David Archuletta is incredibly boring as usual. His voice bores me to tears. He can sing, I admit, but it’s very “so what?” to me. Big deal. Nice looking kid can sing. It’s been done before. I hate his Melinda Doolitte habits too. The “oh shucks, am I really that good?” crap and all of that giggling and stuttering and stuff. Annoying. At least he’s stopped that annoying habit of licking his lips all the time.

Syesha also bores me. She can also sing though. I hope I don’t offend anyone by this comment, but a lot of African American women can sing well and it’s not very impressive to me. It seems to come very natural for a lot of them. People who can sing well and sound the same all the time bore me. It’s not exciting to me. It’s expected.

Okay, by now you’ve probably guessed that if I don’t care for David A. or Syesha that I must obviously be rooting for David Cook. Darn right I am! The guy sang a Duran Duran song! Granted, it wasn’t a very good performance (no one can be Simon LeBon), but I never thought I’d ever hear a Duran Duran song on American Idol ever. I keep praying for a Duran Duran night though. The other cool thing is that our birthdays are close together, oh and me and him had the same exact high chair when we were babies! How cool is that!? How many people can say that!? (Everyone who had that same teddy bear high chair I guess…) David Cook is cool, unique, surprising, and all of that good stuff an American Idol should be. I will definitely be voting for him tonight!

They are singing three songs tonight. Now I shall sit and suffer through two more songs from both David A. and Syesha while waiting to hear the real American Idol, David Cook, to sing his songs.

1. I pronounce the word “pillow” as “pellow” like pell and oh. I always have. My mom and dad tease me about it. *hugs her pellow*

2. Sometimes I really like to moan, whine, wimper, etc. especially when I am bored, frustrated, on my period, etc. It makes me feel good.

3. I love Richard Simmons. I think he’s wonderful. I actually recently bought the boxed set of the Sweatin’ to the Oldies on DVD. I will probably be blogging about Richard Simmons sometime in the near future.

4. For the first 10 or so years of my life, cheese was pretty much the only thing I would eat. I love cheese.

5. I voted for John Kerry, NOT George Bush. (And I would have voted for Al Gore if I had been old enough to vote in that election.)

6. I have a scar on my chin from busting my chin open when I was practically a baby. Whenever I get really sick and have coughing attacks, my chin itches like crazy where my scar is. It’s quite annoying. When I was younger, I would try to pick my scar off like it was a scab.

7. People frequently mess my name up. Four Ashleys work at my school, so sometimes I am “Ashley” and sometimes I am “Ashlee.” Don’t even get me started on my last name. This one kid cannot pronounce my last name. She calls me “Mrs. Muh-Ga-Gee.” It drives me insane.

So there you go. Nothing too extraordinary there. Colin left yesterday morning and will be gone until Wednesday night. He’s off at some thing in Dayton, Ohio, so it’s just me and Pouncy. Us girls are sticking together and hanging in there, but we really miss our husband/daddy.

Heh heh heh…

I am not a huge fan of Facebook. In fact, Facebook is lucky if I log on once a month. Recently, however, I’ve had more people requesting to be my friend and such. People from high school that weren’t even my friends or people I barely talked to suddenly want to be my “friend” on Facebook. Why? So they’ll be able to boast that they have 200+ friends and need little ol’ me to push their friend count higher? Do they have any intention of establishing a meaningful relationship with me? Are they just bored and adding everyone they’ve ever known regardless if they even like that person or not? It all seems a little silly to me.

I usually don’t add people to my friends list on any site unless I know them from somewhere whether it’s real life or an online community like The Quilting Bee. This week though, I’ve added a few new “friends” to my Facebook, all of whom I went to school with at one time or another. Once of which was never really a “friend” of mine. I barely spoke to her the whole time we went to high school together, although we did have a few classes together. I decided to be nice and go ahead and add her (out of curiosity mostly). Last night I spent some time looking through her photos on Facebook, and it was indeed confirmed that she married this guy we went to school with. They dated in high school (and they were sort of this odd couple), and are now married and appear to have a daughter. I felt kind of slimy looking at her photos. It was like I was spying on her life or something. It felt sort of uncomfortable. After it was all over, I felt kind of bad that I had wasted 20 minutes or so of my life that I will never get back.

Let me just add in here that I haven’t really stayed close friends with anyone from high school. I really had no desire or need to. Does that make me an awful person? Were my friends really my friends if I don’t even associate with them now? On the flip side of the creepiness of looking through people’s photos, I did have two girls add me as their friend on Facebook, and it was kind of nice to hear from them and how they remembered good times we had in high school. One congratulated me on my marriage and wanted to know what I’ve been up to for the past 7 years. I just still find the whole concept of Facebook a little bizarre, and it’s kind of a more upscale MySpace in my opinion.

What do you think about Facebook? Do you add everyone you know to your friend list, or do you just add people you are friends with? Do you use Facebook to satisfy your curiosities about people you used to know? Why would someone want to have over 200 “friends” on Facebook if they don’t even know, like, or care about some of them?

Sometimes it’s tough trying to come up with something new and exciting. Now I’m stuck.

So yesterday I was browsing through the photos my Flickr contacts had uploaded recently, and I came across this one from mypapercrane. The idea for the cake came from all of the rainbow cupcakes that have been posted at the Bake! Bake! Bake! LiveJournal community. I promptly went to LJ community and was in awe of the gorgeous rainbow cupcakes people were making. As most of you who read this will know, I love rainbows. I decided I had to try this out for myself. When Colin went to get groceries today (I stayed home because I was cleaning), I had him pick up cupcake supplies. I spent 2-3 hours today baking these cupcakes.

For my first time doing this, I think they turned out pretty awesome! I made up my cake batter and separated it into seven containers. I added food coloring to each container. My purple turned out kind of weird because I mixed blue and purple. I later found real, plain purple that I used for the frosting. I was worried I had filled the cupcake liners too full, but I had to get each of the seven colors in there. I didn’t want to wait for the cupcakes to cool and then make another dozen, so I just used my new star mini cake pan I bought yesterday and used the remaining cake batter to make little mini star cakes.

A couple of the star tips broke off. The orange star is pretty mangled, but they are still cute and colorful all the same. I was also worried that when I cut a cupcake in half I would get a mixed up mess, but it looks so cool!!

These were so much fun to make! I definitely see myself making more of these in the future! I have lots more pictures on my Flickr account if you’d like to see more rainbow cupcake-ness!

Oh yeah, I got an awesome new quilt for the bed yesterday at Target. It’s so rainbowy! I got matching pillow cases, pillow shams, and a throw pillow too. It definitely brightens up the bedroom!

The Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) is designed to improve teaching and student learning in Kentucky. CATS includes the Kentucky Core Content Test, writing portfolios and prompts, alternate assessments for students with severe to profound disabilities…

Last year, I didn’t have to test any students. Instead, I had to cover a first grade teacher’s class while she tested someone. I found out last week that this year I will be testing a fifth grade special education student. I have to provide full accommodations for this student. I have to read everything to her and I have to scribe all of her answers. Fun times for me. The multiple choice questions will be no big deal. The open response questions might not even be so bad. I’m most concerned about the on demand portion. During the on demand portion of the test, students have to go through the entire writing process to answer a prompt. They have two hours to do it (and up to four if they need more time). Luckily, I get to do the testing in the computer lab.

I found out later in the week that I would also be having another fifth grader in the lab with me. This one needs no accommodations. It’s a girl who has been out of school and has been on homebound due to medical reasons. I’m not sure exactly what is wrong with her, but one teacher basically said she’s constantly in pain and could die any time. I think (or at least, I hope) that she was exaggerating. She’s going to be testing in the lab because she may need to get up and move around a lot, and her former homeroom teacher didn’t want her distracting any of the other students in that class. The girl was at the awards ceremony on Friday though, and she looked okay.

Testing lasts two weeks. Since testing will last from 8:15 until 11:00 every day, that means my regular lab classes will not meet at the regularly scheduled time. Instead of having classes for an hour they will only last thirty minutes. Short is good, but because of the fact we have to cram in all the classes during the week, my breaks will be fewer and shorter. It will be a busy two weeks for sure!

I’m sort of excited that I get to help with testing because it’ll be interesting to see how many of the answers I know.

A 5.2-magnitude earthquake centered in southern Illinois rattled homes and skyscrapers across the Midwest this morning, causing little damage but surprising residents unaccustomed to such a powerful temblor.

The quake was one of the strongest ever recorded in Illinois and occurred just before 4:37 a.m. southeast of West Salem, Illinois.

The U.S. Geological Survey says two aftershocks during the next three hours measured 2.6 and 2.5.

Fifteen miles away from the epicenter, a woman was trapped in her home by a collapsed porch but was quickly freed and wasn’t hurt. And a two-story apartment building was evacuated because of loose and falling bricks.

The quake shook skyscrapers in Chicago’s Loop, 230 miles north of the epicenter. It was felt as far away as Georgia and Michigan and caused minor damage in portions of the midwest.

So if you go to wfie.com, they have a link to the morning news that was live when the earthquake happened. It’s kind of funny. The weatherman is like, “I think we’re having an earthquake.”

When I got home after work, I told Colin that everyone but us must have felt that earthquake. And he said, “You didn’t feel it?” And I said, “No! I was sleeping!” And then he told me that there had been a second one at around 10:15 today. Didn’t feel that one either. I was too busy to notice I guess.

Weird. Earthquakes. Here. Wow. And there are more to come?

I didn’t give much thought about the letter passing until early afternoon when I went to log one of the computers back on and noticed a folded piece of notebook paper underneath the keyboard. This is what I found:

My Boo!

J****** would you go out with me. You have a great personality. The other reason is that you are sexy and amazing and also a hottie. We also can have a good time go out with each other. I am going to stop being so warsome and you have to stop being mean to me. The reason I know you are sexy is because you have a amazing body and your lips are big and juicy like I like them. That is the reason I want to go out with you. I am not done yet there is more. I will start being nice to you. I will do anything to go out with you because you are the love of my life. That paper that D*** was going to give to you was that she was asking if you will-

There was obviously a missing second page to the letter. I had two fourth graders in the lab working on their portfolio pieces and I told them I found a love letter. They begged me to read it to them, but of course I didn’t. Instead, here I am posting it for the world to read. I am breaking copyright violations.

This afternoon before school was out, I took the letter to the teacher and told her that I had found a love letter in the lab. Funny thing is, I didn’t find the letter underneath J’s keyboard or D’s keyboard, or even K’s keyboard (the girl who wrote it). It was under another boy’s keyboard! Apparently, the teacher has had problems with love letters in her classroom too. Oh, the raging hormones of young ones. *giggles!!*

So I’ve wanted to draw a cute “comic” for a long time now. I know that the peril of my adorable carrot isn’t going to be winning any prizes for webcomics, but it was fun to make. I don’t know if I’ll make more of these little things (hence the question mark after the number 1), but I may give it another try. If you want to see an adorable little comic featuring a cute turtle, panda, and kitty then visit Christine’s site.

This “comic” and any future comics will be made a sticky post until a new comic is uploaded. At that time, the stickyness will be removed from the old comic and the new comic will become the sticky one. Please see below for my latest blog entry.

The worst part about having a break from work is when it comes to an end. I imagine I’ll be scrambling around to get the kids to finish their PowerPoints done this week because the next week our state testing will start. I guess there’s not really that much of school left. I mean, we are having to go until the beginning of June due to all the snow days we had (and a flood day), but it could be worse probably.

During my spring break I went shopping with my mom and sister, saw 21 and Run Fatboy Run at the theatre (both of which were good), went to Nashville with Colin and did some shopping, got my taxes done, did a lot of exercising, did some cleaning, and played a lot of games with Colin. Overall, it was pretty good I guess.

Now, the temperature has dropped from the 70’s down into the 40’s. We have a freeze warning tonight, and it’s been cloudy and rainy all day. Perfect weather conditions to end my spring break.

(I have so got to bring back my own smilies! These default ones scare me!)

Good luck to those who enter!