons I decided it was time for a radical change. After all, I did just make a big change in my life considering the fact that I quit my job, switched careers, relocated and left all the old behind.

So I figured with a new life, must come a new do! And I have always joked around with he idea of going blonde. So finally, I said screw it and went for it. Well…not completely. I went for an ombre style which is a gradual fade of color into typically a lighter color. So I am not completely blonde. I think I would look horrifying if I did. Check it out and let me know what you think!

The one thing this hair change has proven is that high schoolers love to find distractions everywhere. My students could not stop talking about my hair until I finally had to start giving out warnings! Good thing I didn’t go for the pink/purple color. That probably would have been interesting to say the least….

Turns out, the area of Queens where I live was hardly affected by Hurricane Sandy. Thanks to everyone who sent me emails and called making sure I was ok! I have been lucky to have power and no issues and a 5 day weekend. I have not relaxed this hard in quite a long time.

I did go outside during the hurricane. Probably not the smartest thing to do but we were careful. We walked to the train station a block away where the platform is above ground. We wanted to check out what the city skyline looked like after most of the lights had gone out. This is a picture taken after we jumped the turnstiles and got onto the train platform.

The tiny faint light in the middle of the picture is the top of the empire state building

Walking the streets during Sandy

Unfortunately, the NYC halloween parade was cancelled which is probably one of my favorite yearly events in the city. I did manage to have some halloween fun before the storm hit though.

After some debate with costume ideas I decided to go for something simple yet fun and part of current pop culture. I decided to dress up as the guy from PSY who sings Gangname Syle

How did I do?

And here is a picture with Unlce Sam and Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction (post drug overdose -hence the nose bleed)

 Who doesn’t love some Halloween dress up fun?

I have been packing my stuff up now that I am moving out of my current place and one if the things I was dreading was going through my shoes. I finally did….

If you think that’s a lot of boxes well there’s 2 pairs of shoes in a lot of those boxes. I lost count but it’s somewhere between 70-80 pairs of shoes.

To be fair I have never denied that I have a shoe problem. And you know, sometimes I feel like I have no shoes that will match the outfit I put on.

Barbie has released an engineering barbie! Finally, a barbie I can relate to. Oh wait, she’s still 6ft a million, impossibly thin, blond, amazingly fashionable and beautiful. Besides wearing a shirt that has binary, carrying a laptop and being a four eyes, barbie and I have nothing in common. It is nice to know that they are focusing on expanding her career horizons though.

I must admit, I played with many barbies in my day, but my career inspiration never came from Barbie. I think my massive high heel shoe collection might be the one thing I did learn from barbie….

On the left is anchor woman barbie and on the right is computer engineering barbie. I think in the background is the astronaut barbie. Pretty cool.