My Life as a Teacher Begins...

I finished my first week of teaching! I've learned a lot, especially that lecturing at 7am is going to be interesting. I really need to think of more group activities to do, but packing in all the material is almost impossible. It will definitely be a challenge!

Next week I start at San Diego State. The pace is even quicker there and I may have more students who "hate" math. Hopefully I can get through to some of them.

Anyway, I am including a couple of pictures I took last week on an overcast morning when I was at the community college where I teach. They recently built a new building to house the library and learning resource center, and I thought the art on the side was pretty cool. The campus is pretty nice, so I'll probably be taking more photos of campus in the coming months!

Here is the side of the building from a distance. With all the trees and such, I couldn't get a great shot of the whole thing.


If you pan to the left of the above photo, there is this, um, I'm not sure what to call it... It's a tall slab of concrete with the picture carved in it separate from the building itself. It's a bit hard to get it all in at a reasonable angle.

Here's a close-up without the stuff surrounding it...

This is a close-up of the art interspersed with the windows in the first shot...

Busy, Busy, Busy!

I just wanted to post very briefly to say I'm still alive but insanely busy! I'm trying to catch up on emails, visiting blogs, and everything else. Posts may be scarce in the next couple of weeks until I get more settled in to my teaching schedule. I can't believe classes start on Tuesday!

Take care everyone.

More Sunsets...

More sunset photos from around Bonita.

The sunset view down the end of the culdesac.

From the backyard...

Over the neighbor's house...

End of the culdesac again...

Across from the 7-11 where I stopped for gas...

Dinner at Joes...

We went to eat at Joe's Crab Shack in Downtown San Diego last week. I brought my camera along, so I took some photos after dinner...

View from Joe's...

Close up of the water line...

And as I haven't been too random lately, I decided to throw in this random photo that I took earlier this summer.

Bright Blue Skies...

I noticed the sky was a pretty blue color with some neat clouds, but it was pretty bright in some areas. I wasn't sure how the photos would turn out. These are the ones I liked best.

Photo Mania!

I still have a ton of photos to post. I've been trying to hold off posting them all at once, but it's been difficult because I'm getting impatient! I just want to post them now when I've got the chance, but I don't want to bombard everyone either. As long as I can control myself, there will be photo posts for at least the next 2 days.

Today I'm posting photos of the sky and sunset from last Tuesday evening (in two separate posts because there are so many). The thunderstorms in the area made the clouds pretty remarkable. I was on my way to my internship class when I noticed the sky, so of course I stopped to take some photos and took my camera with me so I could more photos when I got to Grossmont College where the class was held:)

First the cloudy sky at home in Bonita:









More photos in the next post.

Grossmont Skies

These are pictures I took once I got to the Grossmont College campus for my internship class.

Night Photo Experimentation

So I finally figured out how to create a makeshift tripod with my parents ladder and a towel (to adjust the angle). I took a lot of shots of the moon and clouds the other night, but I realized after the fact (of course!) that the wind was moving the clouds quite a bit. That meant all of my photos basically turned out blurry.

I wanted to cry afterwards because you just don't get many nights like this, but I did learn. I may just have to play around more with the aperture rather than doing 10 to 30 second exposures.

Anyway, here are some of the best results of the experiment, though they are still either fuzzy or pretty dark. For those of you who might be curious, these are color pictures (not black and white).

Chillin' With the Kitties...

Here are some photos of the cats that I've taken in the backyard this last week.

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Sophie on my mom's lap. The Hawaiian print on my mom's pants is quite fitting as Sophie is originally from Maui:)

Sophie ready to make a run from the camera

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Cherie hanging out on the patio by the pool

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Ron in one of his favorite places: the bench!