Yogurt

So these last couple of days have been rather exciting and rather frustrating. I don't know if it ended up being a good kind of frustrating, but we'll see.

Yesterday in orchestra was awesome, which has been happening a lot lately, considering this orchestra loves to talk and play when they're not supposed to. They're getting better, though! We're learning a whole bunch of new songs to play in our Monster Concert in April. (By the way, the Monster Concert will have every sixth grade beginning orchestra playing at the high school, and it's going to be epic!) They weren't being to terribly cooperative with me, and I was about to lose my head when the principal walked it.

The moment she walked in, my class dropped dead silent. It was amazing. It was like they weren't even my class anymore! I'm so glad for the influence a principal can have, because I can't think of any other person kids are more willing to impress than someone they admire, and when you're in elementary, that person always seems to be the principal.

Anyways, the principal walks in and sits down quietly to listen in, and the kids started to cooperate with me. They learned half the song within five minutes, and the principal never even realized that the song they were playing was a completely new song to them. The thing about this orchestra is that they are super talented, and they can do a whole bunch if they could only focus and put their minds to the music I give them instead of to their chatter.

Nevertheless, their behavior has been greatly improved from before Christmas. I'm so freaking proud of them.

So that was the exciting bit. The frustrating aspect of these last couple of days consists of jobs, yogurt, and knives.

I got the job, but I declined because they don't pay well and we need a good source of income. Besides, if Kyle gets a job in Salt Lake, I don't want to be tied down in Provo with a job that doesn't help us too much. Besides, I need experience in my career choice.

Also, we made yogurt yesterday. A huge batch of it. Or at least, we tried to make yogurt. We used up three-quarters of a gallon to make it. Unfortunately, the yogurt from our last batch was too old, so the bacteria were dead and the starter didn't work. So after eight hours of incubating, our warm milk was still warm milk. Kyle ran to the store to pick up some fresh yogurt and we tried to save our failed experiment, but the milk curdled when we reheated it and a whole batch of yogurt was wasted.

Well, not quite wasted. We strained the whey out of the curds, used it to make soup for dinner tonight, and now we're trying to make some cheese with the curds. I don't know how successful we'll be, but at least we didn't have to throw it away.

The yogurt we made today worked, hallelujah.

Last of all, I was slicing up some bread for our soup tonight with our wonderfully sharp bread knife, and I sliced my finger open. It took a half hour for it to stop bleeding, yikes, and now I've got an annoying band-aid on my finger and it's no fun typing on this keyboard. I hate band-aids, because they always end up on my poor fingers (because my fingers seem to be a magnet for knives), and you wouldn't believe how much of a nuisance that is! You can't wash your hands properly, you can't type comfortably, and you can't touch raw meat while you're cooking because the meat juices will get into your band-aid and into your open wound and fill you up with all sorts of nasty bacteria. Gosh, sometimes you don't want to know those sorts of things, but that's what comes of being married to a microbiologist. Jeez.

In other news, Rachel's getting her wisdom teeth pulled on Friday and recovering at our house that night and the next day (sleepover!), and Brandon, Hannah, and their kiddies are coming on Saturday!