brainxplosion

I had the following conversation with a third-grader a couple of days ago. We were sitting on the wall next to the parking lot, waiting for her chronically late mother to pick her kids up already. I may have been greatly annoyed.

her:"Do you have a boyfriend?"
me: "No."
her (shocked) "What??? You don't have a boyfriend?"
me: (amused): "No, but I'm married.
her: (grabs my left hand, examines wedding ring) "Let me see."
me: ?!?
her:"How old are you?"
me: (annoyed): "Guess."
Much guessing ensued at this point. She guessed too young first, which means that she is still alive and I am not in jail. Finally...
her:"26!"
me: "Yes! Finally!"
her:"Are you planning to have kids?"
me:(beyond annoyed) "Yes."
her:"You should have your kids in your twenties."
me: (a little afraid of the answer, but asking anyways) "Why?"
her:"Because during your twenties, the babyweight comes right off. In your thirties? not so much."

I'm in a hurry, so here you have it:
* Friday: movie night. Joe vs. the Volcano, which is an awesome movie. If you haven't seen it, see it now. It's one of the Tom-Hanks-Meg-Ryan combos, so don't miss it.
* Saturday: Picked up our NEW CAR. It's shiny and it smells good. More details and pictures will follow, as well as an account of the crazed car dealer from Las Vegas.
* also Saturday: Swingdancing for Sarah's birthday. Beautiful new golden strappy sandals made me dance barefoot pretty soon, but looked pretty, so no matter. Am still healing blisters on the feet though.
* Sunday: Lunch with the just-returned-from-Iraq military cousin, and much drooling over our NEW CAR.
* also Sunday: Shopping at Target and parking of the NEW CAR far away from the store entrance, so that nobody would want to park next to it and ding it when opening their doors.
* Monday: D.'s first day at NEW JOB! Goodbye you old job suckas!
* also Monday: reformatting of the hard drive. Loads of fun. Reloading and installing of all the software, and downloading of Mozilla. Bonus: Was able to back up all data!
*also Monday: Took NEW CAR to work and parked curbside. Yes. I forego my regular parking spot for fear of a door ding. Shut up. I'd cry if you made a ding in my NEW CAR. For real.

*Tuesday: Must dash off to work now.

I have this thing for story time. I just love the kind of quiet, attentive, relaxed atmosphere in a classroom when I read a story. Love. It.
I also have this think for Kevin Henkes. Especially his mouse stories are just so deliciously wonderful. The stories are creative and sweet and perhaps make me tear up just a tiny bit sometimes.
AND NOW. Kevin has written a new book. With one of my favorite mouse characters - Lilly. Lilly has a purple plastic purse that plays music when you open it, and she always has a disguise in her back pocket (just in case). She wears red cowboy boots with stars on them, and she is just plain cool. And in this newest book, Lilly's super-great-cool-neat teacher, Mr. Slinger, is getting married. Mr. Slinger, BTW, is the kind of teacher I want to be when I get a job. He's great.
All this is peachy. The only thing that sucks is that I now have to wait all the way until APRIL FIRST until it gets published. And then for amazon to ship it.
That's, like, ten days or something. *sigh*

The job fair, it was interesting. I was there for 2 hours and spoke to principals and/or teachers from 7 schools. The talking took approximately 40 minutes. The rest of the time I stood in line, sipped water, and studied the flash cards I had written about the schools and hidden in my pretty purse. They said things like "accountability & metacognition" and "joy and rigor in learning with climate of resepct" and "Readers are Leaders program." These things were taken directly from the schools' websites and actually proved useful. Nothing like being able to show off that you know something un-obvious about a school. And my outfit was one of the nicer ones in the room, but not at all overdressed. And my purse was the prettiest of all the purses. Esp. the jute one with the kiddie faces painted on it. So teacher-esque - phew!
Highlights:
1) One principal interrupted me while I was speaking with her with "It was nice to meet you." Then she kinda smiled and added "I have a lot to get to," guesturing at the waiting line. Uh-uh. Whatever.
2) Another principal (a guy) touched my elbow when we were greeting each other, and I tought he was trying to hug me. WHAT??! Actually, he was just trying to move by me to invite two more girls to our group. Embarrassing? Perhaps. Also funny.
3) Everybody was standing in line, waiting (more or less) patiently. Except for one person: There was a group of four of us talking to a principal (the huggy one), when this woman walked up to us and joined the group. WITHOUT standing in line. The principal was kinda cool about it and told her that if she wanted to hear him talk about his school (since she had missed that part), "I guess you need to stand in line."
4) There are 500 applicants for each opening in this district.
5) D. has this week off from work and came with me. We had yummy Indian food for dinner and then took a walk through the quaint little downtown eating some wonderful ice cream.

So much for the job fair. All in all not a bad experience. Not that I really expect a job out of it...

Today is the day. The job fair is this afternoon.
So far, I've spilled liquid soap on my shirt (school shirt, not job fair shirt) and somehow got yellow marker stains in my hair. Yes, my HAIR.
This should be interesting...

Early this morning, I had a very vivid nightmare. First, I was visiting my old cooperating teacher and the class. She then took me to her house for lunch (we just left the kids at school - we care). Her house turned out to be a large cafeteria (???) around the corner from the school. We sat at a table with Tom Hanks, and my teacher got me a plastic grocery bag full of ice cubes for lunch. Um, thanks?
After a while, I decided to leave with Tom Hanks, because he needed to go to the airport. It was a bit of a scramble because we were on foot and there were all these roadblocks, but we eventually made it. As soon as we walked up to the counter, the airline people made faces and it became apparent that Tom Hanks had done major mischief every single time he had ever been at the airport or flown with that (and any other) airline. So obviously, we ran away and hid with a medium-large group of other people in an underground shelter. There were large quantities of food in this shelter, and there was a kitchen with a back door and a stairway in the front that lead back up to the street. Some sort of natural disaster happened, but we were quite comfy in the shelter. But then! An earthquake! Tom and I went up the stairs and into the town square, but people were after us, so we ended up running away frantically and eventually, back into the underground shelter. The mood in there had shifted, though, and I was trying to find a way to leave. I went stealthily into the kitchen and opened the back door. Remember that natural disaster I was talking about? Well, it had caused the ocean to overflow and then freeze solid (?), so outside the kitchen door was ice (from top to bottom of the door): no way to get out.
I woke up instead.
Now. I've had freaky dreams before, but you know how some dreams are hard to shake? It's been over 12 hours, and this crap is still fresh in my mind. It's almost time to go to sleep. Let's hope it's not a series!

I might be a little bit in love with cafepress. And perhaps myself.

Now please do me a favor and scroll down to read an awesomely funny post about home "improvement," local wildlife, and a major freak-out - in short, my life in general. And comment, for crying out loud! I live for the comments! I answer the comments! I start smiling like a looniebird when I read the comments! (Do birds smile? How does that work with their beaks?) Anyways. Go forth, read, and comment.

*warning: long post ahead*
We decided to remodel our bathroom. And by remodel, I mean new paint, new hardware, perhaps a new mirror. For this humble project, I have made 4 (four) trips to the hardware store to date BEFORE EVEN EVER GETTING STARTED. I was doing research. Behold:

paint chip research and subtle messages to help D. decide which color would be the easiest for him to like

We agreed on the paint color and I subsequently went to the hardware store to purchase the paint. I left the paint chip at home and was too lazy to go back, which made me spend 12 bucks on the wrong paint. This is okay though, since we decided to change our minds and use a lovely non-green color we already have in the garage. Which means that it's freeeeeee! And also, Behr paint and not sucky Lowe's paint.*

I also bought about 200 dollars worth of drop cloths, bathroom lamp shades, and other assorted painting-related and bathroom-fixture-related crap. It was exciting, even though I know that painting a bathroom is a stupid job that takes forever and is full of little corners and nitches and hard-to-reach-places-oops-nose-next-to-toilet-bowl kind of moments. But I had my eyes set on the pretty shiny new-seeming bathroom, so I was totally okay with it.
Today, I finally stopped putting doing the actual work off and got started. The plan was to:
1) take everything down
2) fill the various drill holes
3) re-texture the wall with texture-in-a-can so that all those patched patches wouldn't make the new shiny pretty bathroom look so, well, patchy
4) prime
5) paint
6) put new towel bars etc. up
7) rejoice

I did: 1). Then I noticed that where I had taped (and then removed) the paint chips, the paint had come off with the tape, and was now coming off the wall voluntarily in big pieces. The lets-get-this-over-with Sonja voted for painting over it, but the diligent, I-want-perfection Sonja was quiiiiite adamant about removing the paint. She is usually right, so we, ahem, I went to work:

note ickiness of paint in background
also note happy expectancy of perfect bathroom on naive little face *sigh*
also note that hair is getting longer, which totally works with my current goal of letting it grow out

If you have ever scraped paint off anything, you know what kind of a stupid-type work it is. I spent the next hour + scraping, removing chipped paint from facial cavities, massaging cramping arms and hands, eating exorbitant amounts of girl scout cookies, and trying not to curse. WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS BATHR... oh right. Never mind.
I finally got the one wall done and decided that this was quite enough. So... on to filling the holes!
The filly stuff was in the garage, so out I went.

Now let's back up for a second so I can share a discovery I made this week:

a reptile has moved into my garage. Let it be known that he is large and lives on the inside rafters of my garage door. I was thrilled to find him, because, seriously, how cool is that??? Who has a wild lizard living in their garage, catching dangerous spiders and stupid annoying crickets and disgusting waterbugs (or even, if need be, cockroaches)??? HUH? Sure, I realized that he might fall on me upon opening the door, but I figured I could be careful.

When I went to the garage today, it was dark. Hmm. And I had to reach in after opening the door, so I could turn on the light in there. Hmmmmm.** The opening of the door prooved uneventful. TLWLIMG was probably out hunting. The potential presence of wildlife such as this
huge moth - probably the size of my fist
started to freak me out a little. And to make matters worse, I couldn't find the stupid stuff I was looking for. When I did find it, it was under two power tools and a long extension cord. To get to it, I had to move this stack of three really big flowerpots. A licking sound made me shiver. There was WATER in the top POT! How the heck did that happen? Crap! Is there a leak in the roof? UGH, the roof looks scary.*** Significantly freaked out, I shivered again, then gritted my teeth and moved the power tools. Then I said to the box of fill-the-holes-in-the-wall stuff "I'm taking you inside! If you're alive, get out of the box now!" I carefully picked it up and took it to the door step. I told it "Last chance to leave!!!" and then went to - carefully lest we disturb TLWLIMG - close the garage door. Now I felt better. I took the box of goop inside, set it down on the bathroom floor, and rubbed my hands together in glee. I had done it! I was in the dark garage, I found what I needed, I only freaked out just a little bit, and I will probably stop twitching nervously soon! Success! Triumph!
Then I opened the box and something big and brown craweld out of it and INTO MY BATHROOM. I may have said a bad word, before running off to get ther RAID KILLS ROACHES POWERFULLY spray from under the kitchen sink. Only I had thought it'd be a good idea to store dangerous toxins like that in the garage. And there was SO no way I'd be going back there. So I grabbed the homemade ant spray that I am starting to believe the ants actually laugh about as a sort of running joke, that's how well it works. The evil roach - A ROACH IN MY HOUSE, OH THE EVIL AND THE SHIVERING AS I WRITE THIS - had crawled into a corner by the cabinet and was THANK HEAVENS AND ALL THAT IS HOLY still there when I returned. When I started spraying it, it started to run around frantically, and I may have yelled "NO, NO, NO!" at it a few times. I kept my finger on the trigger though, and I triumphed over the evil that was the roach that tried to invade my house and lay eggs and hatch baby roaches all over the place.

Must. Stop. Picturing. Tons. Of. Roaches. INSIDE. HOUSE.

Now I am waiting for D. to get home (night class), so he can remove the dead evil roach and I can perhaps brush my teeth and go potty and go to bed already.

I have to say (for the record) that I can deal with lots of creepy crawliness pretty well. I can remove a cricket from the classroom with 16 6-year-olds watching - I turn into macho teacher. I can remove a spider or a moth from a room full of people who are sort of uncomfortable around them - I turn into macho friend. But when I'm home alone and there is a ROACH, A COCKROACH, A CUCARACHA inside my house and inside the room where I get naked and vulnerable, I JUST HAVE TO FREAK OUT A LITTLE.

Especially after I told that thing to get out of the box when there was still plenty of time.

Now please excuse me while I go faint.

*Lowe's paint is not "sucky" per se, but Behr paint must be better because they sell it at the REAL hardware store (ie Home Depot) and because it's more expensive and because I said so.
** No lizards will fall on my head in this post. Sorry to disappoint. If it ever does happen, I promise to write a raw, emotional report on it right here, so you can laugh your head off. I'm friendly and starved for attention that way.
*** The garage roof really does not look scary. But I really thought it did.

I'm going through the 4 boxes of photos and memorabilia I've amassed over the last few years. I'm wildly determined to put together albums and scrapbooks, thereby ridding myself of the boxes and making the pictures and memories available for easy access.

These are some pictures I looked at today:
1) High school graduation in 1999 - I can't remember some of these people's names. What does that mean? I'm guessing they just weren't that important to me.
2) Me and my boyfriend at the graduation dance.
3) wedding dress
4) wedding shoes

This was the exact order the pictures were in. And I'd like to point out that I did NOT marry the boyfriend in the picture (better for all concerned, I'm sure). My life is insane and crazy. Just the way I like it...

Thanks for all of your input. The white shoes are a splurge, but hey, What.Ever. Now all I have to do is
1) research the school district and prepare goooooood, insightful questions to ask them
2) update my resume with my new job and all the good stuff I've been doing
3) watch what I eat for good skin
4) buy a white purse to match those shoes (vote: Target or Coach -- just kidding)
5) get directions
6) get a sleek folder for the resume and letters of recommendation
7) get some sleep

... to help me decide what to wear.

Next Wednesday, I'm going to a job fair. It's not my first, but the first one I actually care about, so this is important. I have the bestest skirt suit ever, courtesy of Europe and my parents and Christmas. It is tricky, however, to find shoes and a top that will look great when worn with it simultaneously. Today, I went to Ann Taylor and bought shoes that cost me three days worth of my meager salary. So I need two questions answered:
1) Which combo would you wear to a job fair?
2) Would you (if your answer to #1 excludes the expensive white shoes) keep the white shoes or return them? I can't tell, because though I pretty much hated them when I paid for them, I love them ever since I saw them with the pinstripe pants.

See the contestants here, then cast your vote in the comments section here or on flickr.
I might just be eternally grateful.

PTA moms give me the heebie jeebies. Of course, not all of them are idiots, but the ones who are really stand out.

1. I rush in to copy something for my class, when there are about 4 moms getting ready to make copies and yapping. I politely ask if I could cut in so that I can get back to my kids (without pointing out the sign over the copier that says that PTAers are to let teachers cut in so they can get their copies done in what little time they have). The mom tells me that as soon as it finishes her copies that are in progress, I can go ahead. Very nice! Then, when she's done and I go to the machine (thanking her again), another mom says "Why do you always let people ahead?," her intonation making it clear that that's a baaaaad thing. Bad girls finish first! Being nice isn't something valuable! Stupid of you to be kind! Bah bah!
Not really a huge deal, but still enough to make me cringe every time I see her. That's the kind of attitude that makes community and friendship impossible to attain. And she's in an organization that is supposed to help teachers and children? Ha!

2. I walk into the work room to cut some paper. Two moms (different moms - different school, too!) are copying and yapping. I greet them, and one of them answers: "Oh! Are you a student or a teacher?" Yahhh, the school goes up to 5th grade. Do I look like I'm eleven??? Then she tries to make it look like a compliment by saying: "You look so young!" Which makes it even worse.

3. In other school news: I "pimped" my classroom:

I put up the ABC, made the agenda and the spelling sign and put up the graph so we can sort our spelling words according to patterns. I feel like I've moved in...

or
Why you should wear shoes in the kitchen
or
The lie of "shatterproof glass" - exposed!
or
Why my hands are covered in band-aids*
or
So, what did you do tonight?
or
bleep!


*They're really not. I'm exaggerating for effect.

beach day - sun sneezes, cold water, wet pants legs, swinging as high as the swings will go

There are about five posts I didn't get to write this past week, because D. needed the computer, because I was pretty busy, and because I had to watch Elizabethtown approximately once a day, and perhaps twice on the weekend.

On Tuesday, I would have written about J.Crew. J.Crew is my ex-favorite store, and on Tuesday, I got their catalog. As I flipped through the pages and saw how awkward and uncomfortable the models looked in their overpriced clothes, I hatched a plan. I wanted to post those pictures and write snarky captions for them. This post, it was going to be so good. Unfortunately, J.Crew doesn't have the same pictures on their website, so I resorted to scribbling my catty remarks in sharpie on the catalog pictures. I may or may not have forced D. to read through it. I might even have taken it to work to show one of the girls I work with. Maybe!!!
J.Crew and I are officially broken up, and that's all you ever need know. And that they need a new photographer and/or catalog picture chooser (whatever the technical term may be).

On Wednesday, I would have written about lent, and how I am giving up watching TV, though NOT watching DVDs and videos. This is largely due to the recent daytime TV pigout that's been happening. I also know that I won't be able to just turn the thaing off once it's on, so it'll stay off until Easter. You might or might not hear how I'm doing with that. So far, so good. But Tuesday night will be hard (Gilmore Girls), as will March 16th and every Monday night after that (Everwood). Emails with summaries will be appreciated.
Wednesday night, I went to rent Pride and Prejudice, which of course they were out of, so I ended up with Elizabethtown. NEVER EVER have I gotten my money's worth out of a rental like this time. I watched it Wednesday night and loved it, so I watched it again Thursday night. With nothing else to do and a husband away at a work thing, I watched it again Friday night. On Saturday, watching it again seemed like a good idea, and on Sunday, I watched it while folding some laundry. And then there was the time that I watched half of it again when I couldn't sleep... I love this movie! I had to return it today, so I ordered it on amazon (7.99, people... Borders was still selling it for 29.99 - HA!). And then I may have ordered "better together" two soundtracks for this movie (there are 3 CDs with music from that movie... sigh).

On Thursday, I may have written about my absolutely mindblowingly boring Spanish class. We have a test on Tuesday, so we did a review. We spent about 40 minutes copying "fill-in-the-blanks" she wrote on the board. My life, people, it was flashing before my eyes.

On Friday, I may have written about how totally ok it is for a twenty-something to go to sleep on the couch (watching a certain movie) before 9:30 pm. I've had a heck of a week trying to catch up on my life that just kept on keeping on while I was sick.

On Saturday, I might have written about how incredibly obnoxious the clerks at a certain large chain bookstore were. They were sarcastic in a scary way, pushy* about their stupid Borders Club**, and wore sunglasses indoors.

On Sunday, I may have posted sunflower pictures I took. I might still do that today.

* pushy = would't take no for an answer, in fact: wouldn't even acknowledge no as a legitimate word in the English language
** I'm not saying that this was or was not the major bookstore in which the clerks were jerks (haha, that rhymes).

Life has been eating me up alive, figuratively speaking. Updates are upcoming, and so are some exciting changes to brainxplosion. Stay tuned!