New School Year's Resolution

I don't generally make New Year's resolutions, because I find I never keep them. The reason for this, I figured out a few years back, is that I track my years from August to August (which is when school starts around these parts).

I've spent most of my life circling the school year. The elementary-junior high-high school track flowed seamlessly into college and then, with only a two year break, graduate school. Overlapping with grad school was my teaching certification program which launched immediately into my teaching career. For 32 of 39 years, my year has "begun" with the start of the school year.

The last several years have been a blur. Thank gah I knew what I was doing at work (and could do it blindfolded), because I certainly haven't felt very sharp. There's nothing like a near constant round of fertility treatments, pregnancy, breastfeeding/infant care, fertility treatments, pregnancy and breastfeeding/infant care to make a woman feel like she's drained of her very essence. I knew there was a light at the end of that tunnel, but there were days that it seemed very small and far away. I can't say I've walked out of the tunnel yet, but the opening is definitely closer and now looks human-sized.

I feel like I finally figured out to slip the pills under my tongue, rather than swallow them, when the insanity-ward nurse brings them 'round.

So now that I feel like I'm awake, alert and getting a grip on things, what do I go and do? Change teaching positions. I'd been teaching the same subject and grade for the past seven years. I didn't have to do any planning. I didn't have to do any preparation. I could walk out of school one day and back in the next and not have to think about it in between. I was at the top of my game with minimal effort.

Uh, wait a minute. What part of "I have two young children, a husband who takes more than twenty business trips a year, no family to help within a 90 mile radius, five aging pets, a daily hour-long commute (two hours when the Hubster's out of town and I add the daycare run), a car on its last legs that I can't afford to replace, a mammoth landscaping project underway, a house renovation project about to start and a shamefully low level of household management and organization going on" made me think I needed a change from my easy, predictable, mindless job?

Oh, yeah. The easy, predictable, mindless part.

So, I've left the middle school world behind and have returned to high school (11th grade, mostly). I've left the field of American history behind and have moved back into what is my original field, European history. It's exactly where I wanted to be when I originally decided to leave academia and teach high school. But it means starting from scratch. I haven't been this swamped at work in years.

I'm still making a New School Year's Resolution, though: This is going to be the year that I get my shit together.

For starters, I'm talking about my shamefully low level of household management and organization. Part of the problem arose when we had two kids before adding on two bedrooms for them (our plan when we bought the house before they were born), so we lost our guestroom with storage closet and study with storage closet. The main problem, though, is that there is no realistic way two people can work full time, raise children, maintain their relationship and effectively care for their house and property if they have any interests or hobbies other than those things alone. And the Hubster and I do have hobbies. Many, many time-wasting -consuming hobbies. They make us the people we are and keep us sane. (Well, okay... sane-ish.)

But I have a plan.

Step one: Hire a cleaning person. My friend, Frieda, quit her job as a social worker to return to school for a more lucrative career and has decided meanwhile to clean houses to make some side income. She's the amazing combination of trustworthy with mild OCD (no joke) which makes her perfect for this job. This won't actually free up any of my time -- Come on, like I regularly cleaned? Get real. -- but it will mean that basic household cleaning tasks will be taken care of. Before they become our own personal Augean Stables requiring an entire weekend to get under control.

Step two: Start the house renovation project. Even if we have to eat mac and cheese for a year, we will launch this project which has been in the planning stage since we bought our house five years ago. We need more room. Everything that once resided in the rooms the boys are using is currently in boxes. Two rooms worth stuff in boxes: boxes that are now in my bedroom, in the attic, in the basement, in the dining room... you get the picture. It's making me crazy not to be able to find anything or put anything away. (Well, okay... crazier.) In the classic "things are always darkest before dawn" scenario, this will raise the level of chaos before lowering it, which is one reason why we've hesitated. But the time has come.

There will be more steps in the "getting my shit together" project as it unfolds, no doubt, but so far I'm being cautiously optimistic that I can actually do it. Right?

Grammar Police

I do not pretend to have perfect grammar or even an unusually superior command of the English language. (After all, I am the History Goddess, not the English/Language Arts Goddess). I am guilty of grammatical misdeeds myself, to be certain. Two big ones that came up while I was writing my graduate thesis: I like to start sentences with "But" and "And" and I have a serious comma fetish. (Come on, what sentence couldn't use a few more commas?) Also, I've been know to end a sentence or a thousand with a preposition (pure laziness, I admit). So what follows may be a little hypocritical, but it's my Rant of the Week nonetheless.

I've seen this dozens of places in the past year and I just can't take it any longer. This has entered my top five grammatical pets peeves, rounding out the list that includes what I like to call the "errant apostrophe" (the various misuses of its/it's and your/you're), superfluous quotation marks*, people who use the noun bath as a verb**, and saying "all intensive purposes" instead of "all intents and purposes."

My newest hatin'? "Phased." As in, "I wasn't phased when my mother told me she was really an alien sent to Earth to learn human customs." It's fazed, people. You weren't not phased (carried out systematically), you were not fazed ("disturbed or disconcerted").***

F.A.Z.E.D.

Thank you.

Free Tip of the Day: People who write should, first and foremost, read. It's the single best way to improve your grammar and vocabulary. Read. A lot. Read anything, but, please, not just blogs. Read books and published things that have been edited.



*Quotation marks do not signify emphasis, people. Underline, bold and italics serve those purposes. There are a variety of correct uses, but none apply to being used on the word "sale" on an advertisement for your store. (However, they are correct when used on the word "sale" in this sentence and the previous one, as I am referring to the word itself. )
**The verb form is bathe.
***Disclaimer: The grammar in this sentence? Not sure.

Food for Thought

From Pundit Kitchen.

School's Out

It's the first day of summer break, the start of eleven weeks off from school. Since teachers sometimes get grief about having summers "off," I thought I'd make a list of all the things I have to accomplish in the next eleven weeks:

Medical Appointments:

• Doctor's appointment for me to get back on my usual prescriptions (asthma, allergies, etc) that I stop while pregnant/breastfeeding
• Goose's one year check-up
• Dentist appointment for me
• Dentist appointment for Monk (first time)
• Eye doctor for me: I need new glasses and contacts (last ones are pre-Monk in age)
  
• Find a new allergy doctor for me, since my last one moved his practice (to the beach!) just as I got pregnant with Monk
• Possibly take the kids to the allergy doctor, too, since I'm seeing some signs of allergies
  
• Vet appointments for all the critters at my house (five)
  

Other Appointments:

• Have house appraised as part of refinancing our mortgage
  
• Make arrangements for the satellite TV guy to come; we need some upgrades on equipment, including another DVR (one for the master bedroom; the living room one is filled with every Jack's Big Music Show episode, as well as a smattering of just about every other worthwhile children's TV shows)
• Find an exterminator. (Live in the woods and you get bugs, people. Lots and lots of bugs. Bugs of all kinds, some merely creepy but others that can do actual damage to your property.)
• Have excavators come to give estimates on clearing and leveling some of the woods next to the house, so we can build a shed/outbuilding of some kind and also a playset for the kids
  

Trips:

• No, I'm not going to BlogHer this year. Bah.
• I do have a conference in Washington, D.C. for history teachers, though. That should be fun in my "talk nerdy to me" way.
  
• We are taking a vacation this year, yay! Friends of ours (who we often do weekends away with) asked us to go to the beach with their family for a week.
  
• We're also planning on starting to do some camping again, including hosting a kids' campout for all our friends in our own woods.
  

Miscellaneous activities that I don't have time or energy for during the school year:

• Work out/run/bike. (Still need to lose 11 pregnancy pounds.)
  
• Gymnastics classes for Monk. He took some last fall which he loved, but even making it there once a week almost proved to much for me at the time, baby and all.
  
• Photography class
  
• Photoshop class or seminar, possibly
  
• Post-production work on about 3,000 photos I've taken since Christmas
  
• Yard work: vegetable garden, general landscaping, clearing brush, cutting grass, ugh...
  
• House cleaning: The whole house, basement to attic
  
• Organizing: The whole house, basement to attic
  
• Take sixty bagillion garbage bags and boxes of stuff to goodwill
• Visit or have lunch with friends I never get to see
  
• Shop for clothes; everything I own is either a) too big, b) too small, c) too out of fashion, or d) threadbare from not falling into category a, b or c and being overused. (I've hardly bought anything in the past four years other than maternity clothes)
  
• Car maintenance, repair & cleaning (the Cheerios alone in my car would make a man weep)
  
• Take just about everything to the dry cleaners, in stages so it doesn't bankrupt me
  
• Shop for school stuff I need for next year
  
• Plan lessons for next school year

In between all this, I will spend a lot of time with my kids. They still go to daycare two days a week so that I can accomplish all that stuff, but also for socialization and swimming lessons.

Teachers don't get vacation days to take throughout the school year. Other than summer, we can't take days off during the week (other than sick days and three personal days for the whole year that we have to save for funerals or other emergencies). That means everything else that people in the private sector easily take a few hours or a half day to accomplish, we save up to do in the summer. I'm already booked nearly solid between tomorrow (first doctor's appointment) and the first day of school in mid-August.

Swine Flu, in historical context

We now interrupt my scheduled post to bring you this little history lesson, because, hell, it's been too damn long since I've done that, hasn't it?

Swine Flu.* To freak out or not to freak out, that is the question. Mashable reports that there are 10,000 tweets an hour with the #swineflu hashtag. Let's cut through the crap. (Let's also remember that I'm a History Goddess, not a Science one. But I'll do my best.)

Why are some people scared and others dismissive of Swine Flu? No one seems certain whether it's a health threat worth the hype. Pandemic? Maybe. Probably. But remember, the term pandemic refers only to the spread of the disease, not to the deadliness.

To my understanding, the main issues are 1) that no one is immune to Swine Flu (no one has been vaccinated and no one has acquired immunity) and 2) it can be spread from person to person. The New York Times reports:

In the United States, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the outbreak had caused such concern because officials had never seen this particular strain of the flu passing among humans.

“There is no background immunity in the population, and it is spreading from human to human — all of which has the potential for a pandemic,” Dr. Fauci said.

In the regular old Flu that people catch every winter the virus evolves. It shifts antigens every year. (Hey, that much I remember from reading The Stand.) That's why we can't develop just one vaccine and be done with it. The Flu usually mutates in birds (often chickens) and spreads to humans, who then spread it to each other. It's transmissible between animals and people and is transmissible from person to person. The Avian Flu that was so feared a few years ago mutated in birds and spread to humans, but could not be spread from human to human. Deadly, yes. But as a pandemic? A bust.

According to the CDC, the FDA, and Wikipedia (who, frankly, don't really agree with each other on a lot of things), in the United States each season nearly 150 million people get vaccinated against the regular ol' Flu. The vaccine has a 57-77% efficacy rate, depending on age, health, the particular strain or strains that emerge that season (whether the vaccine accurately targets it) and the fact that it takes about two weeks for the vaccine to take effect, so it is possible to get vaccinated and still catch the Flu during that period. Each season anywhere from 5 - 20% of the population contract the flu; more than 200,000 people are hospitalized for complications from the flu and 36,000 die.

Historically, the pandemics that made the history books are the ones that were the deadliest. Possibly the most famous pandemic of all was the Black Plague in the mid 1300s. I was going to go into a big lesson about it, but instead I'll just say neither transmission nor treatment was understood at the time. Today, we treat it with antibiotics and no longer do we suffer its 30 - 50% death rate. (But it's still out there.)

The much-feared "Sweating Sickness" of late 15th/early 16th century England is believed to have possibly been a strain of the Flu. Starting as a fever and body aches, it moved to the lungs and often caused death in short course. If it hadn't struck in 1502 (in April to be exact), Henry VII's son Arthur would have been King of England, Arthur's good looking younger brother Harry would have been merely a lovable roguish player and the world would have been denied a visually-wonderful, but historically-bastardized, sexed-up Showtime series. Among other things.**

Of course, the "Spanish Flu" pandemic of 1918 is much discussed these days. It was also a variant of the H1N1 strain. No one really agrees as to how deadly it was, but it's believed it infected about 30% of the world's population. Depending on your source, probably less than 6% of those infected died; about 2% of the world, I think. God, I suck at math. And the seven thousand differing accounts of the deadliness of this disease don't help. What was significant about the disease was not only that it was widespread, but that it was particularly deadly. If you're a history buff at all, it's worth doing some local history research about the 1918 Flu. Since diseases don't spread evenly across the planet and do not wreak their devastation levelly, many communities were disproportionally ravaged by this illness and never recovered.

One last historical thought: Because they had no acquired or genetic immunity, Native Americans who contracted Old World diseases during Post-Columbian contact suffered a 90% fatality rate. Of course, they didn't have penicillin, either. Or vaccines. Or running water, for that matter.

Today? We're both lucky and cursed. We have antivirals. We have knowledge. (And as we know, "knowledge is power.") We have running water and skilled health care providers. But we also have the ability to circumnavigate the globe in 24 hours. Our technology is a mixed blessing. It's easier to spread diseases, but it can be easier to cure them, too.

What's the upshot of all this? Honestly, I don't know for sure. Historical experience isn't always the fortune cookie we'd like it to be. (Oh, wow... did I just say that?) This Flu, although it is spreading, doesn't seem to stand out as unusually deadly, now that we know what we're dealing with and are reacting appropriately. If irrationally.***

When the first case of H1N1 was finally, just today, announced in my state, the reaction was along the lines of "Well, if this disease has finally had the guts to cross state borders, then I guess we'd better do something about it here, too. En garde!" Like it's coming for us. With premeditated, evil intent. Mwah-ha-ha. But consider this: One reason the 1918 Flu was so deadly was because, after the initial outbreak in the spring, it returned in the fall after having mutated in response to increased human antibodies, seemingly with a vengeance and even more deadly. Mwah-ha-ha, indeed.


*Okay. Fine. H1N1. (Whatever, spin doctors.)
**Like the English Reformation being delayed by several decades, if not longer. Among other, other things.
***During the Black Death, Europeans killed cats who were mistakenly thought to be spreading the disease. But nothing like that would happen today, right?

History Class: It's not just for 8th graders anymore

Maybe because I spend all day discussing American History, I've been a little sensitive about the recent "Tea Party" protests in a slightly different way than the rest of Liberal America.* From what I can gather, the protests were organized in response to conservative disapproval of the current administration's attempts to help the sucktastic economy. Their main complaints were focused on the stimulus bill and "out of control government spending." I may not agree with their sentiments, but hey, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. And to paraphrase someone who paraphrased Voltaire, I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it. Where my main beef lies is with the protest co-opting the "Tea Party" title, due to the original event's connection with patriots, liberty and righteous protest, but with complete disregard for the veraciousness (or not) of the association.

"History Lesson! History Lesson!"

It's hard to believe the city started as a trading post... Oh, wait, that's a Jimmy Buffett song that has nothing to do with this.

But back to my point, I fail to see the connection between the current "Tea Party" protests and the historic Boston Tea Party from which the current movement inaccurately derives its name.

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 was a response to the Tea Act, a law passed by Parliament earlier that year. Granted, the Tea Act was a sort of colonial era bailout, meant to give support to the British East India Tea Company which was suffering financial problems. Some of these financial problems had surfaced when the colonies began boycotting British tea after Parliament passed Townshend Acts beginning in 1767. That series of Acts placed duties on a variety of goods imported into the colonies, tea among them. The Townshend Acts were met with protests and boycotts because Parliament was beginning to establish a pattern of levying taxes on the colonies strictly for the purpose of generating revenue and not merely for regulating trade. And all of these Acts and taxes were being passed without actual representation of the colonists in Parliament. (Parliament was operating under the theory that the colonies, if they did not have "actual representation," had "virtual representation" by virtue of being British subjects.)

Although most of the Townshend duties were eventually repealed in response to colonial protests, the tax on tea remained. However, the amount of the tax on tea was so insignificant that it was hardly worth mentioning. It was the fact that a tax existed at all that was the sticking point. British citizens could not be taxed without the consent of their representatives. Where was the colonies' representation? Furthermore, the Tea Act gave the British East India Tea Company a monopoly on the tea trade in colonies (bailout), but made British tea cheaper than smuggled alternatives that the colonists had previously relied on during their boycotts of British tea. However, many colonists refused to be manipulated and continued to boycott British tea**

The issue came to a head with the famous Boston Tea Party, when the city of Boston refused to allow three ships from the British East India Tea Company to unload their cargo of tea. The city tried to force the ships to return to Britain without paying the tea tax; the royal governor of Massachusetts refused to allow the ships to leave (it's believed he wanted to force the issue). On December 16, 1773 (on the eve of the deadline for the first ship to pay its tax), a group of vigilantes boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The act sent a message to Americans and British alike about how colonists felt about being told what to do by the British government without being given a voice of their own and the steps to which they were willing to go to resist.

Britain -- King, Parliament and citizens -- were not happy. And contrary to current beliefs, most of America was not supportive.

So let's recap. The colonists' main complaint: What do you think we are, stupid? We know there's still a tax on tea. Stop paying lip service to our protests and stop telling us what to do. It was the growing pains of a teenaged colonies.

But the arching overall theme of the colonial protests of the 1770's was that all of the Parliamentary Acts pressed on the colonies were created by a representative government that was not representative of the colonies. No colony had actual representation in Parliament. This was, as the saying goes, "taxation without representation."

The Yahoo News Article "Anti-Obama 'tea party' protests mark US tax day," reported:

One of the bigger demonstrations took place in Washington near the White House, where about 1,000 people waved placards including "Stop Big Government" and "Taxation is Piracy."

"My money is disappearing," said one protester, Marilyn Henretty 70, a retiree. "We are tired of being taxed without representation."

Excuse me... what?! Last time I checked, every U.S. citizen 18 and older who is not a convicted felon and has lived in the state they intend to vote in for at least 30 days has the Constitutionally protected right to vote.

Oh, wait. Do you mean that you don't feel you have representation because your guy lost? Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.

So for someone to say, "The $787 billion economic stimulus bill President Obama signed in February "was basically shoved down the throat of the American people," like protester T. J. Welsh said on Wednesday ("Nationwide Tea Party Protests Blast Spending," CNN.com), is not just their opinion, it's not factually true. We have this cool system that involves separation of powers as well as checks and balances (Don't worry, I'm not going to give an American Government lecture, too). What does all this mean? Short version: the majority of our elected representatives have to agree on something for it to happen.

Holy shit, people. Get your facts straight. And stop trying to gain respectability and legitimacy by piggybacking on an emotionally charged bit of American legend.

Thus endeth the lesson.


*For the record, I'm irritated by the protests in the same way the rest of Liberal America is, too.

**Hmmm. I wonder if the current "Tea Party" conservatives would continue their protest at financial expense to themselves. Principles over personal gain? Somehow, I hardly think so.

Snow Day, Va-cay

Okay, it was really a snow days vacation. Two glorious days off just when I needed them most. It ate up just about everything we had left of Spring Break, though, and now I'm looking at a nearly unbroken* chain of days stretching forward until Memorial Day. Oh, yeah. That's the end of MAY people.

But right now I can't be anything but grateful. We even had a 2-hour delay today. I'm more well rested and more together than I have been in a damn long time.

*Only by Good Friday.

Education: Change We Need

Ugh. We're currently in contract negotiations at work. For obvious reasons, that's all I'm going to say. Instead, I offer the following:

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

-- Sam Seaborn, The West Wing, "Six Meetings Before Breakfast," Season 1, Episode 18 (2000)

Have breast pump, will travel

The school year started for teachers today, so I'm back to work. The Duck is twelve weeks old tomorrow. All day people have asked me if it was hard to leave the kiddos behind. I don't think the answer they were expecting to hear was "I ran screaming from the house, ecstatic to be returning to the land of grown-ups" so I stuck with "Not too hard. Everyone was still asleep when I left this morning."* I love my kids, but I'm ready to talk about something other than Diego and his jaguar.

I'm also ready to feel productive in a way that doesn't include laundry. As contradictory as it sounds, I usually have more time to write while I'm working than when I'm off (probably because I eat lunch in front of my computer and additionally will be pumping at least twice while at work each day). I'm hoping to finish the birth story soon and get it up, as well as finish several other posts I've started but left in draft.

As glad as I am to be back in the working world, I wouldn't be truthful if I didn't say that I feel like I missed out on a summer, since so much of this one was spent inside, doing not much more than holding a baby. The thought that got me through was the mantra, "Next summer will be so much fun."

184 school days to go.

*A couple of weeks ago I counted the number of child-free hours I've had since May 29. The total was fifteen.

I touch the future. I... yadda yadda yadda*

I teach. I don't write much about work here, mainly because I don't want to get dooced. Yes, I admit that the real reason for avoiding discussions of my work is not because of some high moral imperative about not making fun of students and coworkers. Believe me, if it weren't for that, I'd have some real gems to share.

It just so happen to work out that my due date is two days before the last day of school this year. Virtually every single person, upon asking my due date, responds, "You planned that perfectly!" Although I've had it said to me dozens of times, I still don't have a response prepared. I usually just say nothing, or change the subject.

When I was pregnant with the Monkeyboy, his due date was mid-December, right before holiday break. A coworker remarked the familiar, "you planned that perfectly," to which I replied, "Well, when we started trying two years ago, we were aiming for May." She didn't say anything after that. I didn't mean to be curt; I just wanted to set the record straight.

I know that in terms of infertility and treatment, I've only experienced what can be considered Entry-Level Infertility Treatment (What Akeeyu calls Clomid and Fucking). We were lucky that Clomid worked for us. It's really the gateway drug of infertility meds, after all. Many people move on to bigger, scarier, more expensive and more powerful treatment. But just because on the spectrum of infertility treatment we were at the "easy" end, that doesn't mean it was easy. Not when judged in the overall fertility arena. (You know that arena, the one with events like "We got pregnant the first month trying" and "Our fourth child was an accident.")

I feel compelled to educate people about fertility and infertility (I've certainly developed a reputation as the go-to girl among friends and at work to women who have questions about getting pregnant). But, why is that? Am I really looking to "help" people and inform them, or am I looking for getting credit for my own struggles? It's probably a little of both.

So today, in my bag, I carried to school to loan to a friend and co-worker, Taking Charge of Your Fertility (book and software) and a few copies of my very own favorite BBT charts, because she is in her thirties, getting married this summer, and "wants to start right away." (Don't worry, she asked for my "help;" I'm not big on giving unsolicited advice, especially of the personal nature.) And I've told her I'll teach her "everything I know."

As a planner of things by nature, infertility has made me painfully aware that some things are out of our control. And I hate it. It's not the actual struggle to get pregnant that I hated and still resent, it's the uncertainty. If I would have been told, "it will take XX years and XX dollars and XX sometimes-painful tests and treatments to get pregnant," but there was a guaranteed baby at the end of it all, then I know that every woman suffering from infertility would say, "Where do I sign up?" But, we all know women who have sacrificed physically, financially and emotionally to treat their infertility and still are left with nothing but empty hands and a head full of unanswered questions. With years of hindsight, I'm able to realize that I'm very lucky to have been able to get pregnant at all. And planning a pregnancy is such a foreign concept to me that I just freeze at the mention of the word, dumbstruck.

So, I guess my response to the comment, "You planned that perfectly!" should be, "No, neither of my kids are planned. But they are very much wanted."

*With my apologies to the memory of Christa McAuliffe.

Together Again

My work friend C, who was also trying to concieve, has been successful! Last night around 6:45 p.m., I got a text message from her that said: I think I'm pregnant! Very faint line but def there! I was so excited I got chills.

We were pregnant together the first time, and we were both trying this summer, but we were both worried that one of us would be successful and one wouldn't. I personally thought it would be her, since she's ten years younger than me and only took three months to concieve her daughter. But then this cycle (which was to be her last try until next spring, because she can't afford to take time off during the school year), she thought her timing was off and she had missed her chance. She didn't even tell me she was going to test, but last night she was in Walmart and the tests just called out to her.

I'm praying that this goes well for both of us. I have such a hard time not worrying, especially in the beginning. I can't believe our good fortune that this baby is planned to coincide perfectly with the school year. I keep expecting something to take that away from us. I need to hear a heartbeat, but my first prenatal appointment isn't until the end of October. Once that happens, I'll worry until my amnio at 16 weeks. Then I'll worry until 24 weeks, when the baby is viable. Then I'll worry until delivery.

I asked the Hubster what he thought about renting or buying a doppler this time, and he said, "I have a better idea; why don't I just yell really loudly at your uterus every night?" Okay, I understand his feelings... but he didn't have to be so sarcastic about it.

Snow Days

In the past two weeks, we've had four days off from school and three two-hour delays due to weather. The end result of this is that we now have no scheduled days off between now and the end of the school year, which mercifully comes on May 31 this year.

That's fifteen straight weeks without a break of any sort.

Early Spring

Groundhog Day is my favorite holiday. I am firmly a Punxsutawney Phil fan. I stand by him. It's like the Tammy Wynette song, except in this case "my man" is a groundhog.

But I can't help but be discouraged by the past few days weather, including the fact that school was canceled Monday and Tuesday due to extreme cold and a wind-chill advisory. Still, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Things could turn around. I'm counting on it.