t-minus 36 hours

Classes start on Wednesday! Wild.

My co-teacher and I have been getting our room set up, hunting down desks (37, and yes, that's how big our classes are) and putting up posters. Today I was at school all day for a parent-student open house, where they could just drop in and meet teachers in their classrooms. Right now our rosters have about 110 kids in three classes, give or take. I met close to 30 students and/or parents today, which isn't a huge percentage of 110 but is still a lot of names and faces. Especially when I'm trying to remember their names phonetically and then match them to the names on my roster as soon as they leave the room.

A lot of parents told me how they really wanted their child to focus this year, how this was the year they were really going to ride them to do their homework, that kind of thing. One kid's mom talked about how much they really wanted him to go to college, and how much he reads at home, and how important this class was to them as they're trying to transition him out of self-contained classes, and this will be his only mainstream class this year. She told me that right now they (I took "they" to mean guidance counselors) were pushing him towards a community college, but that he really was smart and wanted to go to a real four-year school. They were both very talkative, and the kid started telling me about what books he'd read, "Where the Red Fern Grows," and "The Giver," and all the Harry Potter books except the last one but he's almost finished with it and can't wait to see the movie. So... my job just got a lot more real. My job now is to get him ready to go to college. Or as ready as we can get him in one year-long class. And we've got 109 other kids, and 109 more jobs to figure out. It's a little (read: a lot) overwhelming, but when I get stressed and exhausted and totally spent in the next few months, I'll need to remind myself that there are actual people with actual futures sitting in our classroom. And that their futures are now my job.

Pamela Ander-slam

This weekend I caught up with some Wake folks (Lauren Rico and Robin Dove!) and went to a roller derby. This is that thing that Drew Barrymore made that movie about recently. Girls in knee pads and roller skates slamming into each other around a track. I didn't see the movie, but the real deal was pretty ridiculous. It's not as rock 'em sock 'em as professional wrestling, or a NASCAR race, and the attending demographic skewed a little younger, hipper and more lesbian, but the event had a similar combination of spectacle and sport. Also, it had toothless men drinking PBR and hollering "Git 'er!!" at people going fast and hitting each other. And slightly scary, hulking women hollering the same thing (through a full set of teeth). Lots of tattoos, and chuck taylors, and white people.

Apparently part of the entertainment value is in the creative names the girls come up with for themselves. You can't see really read them here on the program, but I thought I'd share some of the best: Ella Titzgerald, Hands on Gretel, Puncher P. Hole, Shrimp Lo Mean (the only Asian), SexaQShunHer, Ovarian Cyster, and Amy Fister. Subtle they are not. Cringe-inducing? Absolutely. Half the fun? Yep.

Also part of the fun? The local ads included in the program.
In case you're wondering why this child appears to be wearing her underwear over her pants, that's because that's the outfit worn by a lot of the roller girls. Or, an alternate approach was to wear your underwear UNDER a short skirt, but then put something like "Get Back Wenches" on the butt of the underwear so you can flip your skirt up as you whiz past the opponents. Both looks are best accented with ripped fishnet tights or brightly striped leggings.

Basically, it was awesome and I want to go again.

Skink!

Updates.

The Cheerios I left out for the mice disappeared. I have some (as yet unobserved) new friends.

Time Warner Cable came, at long last, which means I can watch episodes of Mad Men without incessant buffering.

Consequently, when not planning for my classes, or going to training things, I have been watching episode after episode. After episode. It's not as bad as with Six Feet Under, or Battlestar Galactica, or Lost, because the website that hosts the Mad Men episodes only lets you watch 72 minutes of video at a time, and then forces you to wait 54 minutes before watching another 72 minutes. I have no idea how they arrived at those numbers, but as aggravating as it is to have the episode stop ten minutes from the end, it at least has forced me to get up and do things. For example, yesterday it got to be about 4:00 and after getting a hair cut and greeting the cable guy, I'd pretty much just made food and watched more Mad Men. So when my 72 minute limit kicked in, I decided to find a mountain to hike.

The actual mountains were farther away than I felt like driving at 4:00 in the afternoon, but Google Maps told me that Crowders Mountain was much closer, so I told Sack (my GPS) where to take me and she got me there in about 45 minutes. (It's about 25 miles west of Charlotte.) At 1,600-ish feet, the "mountain" itself not especially tall, but it's got its own state park and a bunch of hiking trails. I picked a trail at random and hiked maybe two miles and change. At the end of it (well, the middle really - I went one way then doubled back) was a steep, gravelly hill that led up to some high rocky bits, half of which were roped off with caution tape for some reason. I couldn't see beyond that. I had not planned terribly well for my little excusion, and so was lugging my purse over one shoulder (ridiculous, I know - I need one of those little, tiny backpacks that hikers always have) and was sweating to death and the water bottle that I SHOULD have lugged with me, I did not. But, in my experience, you rarely regret climbing to the top of something very tall, so I kept going up. I had to climb sideways in one direction, then sideways in another, and then suddenly, I looked up. And the rocks and the trees stopped and it all just dropped away. I didn't bring my camera, but I drew a picture:
As I was trying to get the best view I could without pitching off the cliff, I heard a scratchy, scuttling sound off to one side, and in my peripheral vision I saw something moving across the trunk of a pine tree. I backed gingerly off the rocks I'd clambered up on, and moved towards the tree. It was a skink! Ha! The only wild lizards I've seen are those little anoles in Florida; and that skink totally made my afternoon. He disappeared before I could draw his picture, but here's about what he looked like (thanks, Google!)
I was glad it was not a rattlesnake. There were warning signs instructing visitors that the local rattlesnake mothers would be giving birth to their live young in the near future, and to be careful of snakes around rocky crevices. Rattlesnakes! So cool! I mean, yeah, glad I didn't run into any, but seeing one from a distance would have been even more awesome than the skink. I miss my snake friends at the Nature Museum (like Connie here) that I got to play with.

Dear Time Warner Cable..

Dear Time Warner Cable,

I waited for your knock on the door. You were supposed to come between 5 and 7. For that two hours, every time I heard a car pull up outside my heart skipped a beat, and I hoped it was you. I cleaned up my living room, and even changed out of my pajamas. I had everything planned out in my head. I'd show you where the cable hookup was, then I'd bring out my old wireless router and watch over your shoulder as you connected it to the new modem you promised me. Then we'd watch together as my computer found all its little wi-fi bars, and we'd test out the streaming video with something perfect from Hulu.

But then it was 7:05. And then it was 7:15. I called, and was told you were going to be late. That you were "out laying down a line." Right. But you'd be here between 9:00 and 9:30. I made myself some dinner, and tried to enjoy my episode of Mad Men as it buffered, and buffered again, and then stopped buffering until I reloaded the entire page. If only you'd get here, I'd never watch buffering again! I went for a run at 8:15 and hurried back to be sure I didn't miss you. I took the fastest shower ever, so I'd be sure to be out when you arrived. At one point I heard the front door open, and I froze in my tracks to see if I heard a knock on my door. But instead I heard someone walking up the stairs, and Amy's door open and shut behind her.

You never came. A very disenchanted-sounding man called me to reschedule for tomorrow. The twenty-dollar credit to my account would have been nice if I thought you gave it to me because you wanted to. Because you wanted to do something nice. That twenty dollars doesn't make up for the hopes I had. What happens to a dream deferred, anyway?

I'll let you in tomorrow. And I'll let you install my cable. I'll haul out my router and hook it up. I'll be courteous, and offer you a drink if it takes too long. But I want you to know that I haven't forgiven you. I wasted a whole evening, waiting and watching, only to be let down. Twice. I have better things to do with my time than wait around for you. I've got a life to live, Time Warner Cable.

Don't try and call tonight. I won't answer.
Molly

Mrs. Tittlemouse?

I might have some friends living under my apartment.
I noticed this suspicious-looking and rather mouse-sized hole today on my back porch entrance. I'm not sure how a mouse chews through brick, but I suppose given the 70 years the building has been here, maybe it's possible through the combined efforts of multiple generations...?
Since it's an exterior wall, not my screen porch, and the hole appears to go underneath the apartment, not into the apartment, I have no plans to disrupt anyone's cozy home. We get little mice in the house in Delaware sometimes - they're kind of adorable and are really just little Beatrix Potter characters as far as I'm concerned. As long as they stay out of my kitchen and out of my food, they're welcome to live in my foundation. I left some Cheerios by the hole to see if something comes and takes them. Yes, that's the kind of thing you do when you're nine, but there's not much for wildlife around my apartment, and mysterious animal visitors haven't yet lost their appeal for me. Unless I'm camping. I don't leave out food for bears because they scare the crap out of me. But I'll take a mouse or two over a house centipede any day of the week.

Reason 37 that I love my apartment

It appears that the big shrub outside my screen porch is actually a gardenia bush.
In both Delaware and Chicago, gardenias are houseplants that you buy in small pots in the grocery store to give as Mothers' Day gifts, so it completely threw me when I noticed familiar-looking flowers on this giant bush. The landscapers recently were out pruning mindlessly with loud electric hedge-trimmers, so it's not exactly flowering profusely, but given as the bush is behind my porch and not near anybody else's apartment, I had no qualms about cutting one of the few flowers I did see.

Gardenias smell so incredible, and nobody's going to enjoy it out in the parking lot. Now my bathroom smells lovely. (See the charming bud vase? Formerly a flask from a hospital lab, courtesy of my mom.) I should probably clean the rust off the overflow drain - that looks kind of dingy.

In teaching-related news, I've been schlepping off to the Marriott every morning for the past week for more TFA training/Kool Aid drinking (I'm swimming in it these days)/planning for my class that I start teaching in THREE WEEKS! I stopped by my school yesterday to scrounge up a text book, and was able to talk to the woman there who does scheduling. She told me that for all three blocks I'm teaching, I'd be working with an '09 Corps Member who teaches Civics & Econ inclusion. (Inclusion is just the way they teach the Special Ed kids who aren't so severely disabled they need their own class. They're "included" in the normal class, and the whole class is then taught by a classroom teacher and a special ed teacher who work together.) I'm really excited about this because my co-teacher, Cliff, taught this class last year, and so has a much better sense than I do of what works and what doesn't. Plus, having a co-teacher means I won't have to struggle on my own to differentiate for kids at different levels while trying to teach the rest of the students. Plus, he's already done a lot of planning for our class, so it's just going to be a matter of getting together and getting on the same page. Plus, he's been at the school for a year so he knows who can help with what, who's in charge of what, and all that other stuff that you get to know after working at a school but can't possibly know when you're brand new.
Tonight I have a dinner scheduled with some TFA donors who live just down the road. TFA has scheduled all of us to go to a couple of these dinners as part of their development campaign. Basically, we get a free meal in return for putting a friendly face on the organization they give money to. Although I'm not the most naturally outgoing person ever, I really kind of enjoy getting to know strangers in smaller settings like this, so it should be fun. Plus there are a couple other corps members going too, so it's not just me and the donors. I was planning on walking, but it has suddenly started thunderstorming (the weather here goes from sunny to monsoon in about 20 seconds) so that might not work out. I did walk to Ben & Jerry's though (3 minutes away) and got a black raspberry frozen yogurt. I don't know what possessed me to get the 'healthy' option - real ice cream is way better. Next time it's back to something with plenty of fat in it.
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