. . . yawn. . . .
I left the house at six fifteen this morning and I got back home about an hour ago. That’s a long day, and I’m really tired.
It’s not even ten p.m. yet, but I think I’m going to go to bed. I feel like such a sissy caving in like this, but today, it’s got the better of me.
It wasn’t a difficult day; it was a very good day, in fact. It was just a long day.
BUT, the longest day at the college still beats the best day I ever had at the public school. I even had an hour for lunch with a friend! I never had that, before. For 26 years, I had 23 minutes for lunch, and by the time I ushered my students to the cafeteria and made sure they all had their lunches and/or money and/or knew to tell the cashier they were on free lunch, it was more like ten minutes. Deciding whether to sit with some adults for a few minutes, or go to the bathroom, was a hard choice to make every day. Usually I sat with the adults, since the nearest bathroom was a country mile away and it took longer to get there and get back than to visit with a peer for a minute. My next break was only four hours away; I could wait. Why could I wait? Because I had to. There was no alternative. Teachers who leave their classrooms for even a moment could find themselves liable if a student decided to behave like a jerk, and guess what; our schools allow jerks to sit right beside your well-behaved child and torment him/her all day long, and there’s not a thing anyone can do about it because there are usually letters of the alphabet involved which render the jerk untouchable.
YOUR child, on the other hand, will be disciplined if he/she snaps and strikes back.
Bah. I can’t think about that right now; I’m too tired.
There is something about some adult contact in between student contacts that refreshes and replenishes a teacher. It would have made all the difference in the world back in the middle school, but I guess that’s too complicated a concept for most administrators to understand, sitting in the ad building with all the time they want for lunch most days as they do, and working so hard to see where more positions might be eliminated so they can double and triple the classroom load and duty load and before-school load and after-school load since the schools are now keeping many kids every minute of the day except the few hours at night when the parents reluctantly pick their kids up and take them home to sleep, the school having furnished all three meals and a cot for dozing, once again. . . . .
Ramble, ramble. . . . good thing I left my red pen in the car. I’d never let a student get by with that sentence.
I got an hour for lunch today. How much time did your child’s teacher get? I bet it wasn’t an hour.
Do you know what your child’s teacher would like for Christmas? Not candles, or lotion, or picture frames, or ornaments that say “World’s Best Teacher,” lovely as these things truly are. Your child’s teacher would really appreciate some gift cards for restaurants.
Most evenings, teachers are too exhausted to even think about dinner, but the teacher and his/her family have to eat, and the gratitude for a restaurant card would be genuine and enthusiastic. Go ahead and buy a scented candle and a tube of hand cream if you want; the teacher will use them and enjoy them, but for a really happy teacher who will remember you with positive vibes, put a restaurant gift card in an envelope with a little note thanking him/her for all the things he/she does for your child, and I’m betting your child’s teacher will leave the building that evening a little less tired than usual. Your gift card and note might be the difference between the teacher leaving at the end of the year, and staying on to work a miracle the next year, maybe even with your child.
We don’t praise each other enough. We’re good at finding fault, but we’re falling behind in the praise department.
This post makes no sense. I’m just too tired.
Good night, my dears. I love you all.
Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Bedbugs have to eat, too, but I don’t want them munching on any of you. You’re all far too precious to end up as bugbait.
Okay, that’s it. I’m going to bed before this post gets even stupider.
I mean it this time.
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She's Feral and Incestuous and Very, Very Fertile
My daughter and some of her friends are coming down today to try to find the latest batch of Stray Slutty FeralMomCat’s kittens, which have been spotted behind almost every shrub around my house but which seem to be hiding really well indeed today. Actually, I haven’t seen them for three days now. FeralMom is back, stealing Charley Gordon’s food off the deck, but no kittens.
I got a good look at them only twice. Two silvery-gray, one black, and one calico like FeralMomCat. Her last batch had huge batlike ears but this batch has tiny ears. Long pointy kittenish tails. Huge loud kittenish voices.
FeralMomCat used to belong next door, even though they deny knowing her. Next door, they have kittens like gangbusters, litter after litter. They can’t afford to have any of the cats ‘fixed,’ but I would think that feeding that many cats would be far more expensive. Besides, around here in RuralLand, you can take your cats and dogs to the local elementary schools once a month and stand in line for the eight dollar pet vaccinations, and get a coupon for a fifteen-dollar neuter.
FeralMomCat was part of the neighbors’ first litter from THEIR semi-feral momcat. There are at least a dozen cats of various sizes at their house. They stay close to the house; I’ve never seen one here, and we are within spittin’ distance. I think most of FeralMomCat’s litters were the result of various incestuous encounters with her siblings, if appearance is any kind of clue.
Belle and her friends are going to try to catch FeralMom, as well as find the kittens.
The Humane Society shelter in this county charges a large (to me, anyway) fee if you want to drop off an animal. I can’t afford that. The shelter in Belle’s county doesn’t, so she will take them there, if she can find them. Besides, her shelter will neuter the kittens, give them their shots, and then PetSmart will sell them, so the odds of baby animals finding a good home increase by crossing the county line.
The kids were supposed to be here at ten. It’s now eleven, and their food is getting cold.
Ahem.
See that title? Go nuts, Google!
Update: They came, they found the kittens, they caged them, they ate, they packed up the leftovers, and they left. FeralMom eluded capture once again.
Charley Gordon wasn’t sad to see those kittens go. Really, he’s more like an Oedipal two-year-old than an elderly cat. I can’t say for certain that he was taunting the kittens through the bars and meowing the equivalent of ‘neener neener’ at them, but if facial expressions could talk, he was giving them the feline finger and bragging that he was staying but they weren’t. . . .
And when I put a little Cheap Chunk sliver on my finger and tried to pass it through the cage, Charley Gordon put a stop to that, too. Ouch.
MY mommy. MINE.
Now that the kittens are gone, Charley Gordon is doing the victory dance out on the deck.
“I’m a big tough, albeit neutered, Tom Cat, so to speak. Hssssst hsssst, purrrrrrrr, hssssst.”
Thank you, Baby Belle and friends.
When FeralMom drops another litter behind the bushes in a few months, I’ll let you know.
Another Post Where I Swear I'm Not A Political Blogger And Then I Say Something About Politics
I am not a political blogger. I swear, I’m not. There isn’t a political bone in my body. (Is there an echo in here?)
But I am a citizen, and a woman, and a registered voter (otherwise, no right to whine), and a mother, and a neighbor, and a bunch of other things, and I’ve tried all my life to be a kind and decent person.
(Those college years don’t count, do they? Oops.)
I think it is the ‘mother’ part of me that is outraged here. I can feel myself morphing into a grizzly bear, standing tall and ready to rip to shreds anyone or anything that came near my children with perverse intent.
Ordinarily I don’t mention political names on this blog because I AM NOT A POLITICAL BLOGGER. But I simply must put my two cents in about Mark Foley.
Wait. He’s not worth two cents. Ach, where’s a ha’penny when you really need one?
Mark Foley. Scum. Predator. Whiny excuse-maker.
His being gay doesn’t bother me in the least. Many of my friends are gay. Many are not. That part of their lives is none of my business. I love them for being the people they are, not for what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms. We are what we are.
What bothers me is that he made inappropriate advances towards children, and then tried to excuse his actions with sniveling statements about his personal addictions and his own teen trauma, all the while standing before us as a nation and vowing to bring down those who lay a violent hand on the bodies/minds/hearts/psyches of our children.
Can we spell “hypocrite?”
And now his own law is coming back to smack him in the arse, because if he goes to jail, it’s because of his own work to get it passed.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Way to go, Foley.
I waste no sympathy on him. He’s a predator, and what he did was inexcusable.
I tend to be pretty tough on grown people who try to use their childhood traumas as excuses for behaving badly as an adult. No. Sorry. Won’t work. Life is full of choices.
Mark Foley chose to be a dirty old man.
