My Brains Iz Addled

There was no heat in the library today, for a change, and all the freshmen, it seemed, lost their ID cards over the long weekend. School was fun today!

I need to make a slide show of all my pictures from the trip, which I'll post for you to see, if you want. All I need is some time and a bit of a clear head, so there may be a wait.

I finally called someone to come and deal with the mice! He's coming Wednesday after school, and is going put out bait, he said, that will make the mice leave the house. I don't know what that is, and I'm not asking. I made it clear that I do not want dead mice in my house, which he says he will take care of. So that's one step taken care of. Now I have to get a handyman to fix up the closet upstairs a little bit, sheetrock the walls and put in a new closet rod. Did I mention that the chimney goes right up through that closet? Yes, it's a very well-designed house. The thing about the chimney though is that when we had a new furnace put in some years ago, it was re-vented so the exhaust (or whatever) goes out the side of the house, and not up the chimney. (It was more efficient that way, or blah blah blah.)

Speaking of the chimney, when we moved into our house 23 years ago next week, little R noticed the chimney on top and all the swaying trees, and said to me, "If something falls down the chimney, what happens to it?" I was thinking, you know, leaves, so I said "Oh, it falls down into the furnace and gets burned up." And her little eyes got huge and her chin started to quiver, and I thought "WTF?" and then realized and said "But not Santa! Oh no, not Santa! He doesn't fall down the chimney, he goes down by magic, so it's all different! Santa will be FINE!" So that was a crisis averted. (We must have had a chimney on the house we lived in before, but it was a big, two-family house, and I guess it was in a place where she never saw it.)

I digress. I ran many errands after school today, including a trip to Barnes and Noble to buy a double set of all those Twilight books, since they're in high demand in the library (but now I have to schlep them all in tomorrow morning), and my gift for the holiday kids' list -- I don't know, we choose requests from a school in a nearby city and get a kid what he or she wants, so I had to go to Toys R Us (the horror of it) and get a Bratz thing (yes, I was humiliated). For years, I used to buy an Easy Bake Oven and tell the teacher in charge of the program to give me whichever kid wanted an Easy Bake Oven, but no more of that, it seems. Kids don't want Easy Bake Ovens anymore? What is this world coming to?

Anyway, I am totally wiped out, and I don't wanna pick out my clothes for tomorrow or make my lunch or even set up the coffee. I do wanna take my hearing aids off and lay down my weary head. And sleep like a human, although I'm not so much expecting that one.


WATCHING KEITH OLBERMAN :: ENTRY #1905
READING: The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin