Poor Me

Why is it that sleepless nights don't happen on the weekend where the following morning can be spent relaxing and napping?  No, of course, sleepless nights exist only on work nights.  I awoke at sometime around 2:30am.  I got up, had a drink of water and tried to return to slumber.  NO LUCK.  I tossed and turned.  So I got up and sat looking at the computer trying to decide how best to bore myself to sleep.  Cora joined me at some point and we had a glass of milk.  I thought this might help and returned hopefully to bed.  Still no sleep.  I read a book.  no luck.  I watched Firefly.  Still not tired.  I finally found my eyelids becoming heavy around 5AM.  I tried going back to bed.  So, I basically lay quietly for an hour, but may have slept for eight or ten minutes.  I am up to stay now.  Drinking coffee and preparing for the day.

This afternoon, I get to return to the dentist and hope they are more gentle with me this time.  My teeth are still sensitive from last time.

We had a pretty good day yesterday.  We worked in the gardens and made some progress with the house.  We might add some flowers and some bricks and make a decent looking dwelling after all.  Best of all, though, I got to spend the day with my incredibly beautiful wife and her new haircut!  Skip on over to her site and have a look at her new do!

Her Slumber Is My Torment

Cora seems to have slept well. The dogs were in the living room and I by her side. She was bound to. Well, not me. I, apparently, wake up whenever Toby makes a squeak. Then I lie there trying to decide if I should go put a blanket over him or let him whine. I don't want him thinking every time I come down the hall that he is coming back to the bedroom with me. So, every hour, and sometimes half-hour he would whine. I would try to withstand it, until I could not. Then I would stumble down the hall and tell him to shut his mouth up! I usually added some other expletives, but apart from the tone, I doubt he got much of the meaning.

Cora, sweet Cora, never seemed to hear him-I am wearing earplugs tonight! ...and I am going to charge the battery to my Airsoft gun...he is much too fast for me to chase but he is not too fast for a BB! Maybe it would not have been so bad, but he seemed to time his whines with me getting back to sleep. Just as I was trekking through the jungle, or walking up the beach toward the beautties that were sunbathing, a sharp, high-pitched whine would puncture my happiness and tear me away from those interesting dreamlands. See, Toby hs the same respect for the ocean as he does for my slumber!

Well, one more day teaching music...yeserday, they needed me to teach in the SPED classroom. The kids in there know me and like me. I like them, and it was an easy day. The ladies in there are awesome, they do the majority of the work. I roll with the flow and I think that might be why they like me in there. It remains dfficult for me to walk through the hallways without kids yelling out to greet me...even when they SHOULD BE standing quietly in line...oh, well.

This weekend...hmmm, I know I had plans...wish I could think of them. I know I want to hve some nachos or some sort of chip vs. salsa dinner...add cheese and meat and it's a meal! I need to get some tomoatoes and some cilantro for my salsa.

I now have a facebook account...not sure how much it will get used, though I did manage to find a few friends from high school. Thank you Diana for questioning my electronic prowess and challenging my technological savvy...now, I have an account, happy? Or, in my most gangsta style voice, "How you like me, NOW!?"

Instructions? WHAT INSTRUCTIONS?

Have you ever been in bed and realized there is no realistic way that you can possibly, actually get to sleep? I hate that. I was tossing and turning. The covers weren't right. It was too cold or too hot or sleeping on my side was not right, nor sleeping on my back. Nothing seemed right. So here I am at 2:40AM. Awake. I think it may partially be drainage from what remains of my damned cold. I am going to sit up for a little while and then go back to bed.

So, what did I do yesterday? I subbed for third graders yet again. The day before I had experienced a teacher that left me 6 or more pages of instructions for the day. Yesterday, I got the whole other end of the spectrum. This teacher left me single words, from which I managed to pull several lessons and waste time until the end of the day. JOY. NOT. The first instruction was "SSHEET #19," and "TANK CARD 20." If this had been my first day teaching the 3rd graders this year...well, lets just say I would have been SOL and we would have spent the day doing drawings.

The ONLY way I knew what to do with this was I had done the exact same thing the day before, except with significantly more instruction. It wasn't hard, but she had not especially gone out of her way to be prepared for me. I ended up having to run down to the copy room a couple times, over to another teacher to verify what I thought she meant, and then I managed to pull some documents out of my ass(yes, it hurt) and the pen I had in hand(probably should have put the pen down first). I used these to instruct the kids.

Every time, I would sit down and look at the next item in her plan book and say to myself, "What the HELL?" "Reading TE341." OK, well, having become somewhat adept at shooting from the hip, my mind raced...TE, probably Teacher's Edition. Reading...only one book fits that...let's see...oh, look at this lesson that happens to be on pge 341! Yes, I am a genius! Shit. I don't have the copies of this handout...what to do? Fake it? As it happened, I only made copies of a couple documents and the other times the kids used their own paper, which they seemed unused to. TOUGH.

Despite my feeling of being behind behind the eight ball all day long, it turned out well and I feel like I managed to make a tree fort out of tooth picks, MacGyver style.

"Hey, MacGyver, all I have is a package of dried Bees, a box of tooth picks, some dixie cups, and a vague idea that this is a science lesson."

"Great! I love a challenge...um, did you say DRIED BEES?"

"Yep."

"Hmm, that's actually a new one for me kid, you better take this one on your own!"

"SHIT."

"Oh, and don't clip the red wire." And off runs my only hope at narrowly avoiding chaos...

Tick....tick....tick....SNIP!

Tomorrow...or is it today? I teach high school biology and science. I think I will not have to work as hard. High school students work differently...and it is a different pace...somewhat more relaxed. FOR ME.

Cora came home yesterday and needed to get gas for her car. She said her car's computer was saying her range was ZERO. She still had the tank above E, though. She had gotten 37.4 MPG on that tank. I suspect the car does not want to run out of gas...it would probably screw up the whole thing, computer, electric motor, batteries, engine, everything. We drove through town on the way home, and at one point had gotten 54.3 mpg on the new tank...which is kind of cool. By the time we got home it was a more realistic 45.3 mpg. It will go back down to about 37, which seems to be its honey spot. I like that car.

Saturday we go down to the valley and run through a geocache with my sister that my dad put up. I should just say treasure hunt and be done with it...semantics, I suppose. Well, shit, it is 3am and I need to get back to bed, hopefully I can sleep again. Maybe I just needed to get up and move around...