Tina just called me to wish me Happy Name Day! April 24th is the name day for St. Elisabeth, which is the closest we can come – evidently there are no Orthodox saints named Laura!
Name Days aren’t celebrated during the Holy Week before Pascha so Tina says that we will celebrate next week. It’s fun being Greek – you get a name day and a birthday!
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Back in November, I asked you to vote for Baltimore in an HGTV competition. Well, we won!!! 
(Portland didn’t win though Katie, sorry!) So, starting this weekend and continuing through next week, HGTV and Rebuilding Together Baltimore will be doing a bunch of cool stuff to help out Pen Lucy, which our church’s neighborhood and my former neighborhood too. Thanks for voting!!!
**cough Katie***
Go here to listen to a cool NPR article about how they name their products!
My favorite fact was that they named all their floor coverings after Danish cities! 
(And the reason that I even know about this is that my car stereo has spontaneously healed itself! It’s been broken for about 3 months and the other day I randomly turned it on and it worked. Hip hip hooray!)
It’s 4:20 – we started at 9:30, took a break for lunch, got the maple hole dug, a good start on the redbud hole, and just now finished planting the maple. I haven’t showered and we have 15-20 tennis players coming over for dinner in 2 hours. I think we may have bitten off a little bit too much for today. Who knew that it took so long to plant a tree? More pictures to come when we have time…
Today is the end of 3rd quarter. Can you believe it? We’re already three quarters finished! Today, I graded for about six hours. YUCK! My kids have been working on a big writing project for three weeks and they handed in the finished project today. Luckily, we had a half day so I was only at school until 6:00 and I got it all finished. I still have to bubble in my grades on Monday but that shouldn’t take too long. In the midst of all of my slogging through stories, I have found a couple gems. To understand this a little bit better, you need to know my standing rule: In my classroom, when you are writing, you are allowed to use your own name, my name (Mrs. B), but no one else’s in our class. This rule is an attempt to prevent you from using your most hated classmate’s name as the really bad guy. Anyway, consequently, I end up in a lot of stories. I was the playground bully in one, an oracle who gets killed in battle in another, and then there were these two:
By E:
[this is my paraphrase of his much longer story. These are the highlights with mostly his own words.]
Some lions attacked Mrs. B. I got there and saved her because I didn’t want Mrs. B to die. I told her she didn’t have to be scared because I was with her. Then we went in the house and closed the door because the zombies wanted to eat us. Then the wolves attacked us. Then she went to the top of a building and then some lions were attacking us. I said, “Don’t
worry; you’ll be fine with me.” Then I said, “Don’t move, there’s a snake under your chair.” Then some aliens came in a space ship. Then the lions came back. But the aliens were good aliens. They saved us because they killed the zombies. The zombies ate the lions. Mrs.
B found a gun and shot the wolves. Then there were no animals because
we killed them. The End
And then, this one by A:
[This story was essentially the Good Samaritan story except that the king pretended to be hurt by the side of the road to see who would stop and help him.]
First, Mrs. B (who likes to go to the meeting and beauty parlor and to go to trip somewhere) was going to the moon to see the biggest water falls. When she was going to there, she saw him. She thought that some of the foxes or dangerous cats attacked him. He was so smelly. So, she didn’t go near him because she thought the foxes or dangerous
cats will attack her and she also was worried because she will be later at Jupiter at attend her meeting.
Like mother, like daughter, I guess!! (and make sure to read Mom’s poem if you haven’t – it’s the perfect Alaskan summer poem!)
Here’s another middle school poem – maybe our last for awhile. I’m getting tired of them! 
Haikus
by Myra Cohn Livingston
Shiny colored tents
pop up above people’s heads
at the first raindrop
How angry you are
today, Ocean, as your waves
knock me off my feet!
Even in summer,
bees have to work in their orange-
and-black striped sweaters
The first day of school…
does my teacher wonder who
these new faces are?
Here we are, Winter,
just you and I in the snow,
freezing together
I remember Curt Finch and his kindness in putting up with all of us pesky kids in Paxson 20 years ago. We really looked forward to his visits when he would come to fix things at the school. I even remember one time when they came to thaw our water pipes after a particularly vicious cold spell. He was certainly the most popular man around then! His kindness towards all of us continued for many years. It was always fun to see him at church and at school.
I particularly remember how he perched high up on scaffolding in the high school library, hanging long “noodles” of curled foil for us as we (the Junior Class) decorated the library for the prom. I think he didn’t exactly know what he was getting into (and neither did we) when we decided to decorate the whole ceiling with those silly things. He was probably regretting the fact that Brent was in our class and so roped his dad into helping us! But he helped us anyway. I’m sure many more stories will be told about how he took care of anyone who needed help in Glennallen and other places too.
I probably haven’t even thought about the Finches since last August when Jan came to our wedding reception in Anchorage and I don’t know how long it had been since I’d seen Curt. I haven’t lived in Glennallen since early 2000 so it’s been a long time since I had any kind of regular contact with him. Nonetheless, I’ve felt particularly sad and bereft today. I’m so sad for Jan, Brent, Chad, and their other kids.
Farewell, Curt. We’ll miss you greatly.
We just finished up our high stakes state testing last Thursday. During that time, I had a mixed group of kids, who weren’t testing for various reasons. So we did origami! One student, O from Israel, really had fun with her boxes, all 14 of them!
Here is the beautiful result (with the biggest and smallest boxes to help with the perspective:
Isn’t it beautiful? The largest square was 9 1/2 inches and the smallest just a square inch!
On Friday night, I went to my friend Dee’s bridal shower. I’m so excited for her. She’s actually marrying a guy I went to college with but I had absolutely nothing to do with them getting together. I haven’t even seen Tom since college! I also had fun with her box!
These are just for fun: I need to host some kind of dinner party where the curly chives can play the starring role:
P.S. Did you know that Rachel and Drew love us the best?
Today, Nik and I went to Poor Boys, our local garden store to buy a tree. We’d already planned on getting a Red Sunset Maple, which is a native tree in Maryland (and much of the East Coast for that matter). It’s for the front of our house, to eventually fill in the space left by a dogwood that died and hopefully give us some shade in the summer.
We came home, having bought that tree but also an Eastern Redbud, a hydrangea, a holly, two kinds of native grasses, and four perennial flowers – Black Eyed Susan, some kind of phlox, and a couple other I don’t even remember ! Yikes!! 
It was the Herring Run Day, which we knew about and why we went today. The Herring Run is the watershed that we live in and Poor Boys has a whole program for being greener and helping the watershed. They work with the Herring Run Watershed Association. What we didn’t know was that it was “Buy One, Get One Free” for all Herring Run approved plants. So how could we pass that up? Especially for another free tree! That’s why we ended up with two expensive trees, not just one, two shrubs, two grasses, and four flowers. So we got about $400 worth of plants for about $200. Hip Hip Hooray! I’ll put more pictures once I’ve taken them.
The only problem is that now we have to dig TWO holes for two trees, not just one!
Salmon and Souvlaki 