200 and Lights Out

This is my 200th post!  I'm not sure how I feel about that.  On the one hand, sticking with an online journal for two hundred entries might be viewed as somewhat of an accomplish, given that half the people who attempt a regular blog ultimately give up.  On the other hand, two hundred entries?  That seems like a lot of wasted hours of life that could have spent living instead of blogging. 

During first period today, there was a thunder storm.  I was in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation when the students and I heard two loud crashes of thunder, and suddenly the power went out.  My room has very little natural light, and with the darkness of the sky outside, it was nearly pitch black. I do have really lousy night vision though, so this could've just been me.  At any rate, we couldn't see, so we had to prop the door open in order to let more light into the room.  I kept thinking the lights were going to come back on any second, but after about ten minutes, I realized that we needed to find a way to occupy our time.  So I told students to get into one large circle, and we went into campfire-story-telling-mode.  I said the first word of our creepy tale, the next person said the next word, and so on and so forth, until we had one long, rambling, silly story. 

Next, we played "Telephone."  I started the game by whispering "Raining cats and dogs is my favorite idiom."  After the message passed through 36 sets of ears, it came out as "Pink gay bunnies."  Needless to say, that was a dismal fail, so we switched to "Spelling-Bee Ball" (made-up game)  Toward the end of the game, a campus assistant came in and told me that class was dismissed (they had no bells to notify us due to the power outage).  When the next period resumed, the power was still out.  One student walked into class late.  I stated "You're tardy Elise, but I have no proof, so have a seat."  This had the class giggling.  For this period, I told students that they were to create a two-minute funny/spooky skit, using any props they could find in the classroom.  I gave them fifteen minutes to prepare, and then we just sat back in the dark and enjoyed the "shows."  The skits were hilarious; we had everything from sorority girls being stalked by Sponge Bob to helpless victims getting attacked by a giant rat (played by Ms. Frisbee).  I have to admit, I felt a little pang of disappointment when, towards the end of the skits, the lights finally came back on.  The rest of the day was just "business as usual".

On a completely unrelated note, I'm back to working out again.  I started about two weeks ago and was exercising every other day, but these last few days have been the most streneous.  Although life in general has been good, I've had a little bit of "heavy-hearted syndrome" that I've been trying to get over recently.  Exercising lifts my spirits, if only temporarily. 

It is still pouring outside and the lights keep flickering.  Time to hunt down some candles.