A different kind of word game…ALPHABET STORY
RULES (because every game has them!):
1. 26 words
2. Must follow alphabetic sequence
3. Must be cohesive/coherent; that is, it can’t be a sequence of unrelated words for the sake of using all 26 letters. Think THEME.
4. No words that you “invented.”
5. Punctuation? Of course!
Here’s a beginning for demo purposes only!
“A beautiful creature!” Daniel exclaimed.
Post yours in the comments!
Whatever invaded my body for the past 48 hours took leave sometime overnight. I woke up this morning feeling almost human, which is how I feel most mornings, so that would mean that we’re back to business as usual.
Just for the record, I have NINE days before school starts. NINE. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. That’s counting today, so that would mean 8.5 days really. There’s simply not enough cheese for the symphony of whining that will resonant in the Allan home over the next 8.5 days.
I love teaching. It’s just that 150 students show up for almost nine months.[insert laugh track here] Honestly, that’s 150 attitudes a day, not counting administrators, peers, or parents. Some days it’s like being in a reality show for personality disorders….and that’s generally just mine. After weeks of lazy mornings, bonding with my laptop, chatting with friends, schlepping around in my jammies, lounging on the sofa with the husband–reading while he’s watching something noisy, and generally slug-ness, it’s a challenge to wind myself up for a 4:30 wake-up call, teaching six classes, a 26 minute lunch, conferences, meetings, and grading papers.
Once I meet my darlings, I’m fine. My feet hit the ground running, and I’m stretching my arms out wide enough to scoop them all with me and push them along. They energize me, frustrate me, motivate me, and fascinate me. And nothing delights me more than, years after they graduate, when they find me on Facebook to tell me they’re parenting, building, lawyering, doctoring, nursing, accounting, and contributing members of Planet Earth. In fact, recently I ran into one at the grocery (no, not a cart-driving issue) who handed me his business card (!), and told me he’s writing magazine articles (because he wants to, not because of his job). Amazing. Not that he’s doing it, but that I could stand back and witness the yound man he’d become.
Several of my former students are now teachers themselves. Their enthusiasm fills me with gratitude for the choice they’ve made to step into the classroom and dare to believe in the goodness of their students.
So, am I whining because the wave of school is overtaking the summer beach? Yes.
But riding the wave is the only way in.
WORDPRESS and I are having issues this morning. It won’t allow me to post pictures. I’m experiencing an alien invasion of my body. Yesterday i slept 20 out of 24 hours, woke up for three hours, went back to sleep for 10 hours, and I’m–somewhat–awake.
Perhaps I need Sigourney Weaver or Ghostbusters. I’ll leave you with this:
5 Critical Life Lessons You Can Learn From Kung Fu Panda
and
Random musings….
1. According to The Daily Mirror, new mommie Angelina Jolie will have to gain 28 pounds for her lead role in the upcoming The Thomas Crown Affair. A moment, please, while I go celebrate with a pint of Chubby Hubby.
2. Michael Savage said that 99% of autistic children are simply brats who aren’t properly disciplined by their parents. From an AP story: “On his radio show last week, he said: “What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, you idiot.”’ Perhaps Mr.Savage might consider that, based on his own definition, he might be autistic. Severely so.
3. You might want to check out Facebook to see if your doctor has a profile there. According to an AP article on www.msn.com: “Erick W. Black, one of the[Univeristy of Florida] researchers, said he found pictures of [medical]students grabbing their breasts and crotches, posing with a dead raccoon and multiple photos of residents and medical students drinking heavily.Many students had joined Facebook groups that could be considered sexist, racist or downright nasty, with many using vulgar language. Some of the tamer groups included “Physicians looking for trophy wives in training” and “PIMP” (Party of Important Male Physicians).”One of Black’s favorite groups, which has 5,700 members nationwide, is “I’m a doctor and I hope my patients don’t see me on Facebook.”
4. The Lamar County school board in Mississippi is “concerned that casual contact between students and teachers would be unprofessional,” so they’re prohibiiting teachers from communicating with students via any Internet social networks.
“The only intent is to limit the personal communication between teachers and students,” Superintendent Ben Burnett told The Hattiesburg American newspaper. “We don’t need to let it cross the line between professional and personal communication.”
Horrors! Teachers and students having casual contact in writing? Crossing THE LINE between professional and personal? Are teachers going to be allowed to cheer at sporting events? Talk to students when they’re chaperoning dances? Oh, my, what about those after-school club meetings? Conventions?
By all means Superintendent Burnett, just think of the consequences if teachers and students personally communicated. They might l-i-k-e talking to one another; they might l-e-a-r-n information that could lead to s-u-c-c-e-s-s. Because, I’m sure, all those teachers and students who were truly engaged in extra-curriculars arranged their trysts on Facebook or My Space first.
S-T-U-P-I-D.
If stupidity could be packaged and sold, supply and demand would dictate it wouldn’t be valuable. There’s just too much of it.
And on the heels of yesterday’s [poor excuse for a] criminal, I bring you….
“The wife of back-from-the-dead canoeist John Darwin told a jury she wished her husband really had drowned.”
Try to follow this without a migraine: The wife, Anne, who conspired with John, her husband, to fake his death in March of 2002, complained that she almost committed suicide because of the pressure to maintain the lie of John’s death.
So, she wished her husband had really died, not just pretended to die because she might not then have wanted to kill herself. With that logic, she’s wasted years not running for political office.
The abomination of it all was their two sons and John’s father actually grieved his death. All the while the man was hiding out in his own home and laughing with Anne in the afternoons. His father, 80 years old at the time of his disappearance, died without knowing his son was alive. For five y
ears, Mark and Anthony, in their 20s at the time, mourned their father’s death. And, on the first “anniversary” of their father’s death, their compassionate mother tossed flowers in the sea “to comfort” her sons.
According to the BBC News: “Darwin changed his appearance. He grew his hair and an astonishing beard – he looked like a member of the rock band ZZ Top – and applied for a passport in a false name using a picture of his new self. He had used the birth certificate of a child who died in 1950 and was buried in a cemetery in Sunderland.”
“Dye-covered bank robber caught”
by Andrew Vanacore, The Times-Picayune
Tuesday July 22, 2008, 7:37 AM
MY DISCLAIMER:THIS IS NOT A POST INTENDED TO ENCOURAGE CRIMINAL ACTIVITY.
If anything speaks to the declining educational system, it’s this news story.
First, the suspect decides that 1 p.m. would be an opportune time for bank robbery. Sure, right after lunch and hours before closing. Great time. Middle of the day in the French Quarter during high tourist season. You betcha.
Next, “Ficks allegedly told a teller that if she sounded the alarm “he would shoot himself and her,” Sabrina Richardson, New Orleans Police Department spokeswoman, said. Okay, I’m not sure who ordered the pronouns in that statement, but my grammar book’s on Ficks. If he shoots himself first, unless he plans to not kill himself when he does, I’m not exactly sure how he’d carry out the second part of that plan. More importantly, why are you robbing a bank if you’re threatening to kill yourself and…YOU’RE ROBBING A BANK…who’s going to care that you’re killing yourself?
Finally, the dye explodes in the bag of money, covering one side of his head with red.Now, during Mardi Gras, no one would’ve even noticed him. But in the middle of a Monday afternoon, a wee bit obvious. Not to mention he stops to chat with someone and then heads toward CANAL STREET. That would be my plan. Escape to the main street, the busiest thoroughfare, with your red painted head and bag of money.
Understandably, anyone who chooses criminal as an occupation needs career counseling. But it’s just criminal that today’s criminals need criminal school.
Can you unscramble the letters to find ten US state capital cities?
G R Y O M O M E N
O X E N H I P
S M A R T O C E A N
H A S L A T E A L E S
A P L A I N S O N
I L L S H A V E N
S H O R T L A N C E
I N L A I D P I A N O S
L O N E P E R M I T
C U B A L I M O
KATY MC KENNA RAYMOND WON THE DR. GARY CHAPMAN BOOK, LOVE AS A WAY OF LIFE, WHICH IS FEATURED ON MY BLOG FICTIONARY.
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I’ve decided that my blogging life, especially with two of them (blogs, not lives…but a clone might be nice) needs to be organized. Lord knows, something in my life needs to be organized. Might as well start there.
So, here’s what I’m thinking about this little blog of mine.
Christa as teacher: After spending over 21 years in high school classrooms as an English teacher, I thought it would be worthwhile to share information for students, teachers, parents, parole boards, employers. Not so much day in the life of, though that’s certainly an option, as mu
ch as a behind the scenes of and how parents help or sabotage their teenagers, and whatever any of you might want to know from a teacher’s perspective on teaching. Transparent Teaching was my first thought for those posts which, of course, would be on a Tuesday and/or Thursday to honor all things alliterative.
Then my marketing brain kicked in and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to call it Naked Teaching?” My Akismet would exhaust itself with the salacious spams, but by the second week of school, my students and I are doing naked writing, so why not? Plus, it’s a great segue into the profoundly boring subject of participles because, clearly, we should all know that naked writing and writing naked are visibly different. Transparent Naked Teaching? Nah, redundant. But, the acronym, TNT, is workable.
Christa as writer: I’ll own being opaque when it comes to my fiction writing. Not that I’m unwilling to share what I write and how it can shift from stupendous to stupid in less than two sentences. So many other writers with more 
experience, published books, awards, and recognizable faces and names are sharing, I wonder what could I possibly offer? [That reads much more self-pitying than I intended. Now, see, in my real book-writing-world, I'd have to change the line because the tone's not conveying the message I want.]
I don’t want to be whiny wimpy writer and compete for blog time with my Word Game Wednesday. Fiction definitely points to Friday. Hmm…Fun Fiction? Gag.
Honestly, Fiction on my Fanny would be much more accurate because, with the exception of those few authors I know who actually write while standing, if the buttocks aren’t in the chair, the book’s not happening.
Christa as wife, mother, grammy, sister, mother-in-law, daughter-in-law: This one is a compound fractu
re in my already fractured life. I’ve forewarned my daughters that it’s unlikely they’ll be a “good” one of those listed roles simultaneously. My adultren (a portmanteau word I just created…adult+children) are now 31, 28, 25, 25, and 22. My granddaughters are three and one. I, on the other hand, have not aged. It is miraculous. Monday or Saturday? Don’t have a firm grasp on this one yet. Liking the idea of Monday Musings…
Christa as God-child: Exploring my relationship as a child of God would be will be scary.[ For me. I hope not for you reading about me. Any other scary caused by your own relationship with God is all yours.] There are still areas in my life where I insist on playing tug-of-war with God. Who am I kidding? I’m pullin
g on a rope the size of which could tow a cruise ship into port, and God’s in His heaven with a yo-yo string entertaining Himself with my foolishness. I love that God as a sense of humor. I don’t always love that I’m the source of it.
Definitely a Sunday post. I’d love to call it Sashay Sunday because I have few, if any opportunities to legitimately use that word sashay, and I happen to like it (the verb; the noun, not so much). Why don’t people sashay in the 21st century? Is it symptomatic of our stressed and frenetic society that we don’t have the time to sashay places? Maybe I could start a Save the Sashay movement.
Maybe I could get back on topic. Sunday Soul Searching. Ugh. So staunchly serious.
Here’s the lineup so far:
Tuesday or Thursday: Transparent (or Naked) Teaching
Wednesday: Word Game Wednesday
Friday: Fiction on my Fanny (unless this is found to be offensive by the audience. If so, I’ll rename it Fiction on Your Fanny.)
Monday or Saturday: Family Day, yet unnamed
Sunday: Devotion day, yet unnamed.
So, feel free to help a sister out here with ideas.
