Back to Work

So vacation is over. I was talking to someone on the phone this morning, a librarian at another school in town, and she said that she was bored by the end of the week. WTF? To me, every day off (except when I was sick, of course) is practice for retirement. This woman is two years older than I am -- she was two years ahead of me in high school, as I recall -- but still has a younger child, only 13, and she says retirement isn't even on her radar yet. Gee. It's sure on mine.

I seem to have much more energy today, although that's still relative to me and not to a normal person, but during the lunch period, I didn't even turn on the software that lets me sit at my desk and monitor the kids on their computers. Instead, I was up and walking around the whole time. It felt very good. Although something has been triggering my allergy eyes since yesterday, so even though I have energy and am wide-awake, my eyes want to shut down and rest.

It's been a quiet day in library land today, and the kids have been very pleasant and polite all day. Next week, however, we go into state testing mode, which won't make the kids any less pleasant, because they know the drill by now, but which is a useless waste of time. The state tests are used primarily to evaluate the school or the school system. Doesn't it seem kind of unfair to the students to make them do that work? Shouldn't there be state inspectors or paperwork or something that makes that happen? I don't like the way the whole school has to stop dead so that we can test one-quarter of the kids, and I don't like the idea of teaching-for-the-test, as opposed to teaching for learning. Also, the security that surrounds this testing is absurd. The people who run this whole shebang are the ones who should be in charge of airport security.

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So I went to Walgreen's for a few things after school, and I picked up a box of crayons. I had to decide between a box of 16 and box of 24. I was amused to see unit pricing on the label; of course, the 24 crayon box is a better buy, although it costs a little more. Either way, Crayola crayons still smell the same as they did 50 years ago, when, if I was lucky, I might get a box of 64 crayons (with sharpener built into the back of the box) for Chanukah, maybe once every five years. Maybe. I mean, why buy a kid a new box of crayons if she still has a whole lot of them somewhere, probably in one of Uncle Ben's old cigar boxes and most of them broken, but still. It's not as if they don't work anymore, they're crayons.

My own kids, however, got a 64 crayon box if they whined at the supermarket. Alas, I did not have the fortitude, let alone the sales resistance, that Shirl had.

Anyway, I downloaded some coloring pages and I just finished one of a witch, whom I colored with green skin because I'm in the middle of reading Wicked. I don't know the last time I colored, but it dredged up a very old memory for me, maybe I was four or maybe less, of lying on the floor at my aunt's house in Connecticut and my cousin Joyce trying to teach me to color inside the lines. I couldn't see the point, and I was a little scared that Joyce was paying attention to me at all, although she was always nice to me; it was my sister she hated and was constantly trying to kill. (They were the same age, and Joyce's awful parents would always say things to her like "You're such a fat pig! Why aren't you a nice little lady like Cousin --- ?" at which point the adults would leave the room and Joyce would try to sit on my sister and squash and/or smother her.)

In other news, I ate olives today. I want to eat a salad, but I don't want to go buy all the salad ingredients if it turns out tomorrow I can't keep eating it; I just want to go buy a fast-food salad, but I haven't been able to find one that doesn't have stuff in it I already know I can't eat (because I couldn't eat it before.) I can pick out stuff like cucumbers, but it's hard to find nuts and things and avoid them. The hunt continues.

WATCHING RAYMOND :: ENTRY #1687