The Talens' Tales

Well, summer is ending quickly. School starts tomorrow. And I am looking forward to it. It is nice to be in a routine, have a schedule and see some different people. Summer is wonderful, but teaching is good too. This is the first year that I have very few concerns going into the year. There are no classes I am dreading teaching, no really new responsibilities and I am not drastically changing my curriculum. So, I go into this school year with a prayer on my heart that God's name will be glorified and praised and His spirit will be very evident in the halls of school this year.

So the whole "smart board" technology is really big right now. Really big. But, being the little private school we are, it was not really feasible. Until now. The company 3M is a big supporter of private schools and they donated six of their version of a Smart Board to our school on the condition we give two of them to our feeders schools. So my room now sports some snazzy technology and it has been working great as I have been testing it out in my room. I hope to use it a lot. And I am just pretty excited to have a projector now to show movies and stuff on too. Hurray for technology that is free!

Our teacher meetings start in about an hour. It is so hard to believe the summer is almost over. But we had a great end to our summer with the wedding of my sister! Congratulations guys! I unfortunately did not get a great picture of Joy and Chad, but here are a few highlights. All of the bridesmaids and my beautiful sister. The three sisters, all happily married. Actually, we do have one more fun thing before I am going to say the summer is really over. In two weeks we head to California for a weekend for Joy and Chad's second reception. That should be a ton of fun.

I just love the fresh tomatoes and peppers from our garden. We had BLTs last night and tonight is tacos with all of the fixings.

For whatever reason, our summer movie watching has been limited this year. Usually we watch a lot of movies in the summer, but other things have been taking up our time this year I guess. But we just recently watched Amazing Grace which came out a few years ago. It is the story of William Wilberforce, a man who fought his whole life to abolish Great Britain's slave trade. The story was very powerful and challenging and told very well. It was wonderful to see a man be so convicted of something through his faith that he saw it through until he was finished. We highly recommend this film!

As I have said before, Christian fiction is not something I like to read all that much. It is just too unrealistic for me. Well, I have found another set of books that I really like in this genre. It is the Fairlawn Series by Angela Hunt. I will admit that I didn't think I would like these books though. Someone said that Angela Hunt was a good author and she has written about a million books, so I thought I would give her a try. I read two and I just didn't like her at all. They both had main characters who were not Christian and then they meet this guy who is and their life is turned around and everything become hunky-dory once they know Christ. A nice story, but as a Christian women it seemed way to cheesy, unrealistic and formulaic. But the Fairlawn Series features a Christian woman who is just trying to figure out how to live in a world that is far from perfect and filled with fallen sinful people. Of course there is a little love story woven in through it which I saw co...

At least that is what I think this potato looks like that I dug up in our garden yesterday. He was very tasty!