Today is an important day in American history, being Veteran's Day and all, but it's also a special day for another reason... today is Mrs. Ruth Fort Hale's BIRTHDAY!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RUTH!

To commemorate her 23rd year of life I've decided to make a list of my top 23 favorite things about/times with her.

In no particular order...

1. She has really great blonde, shiny hair.

2. When she says she prays for you about something you know it's not just empty words

3. Intense is her middle name

4. Three words - elixir of life

5. She makes me want to be more womanly, and by this I mean cook more.

6. Girl knows how to break it down.

7. DWTS! Swooning over Mark Ballas...

8. Late night talks in our room

9. She makes the perfect cup of tea

10. She's the most disciplined person I know.

11. Frolicking around All Faiths' freshman year.

12. Singing High School Musical songs....

13. She has a great brown jacket that I used to borrow all the time and she never complained. Any chance you want to just send that to me?

14. This isn't a good memory, but the time we got in a car wreck going to Copy Corner will always be memorable.

15. She makes great homemade cards.

16. At night she would do crunches while I laid in bed and watch TV shows on my laptop, again reminding me that she's way more disciplined than I'll ever be.

17. When things get hard, she sticks it out.

18. A recent conversation at Panera Bread sticks out...

19. She's the most hospitable person I know.

20. Playing nertz at Rumor's during freshman year

21. Definitely the biggest Aggie fan I know.

22. Red semi-permanent hair dye... that turned to pink hair... only Ruth could pull it off.

23. Cookie dough parties!

Happy Birthday Ruthie! Thou art more lovely...

Can you tell I just woke up?

It started out as a friendly endeavor.



Until my dad decided it was a competition and he was the only judge. Here he is with his award winning H1N1 pumpkin.


Our little pumpkin family.

Dad's

Mine

I started this blog with the idea of opening up myself to people, breaking the vault. And instead I write meaningless stories and post pointless pictures. I don't think it's bad necessarily, and I'm not going to promise there won't be anymore of them, it's just a cop out. And so admitting this means I have to change. It means I have to start being honest. And I don't want to.

A few weeks ago I read a book called Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen. It wasn't the best book I've ever read, in fact there wasn't anything particularly outstanding about it, except for her brutal honesty. She leaves nothing out, which sometimes I could have done without, but the point is she didn't try to cover up anything, good, bad, or ugly. That's what made it appealing - her frankness. I long to be uninhibited like that. But I probably fear it more.

I read Life of Pi last year sometime and that was about the time I got really into using sticky tabs to mark things in books that I didn't want to forget. So today after church, and after some much needed journalling I got out my copy of Life of Pi and found the little green sticky tab on page 161...

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know.... The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you." - Yann Martel

I wrote that passage in my journal last year because that's what I wanted to be about. Fighting to express fears, not just shutting it down and letting it be the destructive gangrene it is. And I failed. I got caught up in being comfortable.

November is a new month.

me: "Hey, I'm Miss Bassett. I'm your sub today..."

boy: "How'd you get your name?"

me: *puzzled look* "What?"

boy: "Are you married?"

me: "No."

boy: "Oh, I just wanted to see how you got your last name, like if you're married. Do you have a boyfriend?"

me: "No, do your work."

First period I was set to sub in a chemistry class. The teacher was actually there when I got there, she told them their assignment and I was basically just there to make sure they don't kill each other or cheat. The class was pretty small, and there was one football player who thought he was way too cool to be quiet or actually do his work. I just want to tell this kid, hey, it's going to end one day. You're not going to be popular in a year and then what are you going to do. But I refrained. He'll find out soon enough.

Second period I was again in the chemistry class but this time we met up with the class next day for Mole Day activities. I vaguely remember this from my time at MHS, but I was reminded today that a mole is 6.02 X 10^23. So to celebrate this magical number the classes did balloon races - popping them at the end, threw 23 pennies in a cup, and had a relay race where they had to carry a spoon in their mouth and transfer a bean from person to person via said spoon. I'm not sure what the point of all this was but it was fun and I got to be the official picture taker.

Then I had a two hour break where I came home and watched America's Next Top Model. Rae definitely shouldn't have been the one to go by the way.

I came back to school at 12:30 where I was assigned an hour duty at SAC. For those of you not familiar with Monahans' disciplinary practices, this is where the bad kids go. The kids who can't handle regular school. So for an hour I sat in a room with about 7 backs towards me, as the kids sat in little cubbies (cells) "doing work". I'm pretty sure the most work that got done in there was me reading a few pages in Ender's Game. These kids are seriously pretty scary. The first kid raised his hand to ask a question and as I'm walking over to him I just picture myself getting shanked. Luckily, no bloodshed occurred.

Sixth period I was assigned girls P.E. I got to the gym and there were no instructions whatsoever. There were a few balls lying in the corner so I decided we were playing four square. Only five girls were in the class and I couldn't believe it when they said they didn't know what four square was! Did you grow up in America? I quickly explained the rules, and quickly dominated all of them. This ended up being my favorite class, the girls were really fun and they kinda got into playing the game. It made me remember how much I missed four square.

Next I was on to a freshman English class. They were all working on research papers in the library so I pretty much just sat there and then went around talking to them a little about their papers. The assignment is a biography of a famous author and they all think their author is "soo boring" or "sooo hard". They have people like Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemmingway. You kids are delusional. The only one who was cool was J.K. Rowling, but one girl said she wished she could do her paper on Stephanie Meyer. Gag.

Final period of the day was another English class and I was warned this one was bad. Turned out they really weren't. Their assignment was to practice making note cards for research papers, and they thought this was the hardest thing in the world. Because, you know, writing down the title, author and year published is really challenging.

Anyway, after a day in high school I've made a few observations. High school kids dress sloppy. It might just be because it was a Friday, but every kid there was wearing a sweat shirt of some kind. I'm not anti-sweat shirt in any way, but when you walk up to a big mass of people and their all wearing sweats it looks kinda sloppy. On the same note, high school in real life is nothing like high school on TV. I watch plenty of high school shows, Glee, 90210, Gossip Girl (Jenny's still in high school...), and those kids are a world apart from any of the kids I saw today. Those kids definitely dress a lot better than any of the ones I saw today, but more than that their lives just seem more interesting, more glamourous. Chalk that up to good writing and the fact that most of those actors are 20+. And finally, high school never changes. It just doesn't. The teachers are the same, the posters in the class room are the same and the students are the same. New faces every year, but still the same.

I love you and I hate you at the very same time.