Lazy Sundays at Juan Valdez & Football Controversy

Kelsi and I have been established regulars at the Juan Valdez in Unicentro Mall since last year. A lone entity in a country where almost all good coffee is exported overseas, Juan Valdez brews a delicious cup of coffee in the perfect environment for Sunday schoolwork. With four school weeks complete and four Sunday trips to Juan Valdez recorded, this is quickly becoming a tradition in our lives.

In keeping with my desire to blog more about the everyday things here in Cali, enjoy some images from this weeks Juan Valdez experience.

Vani-Canela (Vanilla Cinnamon) Latte Mediano.

Upstairs lounge area at JValdez.

Ready to work...

Kelsi planning out the next awesome thing she will teach third grade children.

Kelsi's guilty-pleasure (self-proclaimed) music choices.

My music choice. :)

I finished the day with some football viewing (weird, I know, but I am trying to expand my horizons and I figure I ought to give something else besides baseball a shot). Also, the Twins are in Cleveland (boring) so it is not being televised here. Anyway, I am in a football pool with colleagues for the second year in a row and although my first year showing was not terrible, I figure if I pay a bit more attention this year I can improve my record a bit :) That being said, picks/suggestions are always welcome. This week's viewing included the Bears - Lions game and I was quite impressed with the controversy surrounding the potential Detroit touchdown at the end of the game! I love me a good sports controversy and if every football game can provide such entertainment perhaps this is a sport worth investing in...

Hope you had a wonderful weekend and relaxing Sunday!

Teachable Moments - Teachers Are People Too

Wednesday, September 9, 2010 I had a four period day, which means that I teach four out of the five periods of the day. On a regular day I teach three out of five, so four period days always make me a bit more strained and I am exhausted at the end of them. This semester my schedule includes two four period days in the eight day rotation, and this week they happened on Monday and Wednesday. I arrived at school yesterday ready for four periods of teaching about multiplication and division with negative numbers, but also looking forward to my one prep period - during third hour.

So I arrive at school with the idea that I have third hour prep and I never really bothered to look at my schedule to confirm this. I have been teaching at this school for a year, so I have the schedule down.

NOT SO MUCH.

Third hour I am running around our very large campus talking to various colleagues and taking care of business at the copier, etc. Twenty minutes into third hour I run into my principal walking through a high school block.

"Kristin - did you know you have class right now?"
"Whaaaaaaat? This my prep hour."
"Well, there are 20 kids in your classroom right now who have class."

[Insert image of me running down the hill toward my classroom, red-faced, embarrassed and feeling like a complete fool. Unfortunately no one captured this image live, but you can only imagine how I looked.]

I run into my classroom to the sounds of section 8B laughing hysterically at my mistake. It took me about five minutes of incoherent rambling and apologizing to get my bearings and calm down enough to actually teach anything about math. My students were of course more than understanding and said it was "the best class ever" (probably because they missed half of it!) and "everyone makes mistakes". At the end of the hour I finished the discussion of multiplication and division, and then ended by saying "So today we learned about operations with negative numbers and that teachers are people too."

I still feel incredibly embarrassed about the whole situation, because I consider myself a pretty professional person in the work place and this basically shoots my credibility in the foot. However, my principal and everyone else he had to recruit to help look for me were all more than understanding and forgiving. If nothing else, I guess this experience is a good reminder that everyone messes up sometimes and we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

And no, I will not be lecturing 8B about responsibility any time soon. Thanks.

Oh - it rains here?!?

My first two months in Colombia, September and October 2009, I recall seeing rain maybe once. Cali was full of sunshine and heat and I felt like I was constantly sweating to death. When the rainy season began last March many of us were in shock with how much it rained (almost everyday) and how breezy/chilly the weather felt afterward. This was not the Cali we had grown accustomed to!

When I came back to Colombia at the end of July, I expected a similar situation so I prepared myself not to see rain for awhile. However, in the month since I have been back the rain has continued and I am LOVING it! Don't get me wrong, it is still hot almost everyday but not the stifling, I cannot think of moving right now because it's so hot outside heat. Instead, it rains almost every other day or so and everything feels so much cooler! There is a great breeze that comes through my neighborhood everyday around 5 pm and I have taken to wearing at least capri pants and a long sleeve shirt to bed at night (with windows open and fan on, however).

With this rain inevitably comes the storms, and they have been intense lately! The thunder feels so close to our house and the lightning flashes light up the entire sky. I hardly ever wake up during storms but last week I sat awake one early morning from about 3 to 4 am just waiting for the thunder to be quiet so I could sleep! I definitely don't like being woken up, but the storms do look cool. Check out some pictures from our balcony last night just as another storm was starting...I love how eery the sky looks!!

Disclaimer: I cannot decide if it actually is cooler in Cali these days or I have just grown less tolerant of the cold. Either way, the fact that I can sit here typing this blog in a long sleeve shirt when its sunny outside pretty much makes me think my first winter back in Minnesota will be a major shock to my system.