Stress, and the Non-Missing Missing Puzzle Piece

Stress.  It's everywhere.  Last 2 weeks of school stress.  Graduation stress.  Refinancing stress.  Getting the house passably clean for the appraisal stress.  Grading stress.  School activities stress.  Plus all the ordinary stress that a family of 6 normally has.  Makes a girl want to curl up on the couch with a quilt binding to sew on and watch a marathon of the spelling bee.  And maybe, eventually, get the grading done too.

I was preparing to throw out the above puzzle as part of cleaning off the round table, which tends to be a catchall for whatever the kids pick up off the chairs or kitchen table or floor but don't want to put away.  The cats perch there too.  I had finished the puzzle except for one missing piece, months ago.  Our policy is to throw out thrift store puzzles if they have missing pieces, but I left the puzzle up because I figured, the cats and kids have been messing with this table plenty, maybe it will show up.  That was back in March.  Well, I can't find where the missing puzzle piece was, because someone had found it and put it in.  That so rarely happens, I quizzed the kids about it.  "Did one of you find the puzzle piece that was missing for this puzzle?"  The closest I got was an "I might have, it's been a long time," from Secundus.  Good news, I guess!

No progress on the puzzle

There's this cool jigsaw puzzle we've had out for a few weeks now.  It's a panoramic night skyline of New York City, and it's supposed to glow in the dark.  We haven't made a whole lot of progress on it. But Muffball seems to like the box.

We have to check her fur for any clinging pieces when she does this.  We'll let you know if any end up missing when we finally do get it together.

Grading Marathons and Latin Bloopers

This pretty butterfly puzzle was really challenging to put together, and it's missing 5 pieces.  So we removed it from the puzzle chain rather than giving it back to Goodwill.

I'm always very frazzled during the last week of each quarter and the first week of the next.  There are final exams to administer and then grade, and there are always other large grading projects, as well as prep for the next quarter.  And grades are due Wednesday.  I finally have all three sets of finals graded.  Still to do are the Panis Angelicus for 7th grade and the Isaiah 40 Vulgate passage for 8th grade, and 8th grade mythology pages on Venus.

I occasionally run across unintentionally humorous answers on my final exams.  For example:

More than one young person has rendered "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" as "It is sweet and filling to die for ones country."

Long ago I was floored by the young lady who gave her translation of the all-purpose Latin greeting "Quid agis?" as "What do you drive?"  Because we teach ago, agere - do, drive, act, treat, it's fairly easy to see how she got there, but somehow the image of ancient Romans inquiring as to someone's favorite mode of transportation has always struck me as funny.

I give my 8th graders the challenge: Ille certissime malam fortuam fert qui nullos amicos habet.  Nam Cicero, "Sine amicitia," inquit, "vita est nulla."  Which my own son Secundus last year gave as, "That fortune is bad and has no friends.  Cicero was without friends.  Therefore he had no life."

And then there are the matching sections I throw in at the ends of my exams on Roman history, culture, and mythology.  They are matching sections... so I am always surprised when it's not as obvious and logical for the students as it is for me.  To read the exams, you would think that:

A.K.A. Dis, Hades, or Orcus = Apollo
Son of Apollo, god of the healing arts = Pluto or Venus
A.K.A. Pallas, Athena = Venus (she got around)
A.K.A. Aphrodite = Aesculapius
Separated from Thisbe by a wall = Cerberus
distaff = used to make wedding cake (I'm thinking as a stirring spoon?)
spelt = a woman's shawl

WIP Wednesday: a little progress on many projects

We had a beautiful sunrise today.  Heavy frost made the ground look almost like it had snowed, but I had to dash my daughter's hopes for a snow day.

Some of the same colors are in my Farmer's Wife quilt, block #81, Snowball (and I didn't even plan it that way).

I also did block #82, Spider Legs.  This one was a pain: drew it on graph paper and paper-pieced it, and it's still on the small side.  I purposely chose colors that do NOT remind me of spiders.

I'm still working on the Orca Bay mystery: about halfway done with making the units that will be used in the border.  If I wanted I could start piecing the body, but I like to do the steps in order.  I'm hoping to get several hours at a time this weekend to piece: for the last few weeks I've just grabbed 10 or 20 minutes here and there, in the cracks and crevices of the day.

I've made a little progress on my UFO project of the month, preparing half of the applique pieces for the 1996 Piecemaker's calendar quilt.  This is the quilt I began when I was pregnant with Secundus, and figured that if he was a girl, it might be done by the time "she" was in a big girl bed.  Tertia and Quarta came along, and moved to big girl beds, and the quilt is still not done.  It's time to git 'er done.  I have all the stems for the floral setting blocks, all the leaves, and maybe 10% of the flower petals and flower centers.  It's fiddly work, lots of standing at the ironing board with a paintbrush and spray starch, but it's been progressing, and that's something.  I'd like to get all the pieces prepared now that I've started, and that would leave the actual applique for another month's challenge.

I have my finished crumb-along quilt top in at school, where I'm almost finished collecting signatures from all the students and staff.  I still have Kindergarten and 2nd grade to collect, and a few absentees from other grades.  Yesterday, two 1st graders asked me how to spell their last names.  I told them to just use the last initial.  I hope to have all the signatures collected so I can begin quilting soon, maybe even this weekend, but I'll need to piece a back first!

I did some spinning last night and plied a bobbin full of this Blue-Faced Leicester that I dyed and spun last summer.  I'll have two skeins of light fingering/ heavy laceweight, but still need to skein the bobbin I spun last night, wash both skeins and count the yardage.  I should have enough for one of the shawls I'm planning on knitting this year.

My two shawls are progressing nicely, even though I don't have new pictures.  I'm in the last section of the Age of Brass and Steam, past the part involved in the yarn barf incident.  I'm planning on making it a 5 section shawl instead of a 3-section kerchief.  Might even finish it this weekend.

Okay, one thing did get finished last week: this photomosaic Charlie Brown puzzle we picked up at Goodwill.  None of the 1000 pieces missing: it's a keeper!

Once again I'm linking up to Freshly Pieced, where you can see lots of other progress from lots of other bloggers.

Map of the world

1500 pieces, $2.99 at Goodwill.  No pieces missing!  A keeper.  With Steve's love of maps and my love of Latin, this is possibly the perfect puzzle for us.  That's Julius Caesar in the top left corner.  You know, "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres..."

In knitting news, I finished my Damson shawl with the Tosh Merino Light (and supplemental handspun when I ran out of that).  It's blocking now... pictures later.  Still on sleeve island on two sweaters.

There and back again. And puzzles. And games.

I'm playing catch-up this week after a weekend flight down to Arizona to visit family.  I hadn't seen one sister for 5 years, and had never met my little niece, who's now almost three and impossibly cute. 

My nephews are big on playing board games; I came up with a simplified set of rules for Risk for the 5-9 age range.  We eliminated the cards altogether and played only one army on every country, with 2 attacking dice vs. 1 defending die.  Except if you held onto an entire continent for a whole turn, you got a little city to put on any country you wished, which when attacked would require 2 higher than your highest number to conquer.  And any time you defended a country on your continent, you got to roll 2 dice.  It actually worked out fairly even, but my 6-year-old nephew shows good aptitude for world conquest.

The puzzle craze continues ... the Lord of the Rings one is not missing any pieces, and will be saved for another time.  It was also popular because it was colorful.  By contrast, the puppy puzzle, purchased at Goodwill, was missing about 8 pieces and no one but me really enjoyed the odd shapes and monotonous color scheme.  The poor puppies had to be euthanized.

First week of the third quarter in school -- so I have just finished a furious frenzy of lesson planning and grading.  Also fast approaching is Saturday's Latin Olympika at Veritas School in Newberg, at which my students hope to win undying glory in a quiz-bowl type contest.  I don't really have to do anything for it but watch it, now that I have divided the students into teams of four and given them clever names.  I will also hope no one gets lost on the way or comes down sick.

Since I have so much fun inventing games, here's a favorite classroom game for any of my fellow Latin teachers who might read this.  It's called "Thumbs up/ Thumbs down," and is used to turn correcting an exercise of Latin-into-English sentence translation (which is pure drudgery, trust me) into something students actually enjoy and learn from.  Here's how:  Say you have 10 students.  Make sure your assignment has at least 10 sentences (or get creative about having 2 up at a time).  First student up dictates his translation of sentence 1 to Magistra, who writes it on the board, confirming the spelling and other nitpicky details: "Is this what you wrote?"  Then the other students have a 5-count to vote thumbs up if they think the sentence is correct, thumbs down if they think it is incorrect.  If the sentence is actually completely correct, every student who voted thumbs up gets one point; the student who was up gets one point for every correct word (et, in, de, ex, etc. do not usually count).  If the sentence contains one or more errors, the students who voted thumbs down get one point; then you go around the room in order from the person who was up, and give each student a chance to correct a word (and explain his correction) until no more corrections are necessary.  If it is a correct correction, that student gets one additional point; BUT if he makes an incorrect correction, he must also forfeit the point he got for the thumbs-down vote.  The "it" student gets one point for every correct word.  Students who voted thumbs down but never got a chance to make a correction still get their one point.  Play continues in sequence around the room until all students have translated one sentence.  Then, if there are any extra sentences in the assignment, there can be a bonus round: Magistra writes the correct sentences on the board and students get one additional point for every correct word they have in their homework, but take away a point if they put in an extra incorrect word.  Student with the most points wins a Lemonhead, or whatever Magistra has in her candy box.