Frisbee golf in Philly?!?!?

Several friends and I got to do something I never would have dreamed was possible in Philadelphia: play frisbee golf! We had a GREAT time throwing our discs around the course in Fairmount Park. It's a full 18 hole course in the woods. I never would have guessed we were in the city while we were playing. Such a refreshing change from the busy city! All the guys who went agreed we need to play again soon. I felt like I was back in college!


Last night my friend Kelly had her 30th birthday party. This girl deserves a kudos for the amount she's been celebrating. She decided to make the entire month of June a 30 days of celebration for her 30th birthday. Who thinks of these things? Kelly Thayer does. Anyway, she's so creative and fun, and hosted a great party (complete with cookies in the shape of the number 30!). Happy birthday Kelly!

Getting up today for running practice in West Philly wasn't too fun. When only 7 kids were there who were pretty tired and whiney, it was even harder. Fortunately, Erin, another coach was there to help make it better. We ran a little shorter than I had planned, but much farther than we'd gone any time this week. (the heat made running pretty tough)

My friend Nate Frazier just got a job selling Apple products in Center City Philadelphia. If any of you need anything Apple makes, let him know; he'd love to hook you up with one.

I can't believe the marketing hype the iPhone is getting. Yeah, it's a super cool gadget, but the hype is ridiculous. It's worse than the movie Pearl Harbor (and hopefully much better, too!). Philly's mayor got in line at 3:30AM to get one yesterday. One company has already dissected it to see what's inside.

One last geek point: Philadelphia is only months away from having full wi-fi coverage for the entire city! They're the biggest and first large city to do so, and they're being watched carefully to see how the whole experiment goes. I'm content with my current provider, but I might give their service a 30-day trial to see how it goes (for only $6.99 a month at first too?!?).

Itzhak Perlman

Last night I wrote about the incredible, 4-D concert Nate, John, and I attended at the outdoor Mann Center. Well, John informed me that the violinist we heard play was none other than the world-renown Itzhak Perlman, whom you can read about here, and here, and here! It makes you wonder who else you might encounter in a day and never realize it!

Concert in the rain

What a night! My friend John Jackson from Liberti had a few extra tickets tonight to an outdoor concert at Philadelphia's acclaimed Mann Center out in Fairmount Park. Nate and I met up with him and enjoyed a good two hours of beautiful music. There was a Russion violinist who played like he was born with a violin on his shoulder. Notes just SANG from his instrument. I wish I could remember his name....it started with an I.

The heat was pretty rough at first (it's been mid to upper 90s all week), but it cooled down as the night progressed. Soon we found out why: after intermission, we started seeing lightning. When the last piece was being played, it got more intense. As the music crecendoed, so did the weather! The wind picked up as the tempo did. By the end of the piece, we finally had rain. Some people had already left for their cars, yet most remained to applaud the performers. We took off after the last note, for the rain started POURING down on us. We tossed the two blankets on our backs and charged ahead, laughing at our highly enjoyable situation. It was a memorable night--one I'd enjoy living again.

One thing I wondered about before and during the performance was the tuning of the instruments. I know how sensitive they can be, and with all the humidity in the air, I figured it would affect them over the course of a while piece! As predicted, the whole orchestra tuned after each song to ensure they were all on the same pitch. Amazing how much of a difference the atmosphere can make!

I performed my duties as an America today: I shopped. And I shopped. I had to run some errands, and I ended up spending some good money! Here are a few things I bought: a case for my new 4GB silver iPod Nano (I bought it two weeks ago refurbished online for a great deal), some magazine holders from IKEA (hey, when they're $.25 for two of 'em, you can't pass that up!), a sleeping bag (since my parents took the one I lent them back to Michigan), and a U-lock (Sarah's had disappeared, so I lent her mine and my keys. unfortunately, I didnt' get them back before she left, and I wanted to have a lock to use on my bike!). I also got a bike helmet online, which I expect to get reimbursed for from my health insurance company; they promise to pay you up to $25 for a helmet every 365 calendar days!

Here's a picture of my new iPod in its silicon case:


Seth came back from Indiana today, a day early. Murphy and I are both glad to see him. It can get rough when your girlfriend and roommate both leave at the same time! Fortunately, I've been busy enough as it is. This weekend doesn't look to be slowing down either...summer is officially here!

You can get this for free??

One of my favorite websites has a great posting of things you can get for free...including CPR certification, MIT classes, language lessons, and computer classes. Check it out.

Back at camp

This weekend I went to a leadership summit/running camp with my kids from Students Run Philly Style. About 100 students and leaders from all over Philadelphia drove an hour north of the city to Briarwood Day Camp. Most of the kids had never been to a camp before, much less an overnight one! Several of them were saying they had never left Philly before...so to spend a weekend in the woods was quite the change for them! Despite that, the kids responded so well to everything. The directors said that we were their best group they'd ever had! There weren't any fights and very little bickering. Everyone encouraged each other and stepped up to the expectations of leadership the counselors gave them.


Can you pick me out? (hint: front middle...the white dude with the red bandanna)


Personally, it was a little more difficult than usual. I'm used to Geneva, where there's a rock star feeling with elementary kids. At the summit this weekend, there were all middle and high schoolers. I was nervous about connecting with them, but it all ended up working out. You show kids respect, and they'll show it right back to you.


There sure is a difference between kids from Western Michigan and West Philly. For one, as soon as I had my bandanna on, I had several kids ask me if I was a blood. "A what??" I responded several times. Soon I learned that there's a gang that wears blood red bandanna just like that. Oh well...at least I'm adapting to the culture!

These are the fearless counselors. I'm excited about running in races and knowing several other leaders and more kids. Now I can cheer for specific students instead of simply "go students!".

Seth left this morning for Indiana for a photography gig. That leaves Murphy and me here alone! So far, so good. I was able to get a bunch of random things done today and try to catch up on the e-mails and other business I missed while away. You know, it's good to be missed, but sometimes........

I managed to snag 35 cents on the sidewalk last night while walking around town with John, Seth, Kallie, Jeremy, Casey, Melanie, and Christian. They made dinner and let me join them after I finished my final Walden paper for my third class (only 14 months left now!). I made cwaffles a la mode with ice cream, and we had to take a walk to get the calories burning again. John and Seth were in prime picture taking mode, as shown here by this creative picture:


With Sarah on vacation with her sisters, I find myself missing her more than usual when she's simply across town. It looks like we'll have to survive two weeks without seeing each other; good thing we had practice all last year! God has ways of reminding us how good we have it.

I'm a 5th grade teacher!

What a week! My family and I toured Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Baltimore's Ft. McHenry for the last few days. They left yesterday back for Michigan, and I'm leaving in an hour for running camp with my middle schoolers for the weekend. Busy busy busy!

Spruce Hill offered me a job as 5th grade teacher, and while we were at Ft. McHenry, I accepted it! It was hard to tell my principal I was leaving, but she understood (although she did say "Geeze...Dang," which is pretty strong for a nun). I have to attend several weeks of training for their curriculum over the summer, which knocks me out of summer school availability too.

Sarah is moving to her new apartment on Fairmount this week. We've been emptying dressers and drawers, stuffing LARGE books into suitcases and such today. The real move will happen tonight and tomorrow when I'm at camp (it's a coincidence I swear! I'd WAY rather help her move than run around at camp with middle schoolers...).

There are a ton of pictures I want to post, but it'll have to wait until after this weekend. What a start to summer!

De Boers visit the White House

My family safely arrived in Philly Saturday afternoon. They were a little behind schedule due to some unforeseen delays, but they made it! Sarah and I gave them the grand tour of our respective apartments. We toured Eastern State Penitentiary, which was a great time.

Yesterday we visited my friend Matt Adkins in DC. Matt works in the Human Resources department at the White House, and he gave us a personal tour of the West Wing. We saw the Oval Office, meeting rooms, and other neat locations. Plenty of stories about the President, too. Here's a picture of us in the Rose Garden



Today is International Panic Day, which is ironic since she's taking her board exams tomorrow. =)

Graduation, good-byes, and a job offer

This week was our last week of the 2006-2007 school year. It was a busy one for me, filled with random events, graduation ceremonies (unlike most teachers, I need to attend both schools'!), awards, organizing, and computer formatting. I had thought I'd have some extra time to finish things up, but I didn't get that luxury. My computer had given me a few strange messages, so I decided it was time for the yearly format--wiping the hard drive clean and starting from scratch, with a complete system backup of documents/e-mails/music/pictures beforehand, of course! It's running smoothly now, and I couldn't be happier with it.


Graduation for 8th graders and the award ceremonies for both schools were beautiful. The kids were well behaved, parents were (finally) present, and the whole experience had a nice presentation. This week has really made me start questioning if I want to leave my current job...funny how a week without teaching can help you forget the hard times. Here's me with a graduating 8th grader who mentioned me in his speech:



Thursday afternoon I received a voice mail from Spruce Hill offering me the position as 5th grade teacher! Surprisingly, I felt a little down for the next while. As I reflect on it now, I think it's because I finally knew I would be leaving OMS/SI and all the kids and faculty there. There were other people interviewing for the position at Spruce Hill, and I never let myself think the job was mine until it was offered to me. The headmaster is going to call me on Monday to discuss salary and benefits with me. I expect to ask some questions and let him know by Tuesday or Wednesday. A few days later, I'm a lot more excited about the position. I'm still scared about the work load and a new situation, but God has only shown me wide-open doors in this situation, and I don't expect Him to start slamming them shut now.

Due to a late start and less-than-perfect health, my family didn't make it all the way to Philadelphia yesterday. They took a pit stop in mid-Pennsylvania and hope to make it here by noon. I can't wait to introduce them to people here! Although my natural reaction is to try and impress them (which, quite honestly, will be hard to do), I've decided my goal is to show them the beauty here--in the people, the places, and the culture. Let it be.

YouTube debates

According to Google's company blog, there will be a forthcoming debate among democratic presidential candidates on July 23 that will features questions exclusively from people uploading their questions from YouTube! Last election season was the first one when blogging truly took off; I think the user-generated content era is simply oozing into the political environment even farther.

In other news, I've been extremely busy this week with school finishing up and assuming leadership roles in several areas (students run and church family ministries, mostly). I'll try to catch up here soon...and I have pictures of events to prove them, too!

Mural arts tour

Philadelpha is known for its murals. The building-sized pieces of art are all over the city, transforming neighborhoods, discouraging grafitti, and raising the quality of living for nearby inhabitants. It's a beautiful way to celebrate each community within the city and its heritage. (article here) There are more than 2700 murals that were officially commissioned by the city Mural Arts program, with hundreds more done as side jobs. What's even crazier is that there are currently over 3500 people on the waiting list for a mural! Each one takes between two weeks and six months to make, costing up to $90,000. The paint has sunscreen in it and is only made by manufacturing facilities in California and Germany. Depending on the color, the paint costs between $25 and $125 a gallon (yellow pigment is the cheapest; blues and purples are the more costly kinds).

I've been wanting to go on a mural tour since I moved here this fall. This past Thursday, I got my chance. My schools participated in a the comic book project through St. Joseph University.
As a celebration of the students' work, the students and a few teachers got to tour West Philly's murals. Normally the tour costs $24/person, so it was a great deal. Unfortunately, the adults liked it more than the kids...for some reason, driving around for over two hours and looking at the neighborhood you've lived in your whole life doesn't always appeal to middle schoolers! I had a great time though; here are some pictures from the event:






This picture below is a memorial to some people who were shot in West Philadelphia. One of my student had an uncle was shot and honored through the mural. Here are two 6th graders standing next to the picture.


Will Smith? Heard the Fresh Prince theme song? "West Philadelphia, born and raised..." Well, this is the playgound where Will Smith spent most of his days.

Run the Monk

Last night Sarah and I ran a race called "Run the Monk" with my kids from school. It was only a 5K race, but it seemed like more with the 90+ degree temperatures and hilly course (or was that hell-y?). Most of the kids did quite well; we had several stragglers who simply did NOT want to run in the heat. Fortunately, they were motivated by sprinklers several people were spraying down runners with from their yard. Afterward, there was a band, face painting, a bounce house, and food/drinks. We all got a free t-shirts with our food, too.

Unfortunately, it was Melissa and Stephanie's (7th grade and gym teacher at my school) last event with students run. Melissa is moving to Miami, and Stephanie is moving to the pacific northwest state of Washington this summer. It's a bummer, but fortunately there are a few others who are stepping in for the summer to run with the kids. Any of you are welcome to join us! We'll be practicing Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings.



And here's a video of us dancing to the band before the race. My students are only in middle school while most of the students run kids are in high school. Consequently, they were pretty hyper before the race started...if only they could have saved some of that for the race!!

Mistaken identity

Tuesday night I returned to my house after visiting Sarah. As I approached my door, I noticed a pair of underwear on the sidewalk. I took a minute and scoffed, thinking why on earth a person would leave underwear next to the street. Talk about gross! What kind of neighborhood is this, anyway? Then I took a closer look and realized that the underwear was MINE. It had fallen out of my laundry bag on the way to Sarah's. Guess I should be more careful before I go thinking things like that. =)

As for my job process update, I taught a demo lesson for Spruce Hill to their current 5th graders. Since I had never taught a lesson in a situation like that before, I was pretty nervous! Combine that with a 90-degree + humidity day, coming immediately from my school during my planning period, and a suit/tie, and you've got a tough cookie to eat. To make matters worse, the headmaster, principal, current 5th grade teacher, board member, and a few parents sat in on my class. Now, the 5th grade room is pretty small at Spruce Hill, so the limit the number of students to 18 or so. Almost a third of the people in the room were adults! That was intimidating. I think the students were intimidated too; their responses were pretty dull.

The lesson must have gone better than I had thought, 'cause the principal asked me back for an interview with their education committee. That'll happen this coming Tuesday evening. We'll see how things go!

Crazy times

I hope to post later today or tomorrow with an update regarding my week thus far. Alas, there are final projects to collect, power point presentations to grade, and e-mails to send!

But take heart! I do have some fun reading (well, for me...maybe not necessarily for you):

Google humor.
A rare inside look at how Google works.
More info on how Google searches.

How you can tell I live in the city

How do you know that I live in the city?
I cut my lawn with a weedwacker.

Our backyard has been pretty shoddy in the past. When I moved in last fall, weeds were everywhere. Seth took all of them out before winter, and we just had boring dirt at the start of spring. We wanted to make our backyard more hospitable, so we tilled the soil, planted grass, and have faithfully been watering it. The grass grew slowly but surely, and I noticed a huge difference from when I went home for Maria's graduation to when I returned. Our grass had grown! But so had a bunch of weeds with it. (Biblical parallels, anyone?!?)

This afternoon I went to work on it, ripping out as many weeds as I could grab, then weedwacking the rest down to a managable size. Here are some pictures for a better picture of the progress.

This is a picture my dad took when I moved in at the end of August:


Here's a picture of the view out my bedroom window (Sarah took it; you can see me watering the grass and talking with Dan Carter on my cell phone). This was about a month ago


This is the backyard after I finished it today:



Isn't it great to see progress?!? I was pretty excited about it today. Seth was too, even though he left before he could see the finished product. His excuse was pretty good: he had to drive to New York City to be the main photographer at a wedding in Manhatton in the Four Seasons!

In other news today, Seth bought us a new trash can, as pictured below. We came home and immediately celebrated by picking up some trash on the street and using it! Also, some helpful people had cleaverly disguised some garbage as an advertisement at a local pizza place and put it in our door. This marketing happens several times a week, unfortunately, but this time we joyfully threw it away in our new can.

I also bought a new air conditioner. I had purchased on in the bitter cold of January this year for $40. The 7amps it requires to run blew our circuits, so I had to find a smaller one. As it turns out, the one I had was way too powerful for my room's size. I put it up for sale on Craigslist if any of you are interested! The cheapest retail price I could find online is $240 new. We'll see if I can turn a profit on the whole deal.

And I got paid for this

Today was the last full Friday of school (we finish on June 15, but the last week and a half are half days). To celebrate, both schools I teach went to Clementon Park for the day! Despite some teachers with grumpy attitudes, we had a blast!! No, it wasn't Disney World, but it was perfect for our purposes. The kids had fun, teachers were relaxed, and the food was DELICIOUS! If you want to eat well, come to one of our teachers potlucks. I've developed quite the reputation for consuming massive amounts of food. True to form, I managed to time my eating in order to snag three lunches (11:30, 2:00, and 4:30). We had teachers who got up at 4AM to make fried chicken, salmon salad, potato salad, pasta salad with shrimp and crab, ribs, and many more delicious items.


The rides and water park were decent. Our kids jumped right in, but I had a hard time getting teachers to experience more than a walk around the park. Several of the young teachers joined me for a few rides and water park fun. I felt so laid back walking around the park. It was neat to see kids from both schools and have them greet me. I forget that teachers at one school don't have that blessing! I quickly learned that while it's cool to yell teachers names as they walk by, it isn't as cool to hang out with them, so we teachers just hung out together.

One weird thing about the park is all the clown head covers for the trash cans. I didn't like it, and I can't imagine how people who hate clowns felt! Here's a picture of what happens every now and then:


So all in all, a very low stress day where I had to pinch myself that I was paid for this. I like days like that. =)