First of all, I'm not going to even attempt to figure out my October spending figures. Let's just say I overspent in several categories. Sometime this weekend I'll work on catching up my October data, and decide my November budget.

Halloween was fun. I dressed up as a black-eyed P, and only had two mid-school boys be able to figure it out without me doing a lot of prompting. I saw a post on FB for another costume idea - plain white tshirt with the 404 Error Not Found message written on it.

Halloween night I went to the annual faculty get together. We all pool our candy together and take turns handing it out. Our trick or treater turnout was lower than usual - only about 450 this year compared to 540 last year. We were thinking it might have been due to it being a Wednesday night - church night for many.

Okay, now to tell you about Thursday.

Thursday was my first technology club meetings with the 5th/6th and 7th/8th groups after school. My 5th/6th group had 13 kids, and my other group had 6 kids. I introduced Scratch to them - a simple computer programming language. I had planned on showing them four different projects made by other people to help them see the possibilities - but the site just would not come up. I was getting very frustrated, because not an hour earlier, the site had worked perfectly fine.

So, I finish with the second group (both groups really took to the program and came up with some cool programs in just 25 minutes or so of fiddling) and go over to the gym. When I get there I find out that the phone service (including cell) is out - which explained why the site wouldn't pull up. At first we thought it was just our area, but then several parents coming from big G to pick up their kids let us know that it was more widespread. Cell, internet, and cable all were completely out.

I got home and was at a loss as what to do. My usual routine involves the internet, and sometimes texting. Neither of which I could do. I also had received an email earlier that day telling me that a new module had been opened on our class site. I couldn't do anything like that.

So ... I played around in Scratch for an hour or so. Then I decided to try and see if the Smartboard software I'd downloaded on Sunday would let me do anything with it. It would - so I explored it, and created a lesson with 4 different activities.

It was only a bit after 9 at this point. So .. I turned on the radio to one of the only stations here - Navajo nation country radio - and scared poor Kari to death with my umm.... dancing...

I waited to see if there'd be any news reports telling what had happened, and didn't hear any (unless they said it in Navajo...) Finally, around 9:30 I noticed that I had bars on my phone, and about ten minutes later, internet was back. Whoooh!

I can be very thankful that I at least had electricity and water!

-- Today I found out that some punks decided to dig up the fiber optic cable coming out of ABQ towards the AZ border to see if there was any copper in it to steal. There wasn't any of course, but thanks to their efforts, two entire counties in NM were without cell/internet/cable service for nearly 7 hours!

(I do realize that going without these service for just 7 hours is *nothing* compared to what people have been dealing with after Sandy. It's just that this brought home to me just HOW reliant I/we are on these technologies - and how easily they can be thrown off.)

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I was going to go into town today and do some grocery shopping, but then I realized that it wasn't really necessary after my last shopping run + I was thinking that it might be a bit crazy with it being the beginning of the month AND no shopping possible yesterday afternoon.