The last day of April.

This was the day I found a new app that made my photos dreamy and dramatic. And I love both of those things.

Work.

This was Monday night this week. In our office. At around 11pm. (We burn the midnight oil every night around here.) Sometimes we listen to music. Sometimes we watch episodes of current TV shows on sidereel.com. Sometime's we're goofy.  Sometimes we don't talk to each other for an hour because we're so focused on our projects.

Sometimes it's hard to be night people. It makes being have-to-wake-up-in-the-morning-to-make-it-to-work-on-time people quite difficult sometimes.

Jack and Sawyer Present: The New Toy

Two things:

1. I got the cats a new toy yesterday.
2. SocialCam now has captioning and music. We're going to have a lot of fun in videos to come.

And here we go!

Thoughts:

1. I just love Sawyer's awkward pouncing skills. The Little Prince wouldn't last a day in the jungle.
2. I also love that he catches me videoing him at the end and nuzzles the camera.
3. Techno music makes cat videos much more epic.

Twelfth Graders

I wrote my first letter of recommendation today. One of my students needed a letter for his senior portfolio; luckily he's always been a great and sweet student so it was easy to write. I loved that when I slipped it to him this afternoon, he immediately flipped it over to read it and started grinning.

Since I started working at the charter school three years ago, this year is the first that students of mine are graduating. This year's twelfth graders were my new tenth graders three years ago. Half of them have moved on to other teachers in the classroom since, but I still see them quite often. I spent all of today helping one of them finish Geometry to she can graduate on time.

This year's graduation will be much more personal for me. It will be the first year I'll see students I've personally invested in walk across the stage and get their diplomas. That's nuts. I guess the kiddos have to grow up and become respectable members of society sooner or later, though.

Oh, baby!

Tilted photo courtesy of Instagram's inability to correction crop post-photo taking.

A glimpse of our shoot with the Santone twins. I just love his little face, his expression, and his clasped hands!

Evolution of a Green Smoothie

Weekend days are awesome for green smoothies for one important reason: if I mess up the smoothie, I can fix it. On, say, a Friday morning, if I happen to add too much water to my morning smoothie and it ends up a bit soupy, tough for me- I gots to go teach kids some math. But on Sunday morning? Just chop up some more apples, throw in some more baby carrots, and stuff the thing with a couple more handfuls of spinach.

The evolution of a smoothie:

1) It started out with that top left picture. I had acquired a lot of oranges, apples, bananas, and grapes from leftover lunches, so I decided to put them to good use. I don't usually put oranges in smoothies, since it takes longer to get the skin off, but, as it was Sunday morning, I wanted to add those in. Can't get too much Vitamin C, right? The rest of our tropical mix frozen fruits from Costco went in as well. I also threw in some carrots, which I've never done before because I was too afraid. But yesterday we happened to stop at Jamba Juice and tried their green smoothies with carrots, and it wasn't bad. So I took a risk.

2) The second picture shows the smoothie with all those orangey and yellowy colors mixed up. I almost wanted to drink it like that, instead of adding the greens which would inevitably turn that beautiful light color, well, green. But I also want Chris and me to get as many greens into us as possible, so in went the spinach and the bok choy on top of the orange.

3) Normally I add water to help the blender break up the frozen fruits, but since there were mostly fresh things in this smoothie so far, I really hadn't needed to. My smoothie at this point was pretty thick, though, so I knew I needed some kind of liquid to make it more smoothie and less something we needed a spoon to eat. Sometimes I add in almond milk, but ours was expired. (Those things don't really last forever, apparently.) But we did have a few mouthfuls of V8 Splash left, so I dumped that in there and gave it a whirl.

   Way. Too. Much. Liquid. Dang it.
   
   But lucky for me, it was Sunday, and I still had plenty of room to pack the blender with some more liquid absorbing items. In went another apple, another banana, another handful of spinach, and a whopping amount of carrots, way more than I'd put in originally. (I was throwing caution to the wind at this point. Plus I figured with the V8 Splash, it would probably taste pretty yummy even I threw some cauliflower and green beans in there.)


4) And the last picture shows the final product. It was the perfect texture and absolutely delicious. I didn't even have to add any Stevia thanks to the V8 Splash, and that thing had quite a bit of veggies in it.


So what did we learn today?

1) Carrots are not to be feared in smoothies.

2) A little V8 Splash really livens up a green smoothie.

3) Use liquids sparingly, unless you want a giant vat of green smoothie. (It was okay today, since Chris and I both wanted one, and I poured the rest in a eco cup to take with us to our newborn shoot today.)

Success!

Look at that determination. It's like he's scaling Mount Everest or something.

Sure, he only scratches if we coax him, and then we don't see him at it again all day, but it's something....