Tying a Knot and Holding On

It's not that I don't enjoy teaching. I missed it terribly while we were living in England and I'm glad to be back in the classroom. However, the one thing I didn't miss is the need to go up to my dark, non-airconditioned school building every Sunday for about 3-4 hours in order to stay on top of the demands placed upon teachers. Six day work weeks are no fun, especially when you factor in the salary I receive for my efforts.

Oh sure, I enjoy getting paid during the summer when there are no classes. And yeah, we get a 45 minute planning period every day. But every week we have at least one meeting of some sort during planning time. This past week I had a meeting on 3 of the 5 school days. My students may not have any science homework most nights, but I certainly do.

Right now what's keeping me motivated is travel. At Thanksgiving, we'll be in NYC for the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. Over the Christmas holidays, we'll be traveling with the 7th grader to California while the college coed visits a friend in England. At spring break, we'll head to Turks and Caicos for a relaxing beach vacation. June will find us touring the east coast while July will be busy with an Alaskan cruise. 

As they say, you can't take it with you when you go and so I intend to enjoy the fruits of my teaching labors by traveling with the family every time we have a holiday from school. You hear about folks toiling in the work trenches their whole lives, only to up and get sick or die as soon as they retire. If that happens to me, I won't have any regrets because I plan to rack up the travel miles from now until the Lord calls me home.

My Second Home

So it's not a ski chalet. Or a lake house. And it sure aint a beach condo either. But it's where I spend a good chunk of my time for nine months out of the year. It's my classroom.

I chose a safari theme for my classroom many years before I actually went to Kenya in February, and so it's convenient that I could return with some of the things I purchased from the Maasai tribe we visited and use them as decor.

It's not some cutie patootie little kid look - more like a comfy family room. However, it suits me just fine. And I might as well feel at home because that's where you'll find me for at least 9 hours every Monday to Friday, from mid August to early June. And weekends... can't forget you'll find me there on Sunday afternoons for at least the first six weeks of any given school year trying to stay a step ahead of the kids. Fortunately, I can say it's all worth it.

Just Another Manic Sunday

What is it about Sundays? When I was in college, Sundays were the worst. I wondered what fab homecooked meal granny had whipped up for the rest of the family. I knew I should have washed clothes Friday or Saturday but didn't and now I'm hoping I have something clean in the back of my closet to wear tomorrow. My project for class that's due in a few days didn't magically finish itself, so there's that. 

Now that I'm middle-aged, I find I kinda feel the same way about Sundays as I did when I was a college student. I should have worked out on Saturday or Sunday, but I rolled over and slept until 7:30 since that seems like a luxury compared to the rude 5:30 am alarm Monday through Friday. I should have done everything on my school to-do list, but after 4 hrs on campus this weekend I threw up my hands and came home. I should have taken the dog for a long walk, but I never got around to that either.

What I did do was buy a ticket for the college coed to come home for a long weekend next month. I let the 7th grader invite several friends over for swimming and a meal Friday after school when my fanny was dragging after Parent Orientation Thursday evening at my campus. Plus I washed every piece of dirty clothing in the house, so we all have clean undies to wear tomorrow.

As much as I love teaching, I'll still do the countdown to next Friday when we're staring down two more precious days of freedom from the workaday routine.  

Goodbye, Summertime

So goodbye summer, but not adios to the heat. Yesterday it was 100˚ during recess at 2:20. Many of the students as well as teachers did their best imitation of cattle in nearby pastures, finding a tree that would offer a spot of shade from the unrelenting Texas sun. What I wouldn't give for a late October cool front right about now. Or some mild English weather. 

It's hard to believe summer is officially over. The new 7th grader and I returned to classes Monday. Right now I'm in survival mode, madly paddling to keep my head above water. It's the triple whammy of new campus, new grade and new curriculum. I'm enjoying the first two aspects of my return to teaching, but the third (science) not so much. It's hard to fake a love of something that doesn't particularly interest you in any way, shape or fashion. But alas, I'll persevere and hope for a change of subjects in 2015 when sixth grade makes the move from top of the elementary pile to low man on the totem pole in our middle schools. My dream job is social studies or English.

Before I officially started inservice on August 19, I spent the week before that in Columbia, South Carolina, getting the coed moved into her dorm. It only took $2,000 plus four separate trips to both Bed, Bath and Beyond as well as Target to get her dorm essentials. Our daughter and her roomie opted to loft their beds and have a surprising amount of floor space for a TV stand, futon and fridge/microwave. 

In the first pic is an exterior shot of the daughter's coed dorm. She's on the second of three floors, so it was a do-able hike for me since the husband didn't accompany us. And wasn't that wily of him to dodge what turned out to be a rather gut wrenching event for this momma that has never been particularly sentimental. In the bottom pic is the South Carolina statehouse, located just a couple blocks off campus. I found it to be a more manageable Austin, minus the drag worms and hippies.

Here is a shot of the coed at Wal-Mart, where we picked up important things like toothpaste and deodorant. Our local Wally World store carries the University of Texas and Texas A&M team items. The stores in South Carolina are all about the USC Gamecocks and Clemson Tigers. However, in Columbia it's mostly about the garnet and black - Go Cocks!

We paid to fly four large suitcases to Columbia with the coed's wardrobe and cosmetics. And thus we did our part to support South Carolina's economy by purchasing everything from pillows to makeup remover wipes to hangers in Columbia. Below you see the teen loading up her dorm chest of drawers with clothes.

Above is a pic of the historic horseshoe at the center of the USC campus. Everything was so green, explained by the fact that Columbia receives the same amount of annual rainfall as Houston. The highs there were lower than you'll find at this time of year in the Texas hill country, but it's much more humid in Columbia. The horseshoe is where the coed attended bid day on Sunday. After more than a week of sorority rush events, she pledged Zeta Tau Alpha. In the pic below, she's the brunette in the middle with white shorts and her cellphone peeping from the back pocket. And this is why we carry insurance on her phone - one pop out of her pocket away from a shattered screen or easy access thievery.

On the trip home by myself, I sniffled through airports in three states as I backtracked our flight path through Atlanta. As soon as I arrived back in Texas, I threw myself into school prep and that has kept me from moping around wondering what the newly fledged chick is doing. We've fallen into a family routine that seems to bump along just fine without her, as if she has been away at college for years. But then I'll catch myself wondering what she wants to eat for supper. Or if she needs me to buy her anything at Wal-Mart when I swing by there after school... and then I find myself missing her all over again. They grow up and get out and life goes on for everyone. And that is exactly what happened.

Pardon Our Dust

And pardon the boxes, packing paper and stuff stacked most everywhere. The sea container was delivered Monday. Thus far we've unpacked/put away about 3/4 of its contents. Several of the rooms are more or less done, minus pics on the walls. Probably the worst part of the house is the very front, where the formal dining and husband's office are located. 

Due to a certain family member's hoarding tendencies (cough, cough, the husband), we were up to our eyeballs in boxes of books. After a good cull, we donated eight boxes of books to the town library. And when we found more boxes of books in the garage, we ended up with another four boxes of books that also need to be dropped off for donation.

The husband's secretary is moving, so she's taking some of the boxes and packing materials off our hands. The rest of it is living on the back porch until the moving company returns to pick it up on Tuesday. That's our deadline - we have until then to get everything unpacked/shuffled to where it needs to be.

Forget Calgon taking me away. I picked up the ingredients for margaritas at the grocery store when I unearthed the blender in a storage box. Now I just need to stop off at the liquor store for some tequila as well as triple sec and then I'll be all set. 

Shining Moment... and forehead!

Yesterday the sea container arrived and was unloaded. By 9:00 last night, I was so sore and tired that I could barely move from going up and down the stairs to note placement of furniture and begin a bit of unpacking. We spent today doing some serious unpacking and put away enough stuff to furnish the whole neighborhood... or so it seemed. We donated eight boxes of books to the local library and have four more to take to them tomorrow. I've also collected several items to take to the local thrift shop. I swear I'm not going to buy another piece of home or Christmas decor unless a tornado wipes our property off the map. The husband overhead me and asked to get that in writing. But seriously - I look around at all of our stuff and am just flabbergasted. 

This morning, I had to go up to the district's administration office for new employee paperwork. It was all about making sure I've turned in my required documents and getting enrolled with medical, dental, AD&D, life insurance, etc. Since the girls and I are covered through my husband's work, it didn't take long to decline everything. However, the one thing that did happen which I wasn't expecting was getting my district ID badge. Of course, that involved taking my pic. I jokingly asked the badge lady if she had an edit button on her computer to help me out a bit.

Honestly, anything after that is going to be an improvement. I was wearing a bright pink exercise shirt and some black stretchy lycra workout shorts. Not one bit of makeup. And my hair pulled back into a ponytail because I knew I was coming straight home to wrangle boxes. It's a good thing my 6th graders don't know what a mugshot is - or most of them, anyway - because they would no doubt liken my employee pic to one. 

Metal Mouth

This morning, the 7th grader spent 1.5 hrs at the orthodontist's office to kick off the process of straightening up her jack o' lantern grin. She put a lot of forethought into the selection of turquoise and purple bands, something we didn't get to do when I wore braces about the time Noah was building some big ship out in his backyard. We had no choice - just an ugly gray color. 

Our resident brace face was excited for the first couple hours after she emerged ready to set off the airport's metal detector, posting pics for her friends to see and running her tongue around her mouth to check out how they felt. We zipped over to the local Chinese restaurant to get her some wonton soup. This was more of an anticipatory move because she had taken some ibuprofen right before the appointment and felt fine.

It's almost 5:00 pm and she has piled up in front of the TV with a pillow and blanket after popping a couple more ibuprofen because her mouth is sore. No pain, no beautiful smiley gain.