5/1/2008 OMG!

You might remember that last year, I attended the annual faculty/staff appreciation dinner, held each year by the Campus Residence Council which is basically all students on campus. It was so much fun last year that I decided to go again this year. Imagine my shock and surprise when they announce the Faculty of the Year Award for faculty who've been at UMF for zero-five years! That's me with Becca, one of my students this semester who is on the Executive Board of the Campus Residence Council. She made the award announcement on behalf of the student body. All recipients of the awards received certificates but I was the only one to get flowers because those were from Becca herself. :-) Inside the rolled up certificate was a note that said, "Plaques are being shipped; you will receive yours shortly! :-) " So I get flowers, a certificate AND a plaque!

What an incredible honor! First of all, it's voted on by students. How cool is that to have students decide that you're a good faculty member! And secondly, there are a ton more faculty who've been here 2, 3, 4, and 5 years who are my peers in this category and I received the award with being here only 1.5 years. I am blown away. I am so excited.

The card on the flowers is pre-printed with "Congratulations!" To that Becca added, "You deserve it! Thank you for everything."

Becca read her speech (a copy of it is below) and then after I received the award, she gave me the paper that she was reading from. At the bottom of the page was a sentence in parenthesis that she did not read outloud. It said, "(Dr. Grace is taking pictures so you can blog about this tomorrow.)" LOL! Do my students know me or what. Wait, blog about it tomorrow?! No, I'm blogging about it tonight!!

Grace had originally told me that she wasn't coming this year and then later told me she had changed her mind. Becca had contacted her and asked her to take photos. So Grace changed her plans and did that. What a friend! She got Rod, our department chair, and his wife Margaret to come, too. All 3 of them were sitting at my table and no one spilled the beans.

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Here's what Becca said:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It is my honor and privilege to present the Faculty of the Year Award to an outstanding member of the UMF community and to someone who has played such a large role in my future as an educator. This person is one of the kindest and most caring individuals that I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. She has so much energy and is just a delight to be around. There is never a dull moment in her class and she teaches with such conviction because she truly believes in everything that she conveys to her students. She knows more about technology than any human being I have ever met. In the wise words of John Keating as quoted in the movie Dead Poet’s Society, I say ‘Carpe Diem’ which means ‘seize the day.’ Thank you for all of your hard work, dedication, and caring as you seize each day. Thank you for being a dynamic part of this unique community of UMF. A million thank yous to Dr. Theresa Overall for making our lives extraordinary.

4/28/08 Spring is Really Here!

It's our first day back from spring break and look what's blooming by the library!

4/29/08 Some Serious Snow Chains

I saw this machine a few weeks ago on my drive to Dixfield but couldn't get to it to photograph it. (It was off the main road and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get back if I drove down to it.) Today, it was right next to the highway, though I did have to make 6 U-turns (are you counting, Lindsay?) to be able to pull up along side it and photograph it safely.

4/19/2008 Happy Spring Break!!

It's spring break! I'll be on the road, so switch over to my travel blog to keep up with my adventures--I'll be on Long Island and then in Fort Lauderdale. I hope to come back to blooming flowers, but you never know. Before I left town, I stopped at the credit union to get some cash. They were having a snow lottery! Be the person who correctly picks the day on which there will no longer be any snow on the credit union property and you win a gift certificate for dinner at a local restaurant and two movie passes!

PS This is blog entry #350 just in "Life with the Mainiacs" blog! Congratulations to me. I personally would never have guessed that I would've been writing this long or made so many entries. And I never would've guessed I would've had so many different blogs. Just goes to show, "You never know."

4/16/08 Spring Frisbee

The snow has melted enough for these guys to be playing Frisbee! Of course, we've seen them play Frisbee in the snow, so maybe it's not quite the harbinger of spring one might think. You can see that there's still plenty of snow that needs to melt, but we're making progress. Today was a beautiful day! Gorgeous sunshine, temps in the upper 50's maybe even lower 60's, blue skies, no wind. Aaaaah.

4/16/2008 Symposium!

A really great event at UMF is Symposium. It started as a single day and is becoming a bigger event each year. This year marks the 10th Symposium. It's a time for students to showcase and share their research and creative works in a setting similar to professional conferences. Classes are canceled for the day and everyone goes to presentations all day long instead.

I'm on the University Culture Committee and one of its charges is to organize and carry out Symposium. There are programs to print, refreshments to order, rooms to organize, volunteers to recruit . . . all in all, it's a big day and a big job. Fortunately, there's a fabulous committee to work with and we pulled it off.

Here's a group of interested faculty and students interacting with students who are sharing their work in poster sessions. There are also paper sessions where students present in a more formal fashion to an audience.

This year we had t-shirts made for all presenters and their faculty sponsors--a first!

4/15/2008 spring thoughts

Welcome Spring. Goodbye Snow . . . Please!

That's the message on the bank sign in downtown Farmington. LOL. It's soooo true. As you can tell from the temperature, it's definitely getting warmer. This picture was taken right around 2pm so it was probably the warmest part of the day. But they're predicting highs in the 50's tomorrow (Wednesday) and maybe even the 60's by the end of the week. Whooop! I still don't mind the snow but I know that if we get to have 3 more seasons before the snow comes back again, I'll appreciate the snow even more. So I am looking forward to spring, short as it may be.

4/15/08 an odd parade

I'm not sure what this was about and this picture doesn't do it justice, but this "parade" was on the street moving ever so slowly in front of our house. Waaaay in the front is a street sweeper. Behind that is a front-end loader/tractor kind of vehicle. Behind that is a dump truck. And not in this picture 'cuz it just turned the corner, but behind the dump truck was a City of Farmington water truck. The street sweeper was cleaning the street but I don't understand what all the other vehicles were there for. I hope someone will comment and fill me in.

4/13/2008 we're a church again!!

Look how much of the church sign you can see now! The snow is really melting. (And look how black it's gotten over time from all the sand that was once on the roads but got plowed up into the banks and splashed up on the banks by passing cars.)

4/11/08 Dance

Friday night I went to the UMF Dancers' Spring Concert. One of my advisees, Katie Rose, a junior, is a member of the troupe and actually choreographed one of the numbers in the show. It was very cool. The concert was a lot of fun. I sat next to Geoff, a student in one of my classes last semester. He had been to the winter concert and told me that this was the best concert of the year. We both really enjoyed the show . . . a lot. There was a Red Sox game that night and many of the audience members were wearing Red Sox paraphernalia. Actually, that would happen anytime / anywhere in New England even if there isn't a game on, but I overheard several of them talking about the "sacrifice" they made to come to the concert instead of staying home to watch the game. However, I never heard anyone after the concert say they wished they had watched the game instead. There was a little girl on the front row who was watching everything very intensely. During a solo performance that was particularly beautiful, I noticed that she was mesmerized. AND she was dancing in her chair. Her little leg would stick out with a pointed toe, then she'd raise her arm just like the dancer did. She was copying every move the dancer made. It was so cute. I expect to see her enrolled at UMF in a few years and auditioning for the UMF Dancers.

3/10/2008 Town Meeting

It's that time of year again. If it's spring, there must be town meetings. Here I am at Farmington's Town Meeting. It didn't last nearly as long as last year's. One of the big items on this year's agenda was the library budget. For the first time in the library's history, they were paying insurance benefits for the employees. Seems more than reasonable to me. Yet some people objected. There were some pretty heated debates in the budget committee and selectmen meetings that led up to the Town Meeting. Fortunately, it was approved. In this photo you see the budget committee on the left and town officials (town manager, head of the police department, a few selectmen, . . . ) on the right. They had the same guy as moderator. He's really good. He knows his Robert's rule of order, kept everything straight, knew practically everyone's name, kept his sense of humor, and got us through everything.

The state passed some law that mandated that certain issues be voted on by secret ballot. Even though it was pretty obvious what the vote would be, they voted by ballot because they had to. The issue was raising the taxes in order to have a balanced budget since they had approved more expenditures than last year's budget.

They have a pretty clever system to make this go quickly. The ballot box has obviously been around for a very long time, but for ballots, everyone got a white card approximately 3x5 that had "YES" on the left and "NO" on the right and a perforation down the middle. So you picked up your ballot, tore it in half down the perforated line, put the half with your vote in the ballot box and put the half with the side you weren't going to use in the trash can.

Make your own springtime

There's still a lot of snow on the ground, but it's amazing how much has melted already. Two weeks ago, when I was walking home from school, I wouldn't be able to tell if either of the cars were in the driveway because the piled up snow in the yard was taller than the cars. Now, there are even places where I can see the ground! (Especially where MRM and her neice and nephew built a fort.)

So in honor of spring that's already here on the calendar but not in the local scenery, I changed my blog background to have a springtime look. One of my EDU 101 students (Rachel L.) showed me a cool website pyzam.com that has hundreds of free templates for Blogger, MySpace, etc. Always learning new stuff!

new photos

I found some old photos on my camera (I've been using my iPhone for photos so much lately that I forgot I had photos on my "other" camera). And I finally got around to doing something with the photos on my office computer where I took photos of my window at work. So the next bunch of postings are a backlog from the past.

I also added photos to this blog entry (Ashley had photos posted on her Picasa account that I downloaded):
http://mainiactheresa.blogspot.com/2008/02/29-102008-national-toboggan.html

and this one (Another presenter took our picture on Beth's camera and I got the photo from Beth):
http://texastheresa.blogspot.com/2008/03/352008-our-site-presentation.html

October 2007 Windows

I became a serious Red Sox fan this fall. Kevin Youkilis is my favorite player. At one point, I could even name the batting order. I learned so much. (I never heard of a "walk off home run" before but I think that's cuz the Rangers never had any of those.) I followed the playoffs very closely and changed the window appropriately.

12/7/2008 Dead Fred the Fly

This is the view from Heidi's window (see the edge of the "Under Construction" sign in the top left corner?). And that big black fly is stuck on the outside of her window. Or is that a really big fly on the wall across from the window? He was stuck there for over a month according to Heidi. She named him Fred . . . Dead Fred.