123: Hey, teach

It's Teacher Appreciation Week, so let's appreciate a teacher:

Ms Frizzle!

I think I read all the Magic School Bus books, and I still sometimes watch the cartoon on Saturday mornings.  Taking ridiculously dangerous and super-cool field trips to teach various science concepts? Yes, please!  Even though some of the field trips were a little creepy (going inside your classmate?), I would've picked the Magic School Bus trips over yet another trip to Valleyfair.

Ms. Frizzle, I salute you!

122: Geronimo

It was slightly unbelievable to hear the news about bin Laden last night. I can't imagine what the atmosphere was like in the Situation Room.

121: Marathon

I loved the first season of The Good Wife.  The beginning of the second season was okay, and then I stopped watching sometime around November.  The shift in focus from the legal cases to the intra-office politics -- and, indeed, a political campaign -- just stretched the show a bit thin and made it less enjoyable.  But the DVR is full, so it's time to clear the backlog of episodes.  And you know what?  I remember why I loved this show to begin with.  The creative legal strategies, the wheeling and dealing, and Alan Cumming, among other things.  But most of all, I love a drama that has a sense of humor.  So here's the deal, Good Wife: don't start taking yourself too seriously.  Dive too far into the soap-opera pool and I'm gone.  Linger too long on the Will/Alicia/Peter triangle or the Florrick/Childs/Scott-Carr election mess, and I'm gone.  Remember that, at the end of the day, you're a show about lawyers who are occasionally very, very funny, and I'll stick around.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have seven more episodes to watch.

120: Favorite Things XIV

Too lazy/tired to write, so it's a Favorite Things in photos.

Diners

 Cookies

 Slightly creepy roads

Prince Harry

 I enjoy that he had to spend part of the big wedding day baby-sitting and dress-wrangling.

Pocket watches

click photos for their sources.

119: The Wedding (of course)

I spent the duration of the Royal Wedding unconscious, since I had to work today and didn't fancy staring at a computer screen for seven hours without my full six hours of sleep.  I did, however, catch the second kiss on the balcony while diligently scoping out photos of The Dress while scarfing down a donut.  The PBS rebroadcast of the whole shebang starts in about 10 minutes, so I'll settle in with some cookies and watch as much of it as I can stand, but I already have a favorite photo from the day:

via Tom and Lorenzo
(sorry about the wonky, too-wide formatting.)

After Pippa Middleton handled dress-train wrangling for the ceremony, it looks like Prince Harry took over at Buckingham Palace.  Cute.

Congrats to the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge!  May they have a long and happy marriage.

118: Old Blue Eyes

Picture of the day:

via We Heart It

Pretty kitty.  Someday, I'll have a cat.

117: Kool-Aid

A brief missive from the land of No Child Left Behind:

There's an occupational hazard when you're scoring standardized tests for a living: sometimes, students produce the same wrong answer so frequently that you start to think it might actually, secretly, be right.  In other words, you start drinking the Kool-Aid.  I started out reading essays, and after a few days, a number of my coworkers were grumbling that, faced with the same misspelling for hours on end, they were forgetting how words were actually spelled.  Then I scored short-answer questions assessing punctuation usage.  After three days, I wasn't sure I had ever known how to properly use a comma.  Does, it, go after; or. before? this! word?

Oy.

Here's the moral of the story, kids: study hard, learn to write and express yourself properly, and read up on commas and semicolons.  It will serve you well.  Or, at the very least, it will keep the people that score your tests from going mad.

116: Beg and steal and lie and cheat

The slightly more profane version of this song was stuck in my head all day, which was a little distracting while scoring standardized tests.  I listened to it twice during lunch, to no avail.  And then I watched The Voice, which features Cee Lo as one of the four celebrity coaches, so it's just been a Cee Lo-licious kind of day, I guess.  Which makes up for the end of the workday being a little aggravating.

Anyway.

115: Come as you are

I always listen to Nirvana on Mondays.  I don't know why, but it just seems right.  So have some early '90s grunge for your Monday blues:

114: Easter

photos via We Heart It

Happy Easter.  I spent mine at a family lunch, then frantically clearing a path through the house for the heating and cooling guys tomorrow.