The Night Before My Last First Day.......

Tomorrow I begin the last year of my teaching career (yes, really!), and I thought I would set some teaching goals for the year.

I have shamelessly stolen this idea from my friend over at VodkaMom, and not JUST because I love her blog title. I have to admire anyone who has taught kindergarten as long as she has. I am also shamelessly linking to her blog because I am hoping against hope that I am the person chosen to win her giveaway for a fabulous scooter. I have convinced myself that I really need one of those.

These are the things I would most like to teach my high school students in the coming year. Forgive me if mine aren't as uplifting as VodkaMom's. Her students arrive wearing cute shoes and eager to learn. Mine arrive wearing as little as possible and already knowing everything.

• Your definition of an "emergency" might be slightly different from the rest of the world. Making arrangements for a ride after school is NOT an acceptable reason to use your cell phone in the middle of English class.
• Occasionally we have "professional dress" days, in the hopes of instilling in some of you the idea that your job may require that you dress in a certain way. Apparently we need to be more specific about which "professions" we are talking about. If we provide you with a school-logo blazer and it is longer than your skirt, your "profession" may need some further reflection.
• If you bring your baby(ies) to school, we will ooh and aah over him/her/them. We will also do everything in our power to help you finish school. That does NOT mean we think it is a GOOD IDEA for you to have a baby at 17. Or 18. Or without an education, a support system, child care, or perhaps someone other than your mama to help you raise the baby(ies). 
• Just because your curriculum is delivered primarily over the internet, that does NOT mean that's where your essays should come from. If you submit an essay using the words "emulate" or "heretofore," it's a dead giveaway that you may have procured it online.
• Speaking of essays, double spacing means there should be a blank line between each line of text. It does NOT mean you should go back and put two spaces between each letter. I'm looking at YOU....
• Your "crises" are no worse than anyone else's. You aren't more important than anyone else. Leave your drama at home, because frankly we are sick of it.
• Listening to music while you do your work is fine. Spending 50 minutes searching for just the right song to inspire you to "learn" is not. 
• There are only five teachers in our school. If you cannot remember my name, at least do not confuse me with one of the two men on our faculty.
• School ends at 3:00. This does NOT mean you should pack up your belongings at 2:45 because you "don't have enough time to start something else." Sure you do.
• I cannot make the room comfortable for everyone. If it's too hot or cold, please dress accordingly. 
• This is a school of choice. If you don't like the rules/parking/classes/teachers/building, feel free to return to your home school at the semester break. With or without some credits. It's really up to you.
• High school is really about as easy as your life is going to get. Really. So if you think this "sucks," you probably won't like anything from here on out.
• I realize you may have had a difficult life. You may have had a tough upbringing. You may be on your own. I sympathize, really I do. But you have the choice to wallow in self-pity or rise above it. Use it as an excuse or use it as a motivator. It's really up to you.
• Having an "anger management problem" is not a global excuse for poor behavior. In the real world, acting out without considering the consequences HAS consequences. Grow up. We don't care about how hard it is for you to manage your anger. Deal with it.
• If you cannot be bothered to come to school on the last day of the year because you have a nail appointment, please don't be offended if we don't accept you back for the next year. We are full; we don't need dead weight.
• Please limit your grandmothers' deaths to two per year. I realize you may have more grandmothers than that, but aren't ANY of them healthy?
• If you mention in your interview that you want to leave your home school because there is too much "drama" and then you experience "drama" at OUR school, chances are the school is not the problem. 
• If you decide to cheat the system by signing into the online curriculum as a different student because he is doing YOUR work in another class, you might want to consider waiting until he is actually IN THE BUILDING before you sign in for him.
• Girls: Really, it's going to come around each and every month (we hope). Please try to be prepared at least SOME of those months. 
• If you are a smoker, you stink. No amount of chewing gum, breath mint, or body spray will mask that. You just stink. 

All that being said, I really think it's going to be an AWESOME school year. And not just because I only have 176 days left.

I Need to Budget My Time Better........

I had a (mostly) free day today, plenty of time in which to compose a decent blog post full of pithy remarks and thoughtful musings. Unfortunately, that's not how I actually used my time. Then we went to a wedding in Atlanta this evening (how in the world can my niece be old enough to get MARRIED? Isn't she still crawling?), and it's past my bedtime and I have to chisel the make-up off my face and go to bed. So I'm afraid this blog post won't be up to even my own standards, which are admittedly fairly low.

It was a precious wedding, even having to be moved inside at the VERY last minute when a thunderstorm blew through. Want to end a drought in Georgia? Just plan an outdoor wedding. It was casual without being flippant, reverent without being stuffy. I'll have to post what I think will be my favorite picture of the bride. But it will have to wait until tomorrow.

I sincerely hope that the next time I have on heels, Hubby and I will be on a cruise ship.

I'm just sayin'.....

Fantastic Friday........

I may be trying to generate some fantastic-ness here, but I'm going to give it all I've got.

Fantastic features of this particular Friday:

• Unpacking the remaining boxes in my classroom.
• Having a dip in the pool when I got home from school.
• Living close enough to school that the air conditioner doesn't have time to cool the car off.
• Finishing the (ugly) placemats I've been working on. Except for the fringe.
• Having that last teeny weeny bottle of wine (finally).
• Seeing the Braves go ahead 2-1 in the top of the third inning. (Please hold, please hold, please hold).
• Realizing we're under 30 days to kickoff for college football.
• Knowing I don't have to hear the alarm clock go off tomorrow morning.
• Ending the week of pre-planning with the knowledge that it's my last one.
• Eating dinner at a local restaurant and having Randy as our waiter.
• Finding the perfect gift bags.
• Getting new carpet in our hallways.
• Going out to lunch with the whole teaching team (sans the Warrior Princess - sniff, sniff).
• Returning to the routine of getting on the elliptical every morning. Yes, really.
• Getting a text message from Hubby that he is NOT playing golf tomorrow. Now I don't have to worry about whether or not he will get home in time to go to my niece's wedding.
• Cashing my gigantic check for doing jury duty. I may be able to retire on it alone. Or not.
• Turning in early.

I Keep Forgetting to Drink........

And I'm not talking about water.

I've had one little tiny bottle of wine in the fridge since we went to the beach two and half weeks ago. (Seriously? It was only two and a half weeks ago? It seems like FOREVER!) I have almost completely stopped drinking beer, because a cyclist dude I know said one time that you should "never drink your calories." That has stuck with me, even when I've seen him repeatedly with a Corona in his hand. I had a few mixed drinks at the casino, but I tried to stick to "healthy" choices: bloody marys and vodka & cranberry. I know, I know, they still have empty calories, but they're (slightly) better than the sweet "girlie drinks" I prefer.

I've never been much of a wine drinker, but I do occasionally enjoy a glass of it. I tend to like the sweeter wines, like muscadine and peach.

I keep meaning to drink the little bottle in the fridge, mostly so it will stop staring at me every time I open the door. (And it seems that I open the door with alarming frequency.) Tonight I meant to drink it while I cooked dinner. We had Open House at school this morning, which is always a confusing and exhausting enterprise in itself. (My smile muscles always hurt after Open House. Do you think this could be a sign? Of anything?) This afternoon we had to finish schedules. Hubby spent all day at the hospital with his mother, who fell and broke her arm, refused to be transported by the EMT's who arrived to help her, and then refused to go to a LOCAL hospital for treatment. I decided I had earned a small drink of wine, and so had Hubby. Since he doesn't drink wine at all, I was willing to drink his by proxy. Always sacrificing for my spouse that way.

And then I forgot.

It isn't the kind of wine that goes with country fried steak and mashed potatoes. (IS there a wine that goes with country fried steak and mashed potatoes?) After dinner I spent some time on the computer and played Mario as long as I thought Hubby would tolerate it. Then we had our usual sugar-free, fat-free pudding for dessert, and again the wine didn't seem to go with that.

And then I forgot again.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. When I was in college I might forget to pay my rent, write a 10-page paper, show up on time for an exam, do my laundry, change the oil in my car, wash the dishes, or shave my legs, but I NEVER forgot to drink.

Random Thoughts on a .... What Day is This...... Wednesday.....

Open House at our school is tomorrow morning, and we aren't ready. We've NEVER been ready, but this year we really, really, REALLY aren't ready. Some of our computers aren't there. Some of our desks aren't there. We don't have student schedules done. My room is a disaster area because we were doing scheduling in there today, and our materials are scattered all over.

We have spiffy new digital clocks in our rooms this year. And I still hung my battery-powered Pepsi clock on the same wall. Old habits die hard.

It's amazing to me how a change in routine (or reestablishment of a routine) can absolutely D-R-A-I-N me. I am bone-weary tonight, to the point I almost didn't post. Gasp! I don't sleep in, so getting up early isn't the difference. It's just a matter of getting dressed, then interacting with real, live people all day. Constantly. With no breaks for Mario. I'm so tired I could cry. Many days during summer break I did a gazillion more energy-depleting activities than I did today, and I wasn't nearly this tired. The only thing keeping me from bursting into tears is the thought that this may be the last time I am ever this tired again. At least as a result of returning to school.

Pity party over. Next.

I don't know why I make some of the choices I make. I guess that would explain two ex-husbands. I found a pattern for placemats that I liked, so I decided to crochet them. The colors suggested were: turquoise, fuchsia, purple, and sunflower. The name of the pattern was "Bright Placemats." The colors I chose to use instead? Mustard. Evergreen. Paprika. Clove. Those colors ARE NOT BRIGHT. I guess they look okay together, but they clearly are not bright. They look a lot like the carpet in the house we bought in 1973. Remember Avocado Green? Harvest Gold? Yeah, I must have been having a flashback. I'll be glad when this project is finished. But I have to put a fringe on all four placemats. Yuck.

I may have Zumbaed too enthusiastically last night. My hips hurt just like they did after the infamous 5K in May.

It's rare that I give up on a book before I've finished it. I even suffered all the way to the end of Wicked. (Aside: How in the HELL did they get that wonderful musical production out of THAT BOOK?) I downloaded a **free** book into my Kindle entitled Bubba and the Dead Woman. If the fact that it was free didn't convince me, the word "Bubba" in the title should have. I labored through about 15% of the book, and then I deleted it. It had some humor in it, but the exaggeration was just too .... exaggerated. That wasn't the main reason I deleted it, though. It was fraught with comma errors and other grammatical errors. If the editor wasn't skillful enough to catch those, no telling WHAT other kind of crap he or she allowed to get through.

I was about to embark on a story about one of our dumb cats. But I couldn't make my brain make sense of it. So I'll save it for a more coherent night.

Playing the Glockenspiel........

When I was in middle school, I got the bug to play in the band when everyone else did. I (sort of) played the piano, but it wasn't practical to play that in the marching band. And being in the marching band was a big deal. They had a big parent meeting at the school, representatives from the companies that sold instruments were there, and students who had aspirations for playing in the high school band got their start.

I either chose clarinet or was assigned it, and my mother began a payment plan to purchase (lease?) the clarinet. It is only now that I can appreciate what a sacrifice that was for a single mom. I stuck with it that year, but I also continued piano lessons, and there was a point at which I had to choose one or the other. We simply could not afford both, and I chose piano. I'm not sure why, since I still couldn't tote it on the football field, but I guess I felt that I owed my allegiance to the piano.

Fast forward to high school, specifically tenth grade. Some really cool kids were in the marching band, including the boy I had a crush on for most of high school. And college. And then some. Right up to the night I went to his wedding. Anyway.... I wanted to be in the band, but my clarinet experience was now four or five years old. There was no way I could hope to play in the band.

Then I discovered the glockenspiel.

I had never considered the glockenspiel (also called the bells - I know it looks like a xylophone, but they are very different), because I didn't realize how the instrument was set up. If you turn it on its side, the keys are laid out just like those on a piano. The keys on the left in the image above would be the black keys; the ones on the right would be the white ones. Now THIS I could do.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you what initiated this interest in the glockenspiel, since I wasn't really even aware of its existence. The boy who played the ONE glockenspiel in our school's band was the son of one of our most beloved teachers, and he was killed in a car accident when I was in ninth grade. Donations were made to the school in his memory, and the money was used to purchase a brand new glockenspiel for the band. A plate dedicating the instrument to his memory was attached to the top of it, and suddenly I wanted to be the next person who played it.

I auditioned for the band, was accepted despite my failure to pay attention to the key signature in the piece of music I was asked to sight-read, and attended summer band camp, marching in the scorching Georgia sun and loving every minute of it. Well, mostly I loved the mid-week trip to Six Flags over Georgia, but I liked the rest of it too.

There were times I wished I had stuck with clarinet. The glockenspiel is no piece of cake to march with. There is a metal pole in the middle which can be released, and I had to wear a jock-strap looking contraption to hold the instrument up, and I had to use my left hand to hold it in the back. All our music had to be memorized, since the remaining hand was used to strike the keys. And on the night when they turned out the lights and the majorettes twirled fire, the glockenspiel was the only instrument that could not be played in the dark. We wound up waiting until the lights went out, then turning around backward and kneeling, using the reflection of the fire in the silver keys to show us where to strike.

I say "we" because another glockenspiel player, Mary Beth, was a ninth grader, and she played it too. She was a sweet girl, and in addition to being my partner on the glockenspiel, she also stole my boyfriend away from me. Not the one I had a crush on - we were never actually "boyfriend/girlfriend." I wrote about him before - Figment. One day in band class Mary Beth had the audacity to go to the orthodontist, so I was the only player on bells that day. We were trying out a new piece - must have been somewhere between marching season and festival. I should have had a clue when the title of the piece was something like "March of the Bells" or "Bell Song" or "yada yada yada Bells." My mind wasn't on what I was doing, and I zoned out. My eyes glazed over, and I was far, far away, oblivious of everything around me.

In the middle of the song there was absolute, dead silence, then the roar of everyone else in the band. The silence was a bell solo, and the only remaining glockenspiel player was somewhere with her head in the clouds. Damn that Mary Beth for going to the orthodontist anyway. I can still feel the embarrassment at being caught daydreaming in such a public way. But it was high school, so everything was major.

It's a wonder I have any hearing left at all. I sat next to Mary Beth, of course, and the only way I knew to play ANY musical instrument was all-out. Loud. Fierce. In addition to the two sets of bells, the trumpets were on my right, and the percussion section was right behind me.

Wait....what did you say?

No one marches with a glockenspiel anymore, and I'm intensely jealous. At some point since I graduated from high school, they moved the bells, the xylophone, the marimba, and all associated percussion/keyboard instruments down to the field with the rest of the percussion section, which suddenly became sexy. Drums aren't just to keep the beat anymore. The percussionists don't march, and they typically have their own solo pieces in any halftime show. The buttheads.

I only played the glockenspiel that one year, tenth grade. The band director had approved the formation of a drill team, and my two friends that I spent the weekend with two weeks ago were both on it. They got to wear shiny, white, patent-leather, knee-high boots and wear little dresses and do cute little routines with chairs, balloons, flashlights, and pompoms. I had to have me some of those boots.

Plus we still got to go to Six Flags and do other things with the cool kids in the band.

Every now and then I hear one of the songs we played that year as part of our halftime show (always on an oldies station, of course). I'm transported back to the summer and fall that I marched with my glockenspiel, and I can still remember some parts of the musical scores. 

I wonder if I can find a glockenspiel on eBay.......

My Grand Day.......

When I reported for Grand Jury duty today, I got some fantastic news right off the bat. Our duties would require us to be there today and tomorrow, then two days in October, and that's it.

Whew....what a relief.

I won't go into details about each and every case we heard today. Mainly because I'm not supposed to, but also because they really aren't that exciting. Suffice it to say there are some really dumb criminals out there. Uh...... alleged criminals.

We gathered in a courtroom at first, waiting for the judge to arrive and "charge" us. The bailiff said we would only be there about 15 minutes. I later heard him tell someone, "I meant 15 minutes AFTER the judge gets here." He was still wrong.

The judge started off by thanking us for our service and telling us what an important role we play in the judicial process. He explained that the concept of the grand jury came from English law about 900 years ago. I was afraid he was going to tell the whole 900-year story, and he was still talking almost an hour later.

The clerk said we had too many jurors, and I got my hopes up. Then they said they would keep the first 23 on the list, and I realized immediately my name had been called toward the beginning of the list. (They were NOT in alphabetical order.) The judge asked if serving would create a hardship for anyone, and two people raised their hands. They approached the bench to explain themselves.

I couldn't hear what the woman said, but she was excused. Then came the Harley dude. I saw his Harley parked outside, and he appeared wearing a Harley t-shirt and jeans. The bailiff had to ask him to remove his cap and sunglasses. INSIDE the courtroom. Duh. He approached the bench to tell why he should be excused, but then he spoke loudly enough for everyone in the court to hear him.

The bailiff had told us that we could only have water inside the courtroom, nothing else. He ALSO said we would be there for only about 15 minutes or so, and we could have snacks and anything else in the Grand Jury room. The Harley dude started off by telling the judge he had to have soft drinks available. He can't drink water because it dries his mouth out due to his medication.

Huh?

Then he said he couldn't sit for long periods of time because he has a really bad back.

Then he said he has problems paying attention.

I couldn't hear what the judge said in response, but he was very nice to him. Nicer than I would have been. He was also excused. And I'm glad.

The judge, the clerk, the court reporter, the district attorney, and the assistant district attorney then left the room so we could elect a foreperson. When they left, the woman beside me turned to me and asked, "Are we picking the four people who can leave?"

Foreperson. Not four people. I gently explained to her what a foreperson is. Then I said a little silent prayer that I will never have to appear before a jury of my "peers" in my county.

The process was a painless but arduous one. I was tired and a little grumpy by the time I got home. I think instead of a flat $25 per diem they pay us for Grand Jury duty, they should pay us according to the sacrifice we made to be there.

For my last day of summer vacation, they should be willing to pay me enough for a down payment on the marsh house.

I'm just sayin'.....