I was tagged by Wendy for a meme. Here are the rules:

• List 8 facts/habits about yourself
• Post the rules at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed
• Tag 8 people and post their names, go to their blogs and leave them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and ask them to read your blog.

Like Wendy, I’m trying hard to think of eight things that would be news to anyone who reads this blog, but I’ll give it a shot. Perhaps one or two things you don’t already know will appear in the list.

1. I am planning to go back to school soon for a masters degree. I want to major in Instructional Technology. I am really excited about the possibilities of Web 2.0 technologies in particular.
2. I seriously considered becoming a French teacher, but I didn’t think I’d be very marketable if I couldn’t teach Spanish, too. Since I had no desire to teach Spanish, I didn’t major in French either. French was always my best subject in high school, however, and I won the French Student of the Year award in my senior year.
3. My interest in the Middle Ages dates to two courses I took the same quarter in college — Celtic Literature and Medieval Literature.
4. I like old movies and reruns of The Twilight Zone. I’m also a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I used to gather with friends in dorm on Saturday evenings when new episodes aired.
5. I was on TV in high school with fellow guitar students in my guitar class for a Christmas program. I never saw the program because we didn’t get the channel it was on.
6. I decided to teach English thinking I could teach British literature, but I didn’t realize that was a real seniority-based course. Next year is my first opportunity to teach it after teaching in middle and high schools for nine years. I have mostly taught ninth grade English and American literature in my teaching career. I don’t think I’ll be happy until I have taught British literature for a number of years, and it won’t be until after that point that I move into instructional technology.
7. I like a lot of different kinds of music. I guess that’s not much of a revelation, but I’m running out of stuff, here.
8. I pick up musical instruments fairly easily, and it looks like my daughter does, too.

I’m not sure if I can think of eight people who would be interested in playing along, but I’ll tag Dana, Crankydragon, Steve, Dragon of the Valleys, Maggie, Sarah, Ben, Noah and Abigael (who all share a blog, so I felt it might be cheating to count them as three, but maybe it’s not), and Roger. Don’t feel obligated to participate if you’ve been tagged before, or if you don’t feel like it.

[tags]meme[/tags]

This video depicts 500 years of women in Western art:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/nUDIoN-_Hxs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I wonder how much time it took and how it was done.

[tags]women, Western art[/tags]

Sarah and I went to the Georgia Renaissance Festival yesterday.  For the first time since we’ve been making these trips an annual event, Sarah wanted to bring a friend, so we did.  I think everyone had a good time.  I did.  I really missed seeing Hack and Slash and the Zucchini Brothers, but Barely Balanced was pretty good.  The girls watched one-half of the duo that comprises the Zucchini Brothers in a new act, Flying Debris, but I missed it as I was on a quest to find a working ATM.  The girls wanted to see Ded Bob.  Had Hack and Slash and the Zucchini Brothers been there, we probably wouldn’t have seen this show.  Frankly, I was not overly impressed with the selection of shows.  We ultimately saw only four.  In addition to Ded Bob and Barely Balanced, we also watched the joust, which was dusty, crowded, and hot, and the Lost Boys.  Angus (one of the Lost Boys) was mysteriously absent, and I could find no explanation for his absence on the Lost Boys’ website.  He has been replaced by someone I didn’t recognize and whose name I didn’t catch.  They were good and played songs I haven’t heard them play in a while.

[tags]Georgia Renaissance Festival, Lost Boys, Ded Bob, Barely Balanced, Hack and Slash, Zucchini Brothers[/tags]

I won’t apologize for not posting — I know lots of bloggers do that, and my reaction is usually, why are you apologizing? Just post when you post, and if your readers don’t like it, that’s not your problem. That’s probably a bad attitude to have if you want to sustain a readership, but it’s a healthy one to have if you don’t want your blog to take over your life.

I am still here, and I’m posting much more actively these days at my education blog. I suppose that means that I am particularly passionate about my career right now. I have also begun posting at EduStat Blog, at the invitation of David DeSchryver, but for the time being (as school keeps me busy enough), I have been cross-posting blog posts from my education blog rather than writing new posts. I have been asked to read a book, and review it if I like it, and an education company offered to let me try a product. I guess that blog is growing. It made me wonder what kinds of offers some of the more popular bloggers get.

Harry Potter frenzy is reaching a fever pitch as the last book and the movie for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out this July, and I have been keeping busy keeping up with the latest. I post a Harry Potter Carnival at my Harry Potter blog every two weeks, and that has been good for making sure that particular blog doesn’t go too dormant, but I confess I need to put more of my own material on that blog more often than I do. I don’t want to be another news site, as I think there are enough HP news sites out there, and they have far more time and more resources to stay up to date than I do. I have enjoyed sharing these books so much with Sarah, and I have such fond memories of our reading them together. I am looking forward the opportunity to do the same with Maggie and Dylan. I suspect Maggie will be ready in two years or so, but she let me know the other night when I offered to read a bit of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to her that those books didn’t have pictures.

I have been doing a lot of cooking at home. I don’t have sophisticated tastes, and whatever I fix is family fare, but I guess the frequent practice is making me better. Although I still say my mom does something tricky — like bewitching her pots or something — because I can’t get things to come out just like she does it, even when I’ve watched her and replicated all the steps.

I am thinking seriously about grad school. I have decided where to apply and what to major in. I hope to take the GRE this summer in preparation to apply for admission in spring 2008. I will be majoring in Instructional Technology, and it is my goal to be working as a school IT in about five years. I still have some things I want to do with English.

I haven’t done much with my genealogy research, but I usually save that for summers when I have more time.

School seems to be flying by — weeks flash by in the blink of an eye. Soon it will be over, and I will have finished my 10th year as a teacher. It doesn’t seem that long in some respects, but it others it seems as if I’ve been teaching forever.

My book is still for sale. So far, my parents and my sister have bought it, and not that I’m whining or anything, but it might help my ego if I sold a few more.

[tags]blogging[/tags]