March 1st

It’s hard to believe that it’s March already. And based on how great today’s weather was, I’m predicting snow at the end of the month. You know what we learned in 1st grade, in like a lamb, out like a lion. Was it just me or did you make the picture of the lamb with cottonballs and the lion with the curled up paper strips on the pencil for the lion's mane to hang up in the school hallway?

We had our stake conference this weekend. It went pretty well. We had Elder Teixera from the 1st Quorum of Seventy come visit our stake. He is a pretty dynamic speaker, so it was interesting to listen to him. He talked a lot about making your family your priority and having the faith to do as the Lord asks. He also reminded us of some wise financial council such as living by a budget and spending less than you make. We also went to the CES fireside in the Marriott Center for Elder Hale’s address. He talked about the importance of standing on high ground and not giving way to the temptation to lower our standards. We took a Korean woman with us who is here visiting the United States for a couple of months. We also invited to go with us to the Draper Temple Open House on Thursday. She is a member of the church, but she doesn’t speak much English and she likes to experience what the church has to offer here.

We spent the weekend going to Stake Conference meetings, going to the temple, going to Enrichment, and going to the fireside. I must say it was a pretty spiritual weekend, which is a good thing since I had to take a long Stats test on Saturday amidst the other activities. Several hours and several typed pages later, I feel pretty good about it, so I hope it turns out okay.

I taught for the last week this week before my students go into the Elementary schools. It’s a really good thing too, because I’ve been putting off some projects that really need my attention now. I’m hoping to get some work done on them, but it’s hard to find time with so many extracurricular activities planned.

This week Jason and I will play in the final round for our division in racquetball. We already played this team before and lost, so I don’t have a whole lot of hope to win, but it’s always fun to play other couples too.

One of the best things that happened this week as far as school is concerned is that I’ve pretty much settled on what I’m doing for my Master’s Thesis Project. I’ve been worrying about it for a while. I talked to Peter Rich, the professor that I work with to teach Educational Psychology , about it for a while one day and he suggested that I do a project to put the Educational Psychology class on-line. At first I wasn’t interested in it, but I thought it over for about a week and decided that it would be do-able and a good fit for me. Peter will be the chair of my committee and I will start working to gather materials starting in May and then actually create the website during Fall Semester. The goal is to be done by December and possibly pilot the class for Winter Semester 2010. The other blessing about doing this project is that Peter got permission for me to be paid for my work, so I can work up to 20 paid hours a week during the summer months while I work on it. It’s so nice to be paid to do school work! I hope things continue to fall into place with this project.

Jason has also been thinking about what he’s going to do this summer. He talked to one of his professors this week after class about possibly doing some research for him this summer. He’s also possibly thinking about working at the MTC again since behavioral coding for more than 20 hours would be a little tedious.