Cramming the Cat Back in the Bag

So, I got a Vice Principal gig. I will officially be starting my career in middle management in September. I now huddle in a ball on the floor, hyperventilating about how I will deal with the 10 years worth of crap and teaching supplies that I have in my classroom. I'm telling staff at the moment that I will be leaving, but not students. Frankly, I need to sit on this news until the second last week of June so that I don't listen to students who can talk about nothing else from now until then. I actually have a couple for whom this would be the major topic of conversation. And none of us need that. Especially not me. I almost cracked this morning. I was talking with one of my classes, mentioning that I would need to box up my stuff in June. They wanted to know why. Oops. Tap dancing around the truth, I went with "I want to be better organized in the fall than I was this year." An incredibly true statement, seeing as I spend lots of time now wondering what I did with things. My room is a black hole into which many things fall. It's the Bermuda Triangle of classrooms. They came back with the obvious question, "Is something changing in the fall?" Uh oh. I told them that yes, things would be changing, but I wasn't ready to talk about them yet. Which of course prompted the question, "Are you leaving us?" Eeeee. Before I could answer that, one of the other students asked, "Does this have anything to do with Mr. S?" They know he's home right now, not working. Thankfully, the answer to that was no. Before they all start thinking that J has a new job that will take us to a far-flung reach of the province from which I cannot commute. So I finally told my students that other than J will have to live with me and my news (and my new exhaustion and stress), it had nothing to do with him. And it doesn't. That did it for one girl in the class. "Well," she announced, "we know Mrs. S isn't pregnant!" Thank heavens for small mercies.

"That's a little high" OR Why I Shouldn't Start DIY Projects at 10:15 at Night

So J went to see Speed Racer on Friday night. It was awesome. He left at 7 and got home around midnight. While most would not normally say that it is awesome to see their spouse leave the house without them, it's totally wonderful where I live. J's not working means he's here. All. The. Time. With me. Wanting to be social with the one live person he's guaranteed to see in a day. I keep looking for ways for him to get out. I can't be the only source of entertainment to him. It will make me stir crazy too. So, J left here at 7 for dinner and a movie. I was going to work on assignments for my course. As time passes, I realize how much I hate homework. Not like my students hate homework. I see the point. I just don't want to do it. I have a husband who hangs on my every word and expects dinner at a normal hour. So he left, and I started surfing on the computer. It was around 9:45 that I realized that I hadn't eaten, and had yet to start an assignment. I ate a toasted bagel, thought about how it was like I was living alone again and eating weird things at weird times again, and decided that I should really have something productive to show J when he got home. Seeing as my mother cleared off my dining room table, I thought I'd hang our wedding picture and the needlepoint that my aunt did for us (one of those, "J and Sarah have been joined in holy matrimony needlepoints. It's nice.) that is in a matching frame. Last August, when I had the enlargement done, I was thinking. I was even thinking about where they'd hang, side by side. So when the picture came home, I took it and the needlepoint up to our bedroom and set them on the floor behind the rocker. I'm not good about actually hanging pictures. The first year in the house, I hung pictures on preexisting hangers, and to cover the odd, white rectangle on the living room wall. The previous owners probably had a cabinet that they'd painted around there. While I will look at a room and know what colour to paint it, and what the window dressings should look like, I never want to hang pictures. I am starting to think it's because I know where to put the pictures, I just suck at getting them on the wall. Case in point: The zebras in the bathroom. After I repainted the bathroom, I went to IKEA for artwork. I found exactly what I wanted: 3 large, matching zebra prints for equally huge shadowbox type frames. They're heavy and massive. Seeing as I knew where I wanted them, they went up fairly quickly: only 2 or 3 months after I bought them. The zebra print hanging was the last expletive laced afternoon I spent hanging pictures independently. 2 of them are side by side, and while they don't exactly line up, they're darn close. I tilt the inner corners in slightly so that they do look the same. Undaunted by this and the Alhambra picture fiasco when I hung frames side by side in the hall, I got my toolbox and a pencil. The needlepoint was first, and it went up well. The first picture is always the easy one. The nail went into the wall with some, but not a lot of resistance, and it was up in about 10 minutes. My mother and I had already decided exactly where we were going to hang them, yet we didn't follow through. She was involved in the Alhambra fiasco, so I think she was cutting losses. I measured and started to attach the second hanger to the wall. I think I found a stud without trying the second time. There was a lot of resistance, and I had to hammer quite forcefully to get the nail all the way in. This was my first mistake. When I hung the picture of J and myself next to the needlepoint, they were way off. Like I hadn't even measured. But I decided that the hole would be covered by the picture, so I should just move to the right a bit, and try again a bit lower. This was really my second mistake. Remember how I said that I had hammered the nail into the stud? Yeah...it wasn't coming out. I spent the next 35 minutes using the hammer and a pair of pliers to cajole the nail out of the wall. That could also be read "wiggle wildly, curse and generally bemoan the fact that I ever started this project in the first place". We did end Sarah: 1, Nail: 0. Crater in the wall: big. Not as big as when I ripped a molly bolt through the plaster trying to remove it from the wall. That required screen to fix. This is just going to be many thin layers of polyfila. So I went to the right, a little lower, and realized that I still hadn't cleared the stud. The nail is still not all the way in this time. I was thinking for the next owners of the house who may not want a picture there, seeing as they're high on the wall as well. But it's in, and the pictures are hung, and J's only comment was, "They look good, but was that all you did while I was out?" Apparantly, he takes lessons from my mother.

Things that go Bump in the Night

Some bullets about where me and my head are right now:
  • I have been offered a spot in the VP pool for the local public school board. Yay me. They told me 18 months until assignment in the interview. They told me 3 weeks on the phone. I will most likely have a new job in September. I am now scared out of my mind. Real school will chew me up and spit me out.
  • J is going stir crazy. I come home at night to a man who desperately wants to go out and talk. All I want to do is curl into a ball and hope I survive another day at work as I contemplate the fact that I need to clean out the classroom that I have inhabited for the past 10 years. It makes me want to cry.
  • My mother cleaned off my dining room table and moved everything to the shelves that she set up in the basement. It is very clean, and I didn't have to lift a finger. It's all good.
  • J and I are planning a road trip for our summer vacation. It should be fun. I come home every day and look for the mail, hoping for tourist packages from far off states like Pennsylvania. I don't get out much.
  • I keep having dreams that I'm pregnant. That can't be a good sign. Pregnant women who can talk about nothing else piss me off. Those 2 facts must be related.
  • J sat straight up in bed the other night because he lost an earplug (apparantly I snore. How sexy is that??). He thought he'd pushed it too far into his ear - apparantly there's a big black abyss into which it fell...inside his head. At 3:12 AM, I really didn't care. For him, this was a traumatic event that we needed to discuss.
  • I am running short on sleep at the moment. Contemplating how far into my husband's head an earplug can go didn't help matters.
  • I am 3 assignments, a weekend of classes and a seminar away from being a qualified principal. How surreal is that?
  • J and I are incapable of making grass grow in our backyard. So is our lawn guy. We're on seeding #3.
  • I love that I no longer do laundry and dishes. These are J's domain now. I did dishes with him last night for the first time in 3 weeks.
  • There are only 7 Fridays of school left, and so much to cover. My grade 9s have no idea what's coming at them next week.
  • I don't have any plans for this weekend, other than sleep late, buy hanging baskets for the deck, spend time cooking, and writing some of the above assignments. How great is that. The sun is shining, it's 1:43 in the afternoon, and there's not one thing I absolutely have to do except take J for a haircut. It's all good.