Billy's Birthday

  We didn't plan out my birthday very far in advance, which is fine with me.  I wasn't really looking forward to this birthday because I turned 28.  I feel like 28 is kind of a blah age because it makes me feel old to think about being 28.  It's so close to 30.  When I was a kid, I never thought about how cool it would be to be 28... I feel bad for Caitlin because I know she wants to do something fun and special for my birthday, but I never have any burning desire to do anything specific on my birthday, except for when we lived in Utah I always wanted to eat at Tucanos on my birthday. I'm kind of hard to plan for I suppose.  This year, my birthday was also Caitlin's last day of school, so she had been pretty busy.  So the celebration that we just kind of threw together was to go mini golfing, then out to dinner at Gecko Grill.

At Golfland

  I do need to mention that we did really well at mini golf!  We did establish a mercy rule that we couldn't score higher than 3 strokes on any particular hole, so although on some holes we took like 10 strokes, we only put 3 down on the scorecard.  Pretty awesome right?
  Gecko grill was delicious as usual and we hopped over to Caitlin's favorite, The Sweet Tooth Fairy, just next door.  I think Caitlin got a couple different cupcakes and we got some cake bites too.
  When we came home, I opened up a few presents.  Caitlin got me some new Vans that are black with the brown rubber sole.  I think they look awesome!  She also got me a new running shirt.  She is good at subtly letting me know that I need to exercise.
  It was a very low key birthday, which was perfectly fine because I think we were both looking forward to Caitlin finishing up her school year.  We are going to have tons of fun this summer before her next year of teaching starts and before I start school again at Thunderbird.


Ok I am adding more here too (this is Caitlin again).  Billy's birthday was also the last day of school.  I was really sad I didn't plan a better birthday for Billy but did I mention it was the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL OF MY FIRST YEAR OF TEACHING?!?!  Yes, I survived.  I am a survivor.  It was a rough rough year full of tears and laughs and mostly just a lot of being grumpy.  I hope next year I am happier!  The last day of school was pretty fun.  I got paid $20 to eat ice cream with kids who signed up to eat ice cream with me.  It was sweet (literally and figuratively) because they were all my favorite students so I had a ton of fun listening to them tell me how awesome I am and how they don't know why everyone didn't sign up to eat ice cream with me.  Then I had a couple classes which I just showed the Princess Bride to because I didn't want to deal with the craziness.  Then we had an assembly to present awards to students.  Here's a pic of that.

Most of the kids you can see in this pic were my students.  Awesome, right?  After the assembly all the kids left and we had a teacher pot luck.  It was super fun!  Except there ended up being a lot of drama...yikes!  But all in all it was a good day.

We teachers had a little get together the next Monday (Memorial Day) to celebrate Rachel and Natalie's (my teacher friends) birthdays.  We went bowling and laser tagging at this place in Tempe that was super fun.  We had a BLAST and got super sweaty laser tagging.  Awesome, right?  After that we had to get ready for our trip to Orange County the next day!  Then DUBAI!  Stay tuned for more to come in the next post ;)

Grad School

  On May 9th I was accepted to Thunderbird School of Global Management!  It was pretty exciting!  I was on my way to Red Robin with my mom and Ty Nelson and I received an email from Thunderbird saying that I qualified for a scholarship.  I was way excited, but a little confused because I hadn't been accepted to the school yet.  Then about 30 minutes later I received an email saying I was officially accepted to the school!  That is the school that Caitlin and I really wanted, so starting this Fall I will be going to Thunderbird to receive a MS in Global Management, then I can do an accelerated International MBA program after that.

I'm going to add my reaction to this news too just so it can be documented (this is Caitlin, btw).  Billy forwarded me the emails that he got a scholarship and got accepted to Thunderbird to my work email.  I sat down at my desk at the end of the school day, which was actually the last day of real class with my students because after that they had testing/projects/etc.  So I had students surrounding my desk all asking what their grades were and saying bye to me and stuff and then I saw the emails and I was like AHH MR.BARNES GOT INTO GRADUATE SCHOOL!!  The kids were kind of confused that I actually had a life outside of school, as they always are when I mention anything about myself, but they were excited and then left.  I called Billy to congratulate him and then got out of school as fast as I could so we could go celebrate!  We went to Yao's that night for dinner with Bruce and Karen, which is always a good time!  I am very excited and super proud of Billy that he got accepted!  (Except just between you and me, I think I deserve some credit too, so congrats to myself for pushing Billy so hard and nagging the heck out of him to get everything turned in and done ;) )