Famous Last Words... a house!

So last week was totally overwhelming already (second Pfizer shot, doing a keynote for OERxDomains conference, among other adventures)... and then this weekend, my husband and I put in a bid on a house, and we just found out late on Sunday evening that the owners accepted our offer. So, I'm going to be starting my retirement in a new house, and it looks amazing. The best part is the woods around the house, which have walking trails:

The woods where we live now are beautiful too (we live about an hour away from the new house), but our woods are not like this: where we live now we have lots of undergrowth and bushes and so on, so that you can't just walk through the woods (at least, not without a machete, ha ha)... but this forest is like a movie set or something: woods perfect for walking in.

There are also wonderful built-in bookcases in the room that will be my study. I'm guessing this will be the first time in, uh... forever, when I will actually be able to have all my books out on bookshelves; right now I've got boxes of books in my closet. In fact, my closet is basically full of boxes of books. Now I'll have a study and there is also a guest room where I can put the bookcases that are in my study now (guests will have lots of things to read if they want, ha ha). This is the room that will be the study; it's a children's bedroom right now (the owners are still living in the house). 

It gets good light and should be really nice and quiet too, even more quiet than where we live now because it is way way way off the main road down a gravel road through the woods. 

Anyway, I still can't quite believe it is really happening, but this is the weekend when this new life adventure began. If all goes well, we'll close in a month and start moving in June. Our anniversary is in June: even if we are not moved in yet, we should be be able to celebrate our anniversary at the new house, whoo-hoo!

Week 12 Famous Last Words... 3 weeks to go!

This week went really well! I prepared my talk for the OERxDomains conference, I'm honestly excited about it... I created randomized bingo cards! Plus I built a kind bingo generator that people can use to create their own cards with their own random words. When I was in college we used to make bingo cards for especially boring lectures, ha ha... and I'm still a believer in bingo as a way to pique people's curiosity and help them pay attention, even though of course I hope my talk won't be boring. The whole talk will be all about Storybooks over the years, and my goal is to inspire other teachers to think about how they might use websites in their classes. Here's a bingo card, and here's the generator. :-)

And on Tuesday................. I get my second Pfizer shot! WHOO-HOO!

Then the talk is on Wednesday, plus a follow-up VConnecting after the conference too!

And then it's just 19 days until the end of the semester (as of the time I'm writing this post), although I hope people will want to make a microfiction book together, and I'll probably be working on that during finals week. But anyway, the end is near, ha ha. And I am so excited about all the books I've got stacked up in heaps (heaps and heaps!) to read as soon as the semester is over. One of my latest discoveries is the writer and illustrator Ashley Bryan; I had bought a few of his books not even knowing who he was, and then I read his biography: what an amazing person! Here's his Wikipedia article. And here's a website dedicated to his work: Ashley Bryan Center.

I'm also really excited about a book that I just learned about today; it's a new edition of Apuleius's Golden Ass edited by Peter Singer, the animal rights activist and philosopher, with an essay he's written for the book, plus illustrations. I had been thinking about doing a Tiny Tales versions of Apuleius, and seeing this book made me even more certain that I should try to do something like that.