menagerie of days
I don't have anything incredibly profound to say, but I felt like it was time to update something around here. School is going well, overall. Of course there are always bumps along the way since it involves dealing with 6th grade humans and 7/8 grade aliens. I never ceases to amaze me how an 8th grade boy can completely turn his entire brain off. For instance, two of the 8th grade boys earned a detention on Monday for passing notes back and forth in class (last hour, no less) about how mean and evil and strict, etc. the teacher sitting in the room is. She was sitting in the room. And could hear them. Hello? (The inability of said 8th graders to actually whisper is also a bizarre phenomena). So they served their detention, part of which was scrubbing urinals. Yes. Gotta love it. This job required wearing gloves, which they then decided to place inside the backpack of one of the 7th grade boys. What on earth? Needless to say, they earned a second detention. I'm not sure exactly what else they expected to come out of that. Sigh. It keeps life interesting, if nothing else.
I managed to catch a cold last week, also. I hadn't had a cold in years...I've had two this year. The first was manageable. This one hit me like a truck. I started sneezing on a Friday morning, by Friday night I was pretty much down for the count. Of course, I exacerbated the situation by driving to Lake Charles and back (2 hours each way) to do stats for the basketball teams. So I spent the weekend in bed. Monday dawned nearly voiceless. But I struggled through. By Tuesday, I was considering going to the doctor...which I never do. The other 5-8 teacher looked at me Tuesday afternoon and told the secretary to send around an email asking for a substitute for Wednesday. haha! So I got to go home early that day. At any rate, I struggled through last week with almost no voice, and coughing almost continuously. The kids now think I enjoy torture. I'm finally on the mend, but the 80% of my voice that has returned apparently makes me sound like Miley Cyrus. That has caused heretofore unknown hilarity among the ranks of students. It is pretty funny.
Other than that, life has been ... well, life. I finally read Crime and Punishment, my first ever Russian novel. It's a great read. It's already in the queue for a second read. Then I countered the deep book with Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Everybody needs a little noir every now and then, after all. And as usual, just when it seems that life is simple and manageable, complication comes to overwhelm my heart. But, it's just another reminder of Who I must trust, Who I must approach with my heart, with my complications, hurts, and joys. The result of all that personal complication, though, is less thoughtful blog posts. haha! It is those complications, and how we find our ways through them that molds us into who He wants us to be, though. It seems so hard to see that, but I just choose to know that it is Truth no matter how I feel about it in the moment. Eventually, it trickles down to change my feelings. Perhaps one day I'll be sanctified enough to move through that circle in ever rarer cycles. Perhaps.
So there's my life right now. Feel free to comment. It's interactive. :-D