christmas in hawaii

well, this was the last christmas all of the murphy clan is going to be together for a really long time. little brother austin is turning in his mission papers THIS WEEK (!!!) and little brother dallin will be trading places with him right when he gets back, and now that camille and i are both married we have in-laws to visit each christmas as well. so it will be AT LEAST four years until we have another christmas together, and, knowing that, my parents decided that we should go big or go home. so, we went to hawaii together.

let me tell you, i had NEVER expected our family to do a trip to hawaii. i distinctly remember begging my parents to take us to hawaii (when everyone else i knew got to go) and they said that they had to wait to go to hawaii until after they were 30, so we could wait that long too. (no worries mom, it totally makes sense that you said that.) so it was a big (and exciting) surprise when they posed the idea to us, and we immediately jumped on board. obviously.

exciting things of this week:

-president obama was staying just across the canal from our house. we spent a good amount of time watching his caravan of cars parade in and out of the neighborhood and spying on the gunboats patrolling the canal. we never got a good look at the president, but i bet he was really impressed with us as neighbors.

-we went to pearl harbor and saw the memorials there.

-we went shopping at the honolulu swap meet. look at mom with her two sons-in-law!

-we ate shrimp out of a truck, and it was amazing!

-we visited the north shore and didn't actually go into the water.


-we went to a session at the laie temple, and the kiddos did baptisms. (except for cole, who spent two hours in the temple visitor's center with the sister missionaries.)



-we ate lots of shaved ice! (and it was sooooo good.)

-of course, we went to the beach. a lot.

-we visited a buddhist temple.


-we visited the polynesian cultural center.




(and we didn't buy the photos they took of us because they were twenty dollars each!)

-we went snorkeling and swam with some tropical fish AND a sea turtle!

-we went to church on christmas sunday.

-we watched the sun rise on christmas morning (most of us).

-we got surfing lessons on waikiki and were surfing MASTERS! all of us got up, even cole on his first time.



-annnnddd, we bought muumuus and hawaiian clothes for photo ops.

it was an amazing week, because of all of these fun things but even more because we got to spend a lot of time with the family. these are some really fun people, even if we do all know how to push each others' buttons still. i think we should make this trip an annual tradition! (haha, just kidding dad.)

HARRY POTTER WORLD

don't be too jealous, but after we finished our finals we had six days without any active work to do. so we decided to take a little trip down to florida to visit the world's greatest theme park. no, not disney world. the new wizarding world of harry potter. i'll admit i was skeptical about harry potter world--but i thought that we absolutely needed to make it there while living in north carolina. and this weekend seemed like the one where we would have the most time for the foreseeable future . . . all in all, we went on a pretty last-minute drive down to orlando!

we drove down on wednesday, went to universal studios (a.k.a. HP world) on thursday and epcot on friday, and then drove back on saturday to take off to utah on monday. i'll just tell you--harry potter world was excellent. i felt like i was really in hogsmeade and hogwarts--drinking butterbeer, visiting the three broomsticks, buying stuff at zonkos and honeydukes and ollivanders, wandering through hogwarts castle (and going on the three HP roller coasters). for a harry potterophile like myself, it was pretty dang great.

oh yeah, and epcot was pretty good too.

wanna see some pictures?

tommy greeting hagrid's hut.


two proud (but cheap) gryffindors. we took pictures of the robes, but didn't buy them. (they were $100 each!)

voldemort's wand--look out!

we ate at the rainforest cafe that night as well.

andddd, EPCOT!

although we had to miss my dear cousins bennett and jazz's wedding (because of flights being purchased, etc.) and i would have rather been celebrating with family, this was a pretty good substitute.

happy face

sorry about all the depressing posts lately. or, i guess, they've just been less-than-enthusiastic, if anything. i'm all about enthusiasm again, because i'm (almost) officially on christmas break! i turned in my final paper on friday and just have to meet with my students tomorrow to return their papers, then submit their final grades, and make sure i've got next semester all planned and ready, and then i'm done! done! done!

i've really learned over the last year that i am VERY ready to be done with school. i was kind of done when i graduated from byu--very tired of school, but still looking forward to doing the master's. but now i absolutely KNOW that i don't want to do any more of it, and i think that's a very good thing to have figured out. three cheers for the process of elimination!

in other news, here are our upcoming plans for the next few weeks:

-this week: one day at the wizarding world of harry potter and one day at disney world

-next week: hawaii with my familia

-the week after: utah with tommy's familia

um, yes. we're going to hawaii and disney world within one week of each other. WE HAVE THE MOST RIDICULOUS LIFE. it must be our extravagant grad student stipends we're living off of.

finals

there's nothing like finals week to show you how truly lazy and procrastinator-ish you really are.

(see? i'm too lazy to even come up with the real word for "procrastinator-ish." lazy.)

6 more days!

the woes of teaching

remember a few months ago how i posted about how much i loved teaching? well, right about now, i'm looking back at my inexperienced self and laughing. heartily. oh, my goodness, teaching is way harder than i'd anticipated back in august and september.

it's harder because i started off the semester with 20 students. and only 14 have made it to the last day of class. do the math, folks, that's almost a 30% attrition rate. don't ask me why. it's got to be some kind of record in the first-year writing program--NO ONE else in the program has lost more than one student.

it's harder because everyone stopped caring. half of my students stopped paying attention to me about 6 weeks ago. even i started drooping the week before thanksgiving and only JUST made it to class every day this week, telling myself, "three more days. i can do it for three more days."

it's harder because i've lost confidence in myself as an effective teacher. i'm not convinced that they've actually learned ANYTHING this semester. i'm hyper-aware of my flaws as a teacher, my inexperience and my tendency to shut down and flounder when i'm lecturing and they're bored, the problems in how i explained everything this semester. but luckily, all of the other TAs have been sharing the same feelings, so i know i'm not alone. it's just the woes of being a first-semester teacher.

but hey, despite the fact that it's been hard, i'm really excited about next semester. because i get to do it all over again--but better. i've got so many ideas to make it better and to be a better instructor, and hopefully i get a group of students who don't drop out one by one like the ones i got this semester.

and one of my students, as he was leaving class today (the last day of class), said, "thanks so much. you made english 101 at least semi-enjoyable!" i felt pretty good about that. even though it's not much of a compliment, it wasn't hate mail. (i'll just have to wait for the student evaluations for that.)