On Thursday and Friday, my department hosted its annual Student Conference in Linguistics & TESOL. The photo above shows me with Jacob, a conference presenter who traveled from Mexico. If you look closely, you’ll perhaps notice that this photo was not taken at school but in our apartment. Jacob’s cash-to-expenses ratio wasn’t looking so good on Friday, so to help that situation from getting worse, Amy and I invited him to stay at our apartment last night. Of all our very appreciative guests (many of whom read our blog — so let me emphasize that all of our previous guests have been very very appreciative), Jacob was probably the most overflowing in his gratitude.

We enjoyed our time talking with him, and we have an open invitation to stay with him and his wife in Hermosillo, Mexico, next time we’re down that way.

Today we celebrate our 8th month wedding anniversary. We thank the Lord for giving us eight wonderful months of marriage. I am truly blessed to have Joshua Jensen as my husband.

A few weeks ago, Josh offered to make our Valentine’s Day dinner. I wasn’t sure what he was planning and was delightfully surprised with our meal last night. Josh made salad, chicken (his own recipe in the crockpot), twice baked potatoes (ht to Sam and Abigail for the cookbook), veggies, and apple crisp (thanks Mom J. for the recipe)! Everything was absolutely delicious!

After supper, we read our cards to each other and then Josh read a P.J. Wodehouse story. It was wonderful to spend our first Valentine’s Day together. Wonderful to be married to the world’s most sweet romantic man.

Valentine’s Day at school was a big celebration. I received several Valentine’s, as well as a single red rose that was so perfect that it looked fake.

I had a good week at school. In my fifth grade class worked on writing and performing their own raps.

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In hopes of instilling a love for music class in my students, I recently purchased two sets of Boomwhackers. (Ok, you’re right . . . I just wanted them for myself!)

It was another busy week in the Jensen household. Josh was busy with his classwork, preparing and teaching his class (Grammar and Morphology), webwork, and meeting one of the syntax faculty candidates at UTA.

I had an interesting teaching week…it was the third week in the 6 week grading period, and I’m convinced that my three worst classes in the school are scheduled during week 3 – back-to-back. I had my first classroom fight between two 4th grade boys, met the school policeman, and had my first parent/teacher/principal conference. I’m learning a lot at Cochran Elementary School, and I know the Lord is using the school to teach me dependence on wisdom from above. The most hilarious episode of the teaching week was the teacher’s assistant sub who kept telling the bilingual Pre-K class to “andale” when they were leaving my classroom.

Wednesday night we had Micah and Anna over for dinner. It was great to fellowship with them. Friday night, Josh and I went to a park, then went grocery shopping, and ended the night by making chocolate chip cookies. Sunday, we had a church fellowship, including pizza and games.

So, there’s a short glimpse into our week. We’re looking forward to this coming week – teaching and studying.

I just watched this presentation while dusting (white glove for our apartment complex this week!). Lomborg is a Danish statistician who argues that even though global warming is a real (man-made) problem, there are better ways to spend our money than cutting carbon emissions. He’s quite humorous.

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It’s been more than a month since Christmas, but I still think this was a totally cool present (from my sister Emily). I don’t think I’ve ever had an eraser this big, and I love it. (And its size makes it more ergonomic!) Another cool present — one we use every morning — was a new coffee maker from Steve & Charity and the boys.

If you gave us a present that’s not mentioned here, it’s not because we haven’t used it. We just haven’t taken a picture of it.

While I’m rambling, I’ll also mention our recent overnight guests, David and Natalie Wynn, who stopped by on their way from Florida to Washington (state) — moving from one military base to the next. (David is a Marine.) Though not our first guests, they were the first to sign our guest book. Not that the other guests refused, just that we always forget to get it out.

David and Natalie took us out for a nice supper, and we enjoyed our evening together, which included a rambling walk around the campus and lots of catching up.

Today is our 7th month wedding anniversary. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been married 7 months already! I love being married to my Josh –  the most wonderful man in the world! Everyday I am reminded of what a treasure my husband is to me from God.

I decided to surprise Josh with a picnic for our 7th month anniversary. We had a lovely time, and the “weather” was absolutely perfect.

From Dallas ISD’s website this morning:

January 28, 2009

Dallas ISD schools are closed today due to the weather.

So, of course . . .

This morning, I got up preparing for an extended drive to Dallas — extended because of icy road conditions. But I was delighted to find out that DISD closed school for the day, and I get an “extra” day to get things done. Josh and I went outside at 7:30AM and enjoyed the wintry weather.

And here’s a little video (no sound).

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If you have trouble viewing the video, please let us know in the comments. Josh is trying a different format that should be more compatible with most computers. (In case you’re interested, the format is Adobe Flash 8.)

On Dec. 19 we told you about Amy’s 1st PTA. There were some embedded Quicktime videos, but some people had trouble viewing them. I’ve converted them to Adobe Flash, which works on almost everyone’s computer. So here they are again.

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Since both Josh and I had MKL Day off from school, I was planning to surprise him with a secret getaway on Sunday night. However,  since I’ve been fighting a cold all week, I decided to forget the idea and wait until I was feeling better. On Sunday morning, when I mentioned my idea to Josh, he thought it was a great plan and we decided to see how I felt after church and then go from there. After church I was feeling well and was excited about our getaway.

We used Hotwire.com to find an excellent hotel deal and thanks to Mr. West’s Christmas gift, spent the night in the DoubleTree Hotel at Market Place Center in Dallas. It was wonderful to get away (our first official vacation since our honeymoon) and enjoy the evening and entire morning together. We brought Josh’s Mac and watched David Copperfield. It was a great way to spend extra time together, without feeling the pressures of lesson planning and other work calling to us. Now it’s back to work for both of us. Josh is planning for teaching his class tomorrow and I’m teaching piano lessons tonight and preparing lesson plans for this school week.

I had great ambitions to give Josh his second haircut of our marriage before we went to visit our relatives for Christmas, but we ran out of time before our departure and Josh assured me that no one would think I was a bad wife for failing to give my husband a haircut. My worries were completely relieved when one of my younger brothers commented, “nice to see Josh has his hair back.”

On our return home, I gathered my courage together and decided to try giving Josh a haircut again. With some helpful advice from a professional hairdresser (and from my husband), we successfully accomplished the mission and I was satisfied that no one would be looking at Josh’s hair and wondering who his “butcher” wife is.

Last weekend, Lap Siu (pictured above) and his family visited Dallas to spend time with other Jarai. (There are about 100 Jarai in the Dallas area.) Lap is from Vietnam, and he immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee around the age of 18. He and I have been talking for the last year or so, but this was my first chance to meet him.

Lap graciously gave up a couple days to consult with me about the Jarai language and also to assist me in recording a 30-minute traditional Jarai tale, told by a middle-aged Jarai man, Dun (pictured below), who knows a lot of the old legends.

Part of the recording session involved going over a release form that all research participants must sign. One section of the form states that participates are not paid for their participation. Dun replied (in Jarai) something to this effect: “The words that come out of my mouth cost me nothing.”

Lap himself also recorded some rhymes for me. You can listen to one below and see the transcription and translation here. This particular one was written by Lap, and it goes along with a traditional Jarai tune. (I recorded Lap reciting the poem, too, but I just discovered that the file was corrupted. I tried to recover it from my backup, but apparently it was corrupted from the start. Anyway, here’s Lap singing it.)

This Christmas all six Sutter siblings (and three spouses) were able to celebrate at the Sutter household in PA. We enjoyed our visit with the whole family.

We had a wonderful time in SC visiting family and celebrating Christmas with the Jensens. We’re looking forward to spending more time with them this summer, when I take my last nine credits of classes at BJU.

Last night from 6 to 7 was Amy’s first PTA. It was a blast, even though I didn’t win the raffle. (Actually, I didn’t even get a (free) ticket. I think they were for the parents.) In addition to the raffle, a few other things reminded me of elementary Christmas programs I was in as a kid at Hampton Park: the enthusiastic chatter in the audience throughout the program, the crowd of parents in the aisle taking photos of their kids during the performances, and — the program’s climax — kindergartners jumping up and down on stage while Feliz Navidad was played on a boombox. (You wanna see that? You’ll have to click on Continue Reading, further down.) Okay, so maybe not quite like programs Amy and I were in as kids. But it was lots of fun!

Amy did have a nervous 20 minutes waiting for her kids to a arrive. From about 5:35 – 5:55 only 2 or 3 of her students had shown up. But by 6:05, about 12 total had come (out of Amy’s 40 1st graders from the last two weeks) to sing Jingle Bells and shake their instruments (first audio clip below). They sang loudly and with enthusiasm

The crowd thoroughly enjoyed their singing, as you can hear from the very appreciative applause:

Yeah, and they’re cute. Here are some photos.

If you want to see a video of Amy’s kiddos — and the kindergartners who, as their teacher told me, “Like to jump up and down”, go on to the next page: Continue reading 1st PTA →

These were Amy’s words when we went out to the ice-covered car this morning a little after 7. We’d started the car about 5 minutes before, and some of the ice on the windshield was melted, but not enough. Not finding my ice scraper, I made do with my umbrella (hey — it was better than my fingernails).

Sorry, no photos.

Last week was my first full week of teaching at Cochran Elementary School. The rotation for Special classes (music, art, gym, and computer) for grades K-6 is 5 consecutive days of each special every 6 weeks, so I see each class for one week out of each 6 week grading period. Last week I only had two classes per day . . . a nice way to be integrated into the school. (This week I have 7-8 classes per day — PreK-6th grade — in 45-minute back-to-back sessions. More on that later.) I’m currently working on trying to learn the names of my over 600 students. Or at least the 100+ I’ve had so far. Let me introduce you to class 2C and class Pre-KC.

Class 2C                                  Class Pre-KC

This afternoon while Amy worked on lesson plans, I threw together a new website (based on this one for its design) that I’ll use to market my small-scale web design business. I recycled an address I used while I was in Cambodia (www.josh-in-cambodia.org) and used the initials to create J.I.C. Web Design.

I had intended to use Jensen Dimension for my web portfolio, but I started to doubt the wisdom of passing out – for business purposes – the address to a web site devote mainly to family news.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with the Park family this year. Jun Suk is one of Josh’s fellow students, and this is his first year working on his Ph.D. at UTA. We had a lovely time with their family and enjoyed our fellowship together.

Thanksgiving preparations kept us busy both Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Wednesday night, while Josh was in class, I made three loaves of Challah bread. (Challah bread is traditionally served in Jewish homes for the Sabbath meal and at feast times, but I love it and decided to add some Jewish flavor into our Thanksgiving meal.)

Thursday morning I popped the turkey in the oven (love those oven bags), and when it was cooked, Josh did a wonderful job carving the turkey – just finishing as our guests were arriving.

After our guests left, we took a traditional after Thanksgiving meal nap, finished reading Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, went on an evening walk, and enjoyed warm turkey sandwiches for dinner.

We have so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving – our salvation, our marriage, our apartment, our jobs, and the many other blessings God daily gives us. He is our faithful Father. To God be the glory.