My alarm clock has taken over my subconscious

When I got an alarm clock that can be set to play the radio or the first song of a CD to wake me up instead of a buzzing sound, I was excited. In college, I would put in CDs with great first songs and surprise myself with joy in the morning.

Well, now that I no longer download music to burn CDs with cool first songs*, I have it set to the radio, which betrays me often. Very often. Hence, I currently have Richard Marx stuck in my head and don't see it leaving anytime soon.

*My new computer is supposed to arrive today, on which I can once again download music and burn anything I want! Hooray!

If you can't break out the convict...

... break out the tissues.

This week, I've been having one-on-one meetings with my kids for this school year. After finding out whether they like Hannah Montana or 50 Cent, rollerskating or riding their bikes, reading or math, I have to cut the small talk and ask them about their mom/dad who is/are in jail.

Many of the stories I cannot tell due to confidentiality laws, similar to ones many of you have in the healthcare, legal, or educational fields, of course. But let me just tell you that these little people are breaking my heart one second and inspiring me the next. Today I met with a downright adorable first grader. You just wanted to pick her up and squeeze her (but I think there's a law against that, too). She told me stories about different things in her life, which was great... until she offered me a story of visiting her dad in jail. It was complete with, "They tell all the men when to stand up and when to sit down and they have to do that" and "Sometimes we have to wait for 50 hours to visit him." She's just so beautiful, so vulnerable, so loving... and so freaking young. It is really, really amazing to get to do what I am doing. Please pray for my kiddies - they didn't do anything wrong!

Hot diggitty Dell!

It has happened: I hit a wall of insanity last night that made me hit "confirm order" on my Best Buy cart, filled with a beautiful new laptop and an Office package.

In case you didn't know, I have had the same computer since day one of college - which I daresay is longer than I have known most of you, dear readers. My wonderful dinosaur has a 6GB hard drive. It has no burners of any type, not that it could support a substantial music/picture/movie library of any sort. Recently, it's been getting a little... hmm... "tired."

I'm not dissing it... the thing is obviously awesome to have lasted me so long. To think of the multitude of life events it's gone through with me - the English papers, the IM conversations, the job searches, pretty much the advent of my serious internet usage since 1999 was kind of the start of all that for most of us - it makes it kind of sad to retire this little dudette!

Still, I'm excited for my bright, shiny, new laptop. Who knows, maybe it will last me another 10 years!

O M G

I had totally forgotten that tonight is Back to Great TV Night! Season premieres of "The Office" AND "Grey's Anatomy." Good thing my VCR is in working order since they overlap!

Yes I really have a VCR. Yes I will be using it. Yes you still want to be my friend.

Got Support?

People just never cease to amaze me. You know those large advertising magnets people put on the sides of their car when they're out on business? Don't make fun of them; I have one now for when I go to the hood. Well, I haven't actually used it yet... so if you were thinking of making fun of them, do it now to my face so I can never use it in the future and thus avoid your sneers all around.

Ok, back to my point... Today I saw a big man driving a big pickup truck (F-250 or something of the sort), and a 2-foot magnetic sign was plastered on the back of it. What did it advertise? Bras. Over 500 sizes, to be exact (which, frankly, I find a little impossible to believe). The poor guy! I am wondering if his wife was just P.O.'ed at him and put it on the back without him knowing.

p.s. Yes I said "P.O.'ed." GOI.
p.p.s. I made up "GOI" but it means Get Over It so just do it.

Thank you, blog world

Remember when I blogged about how that lady who got severely burned was sent $100,000 by her blog fans? I had a similar experience this weekend, minus the scarring. Did I or did I not post just a few short days ago about needing shoe advice? Lo and behold, on Saturday morning, a shoe shopping companion extraordinaire came down from D.C. to assist me, answering the summons of my blog. It's like she could hear the pain of my feet. And we had success! Three pairs of good, stylin' work shoes.

We also had some wonderful meals outside at Richmond eateries, enjoyed a farmers market, and proved to the world once again (just for confirmation) that I suck at bowling but excel at pitcher imbibing.

Exquisite, I tell you.

A painful, painful error

You know those editing mistakes that Jay Leno does bits on every now and then? I forget what he calls them, but the segment is always hilarious. Anyway, on my way to work today, I passed an awesome blooper: a huge business sign for "Colon Cleaners." Talk about doing a double take! I don't know how there were not rubber-necking accidents all over that road. Underneath, the sign said, "Same Day Dry Cleaning." I am thinking it's supposed to be "Colony Cleaners"... otherwise, we need to work on some serious strip mall regulations and a little more subtlety in medical advertising.

Recommendations, s'il vous plait

I need new, comfortable, work-appropriate shoes. I would prefer something with a heel (prefer chunky over stilleto-ish) to work with boot-leg pants on days I'm not feeling booty (pun intended). I want store, brand, and price. Pronto. Do it, or I swear I'll keep considering Crocs.

I'm paranoid. Or am I?

Since my office is located in a school and schools are no longer the safe havens we once considered them, I have to ring a doorbell to be let in the front door. More often than not, the doorbell (attached with velcro - gotta love it), falls off the door, indicating that it is not properly hooked to the part that rings inside. Thus, I end up pushing the thing repeatedly to get let in, never knowing if it's ringing 0 times inside or 32450782 times inside.

I've decided it's the latter: that the velcro doorbell is just a ploy to get me to keep ringing it, and that when the office staff inside sees me on the verge of having an out-of-body experience, they finally stop laughing long enough to buzz me in.

Paranoid or shrewd? Delirious or realistic? In any case, thought you'd like the mental picture of how I professionally enter the building each day.

I used to think I could read...

... but I have no idea what a student just wrote on our chalkboard. I think it is a name. Normally, a child's name is one of the first things he/she learns to write. In the cases of many of my students, I would say their names are pretty much impossible to learn to spell... more of a 5th grade task than Pre-K, for sure. As my favorite George would say, "Hokie schmokes." I have no idea what T'odaidh spells. I'm fairly certain I'm not breaching any confidentiality rules by posting that name, since I'm fairly certain it's not spelling anything, but who knows.

It's great to have a job that I could pretty much continue undaunted if jailed (i.e. for breaching confidentiality, which I am of course trying not to do, which is in turn hindering my blogging). I think I might even get a raise if I blog from the inside. I'll try not to find out.

A Letter to my Love

Dear coffee,

I love you.

Sincerely,
theburgblogger

Miracle #48301 of my career at this school

Today someone stopped to let me cross over to school in the crosswalk. You have no idea how surreal this was. In general, I consider the chances of being a victim of a hit-and-run outside my school much higher than the chances of being peacefully waved across - with good reason. This is such a bad probability that I usually do not even bother stepping into the crosswalk to wait for such a possibility.

I do what I can: put on my allowed-in-school badge, hoist my file bag over my shoulder, and have my tell-tale cup of coffee in one hand. All of these signs should point to me not being a white girl lost in the hood who deserves a hit-and-run, but rather a nice lady coming in to help your kids in one form or another. Nope, no luck... until today. I have new faith in humanity and heightened pedestrian confidence! Now to get on to that "helping kids" thing.

Neat! Or decidedly not so.

The afore-mentioned crying that started school this week along with the Pre-Kers has progressed to screaming. Intense, "someone's attacking me," high-pitched screaming. Ah, it just stopped. At least it was less than one blog's worth!

And my ever present side-note, meaning "here is an item of interest for which I have no words": Yesterday I saw an advertisement for half-wigs. Um, am I missing something fashion-wise, or would you want to go ahead and go for the whole shebang in that department?

Mmm... the sweet, sweet smell of bindings

It's true: I am one of those geeks who enjoys the aroma of a well-stocked library. haha. Thus, I appreciate my office location across from the school's library (although it is not particularly well-stocked). What I do not appreciate is a to-remain-nameless teacher who tells her impressionable kids, "This is the li-berry" over and over. Sends shivers down my spine!

Just in case one day I sustain burns over 85% of my body...

Believe me when I say I am not making fun of this situation. Have you heard this? A popular blogger was burned in a plane crash in Arizona (a 3 person plane, not a commercial airliner), and fans of her blog who have never met her have donated over $100,000 for her and her husband's medical bills already. So now I am going to blog all the time in the hopes that you would do the same for me. I am also no longer flying on my private plane. Oh wait... I don't have one.

In [presumably] unrelated news, yesterday on my way home I passed a nun in full habit driving a CRV. Is that normal?

For the "awwwwwwwwwww" file

Every day when my brother-in-law gets home from work, my three-year-old niece tells him, "I missed you at work." Last night she did not want me to leave their house - I was over for dinner - and couldn't give me enough bye hugs and kisses. Finally she looked up at me with her beautiful big eyes and said, "I miss you at home." Aww. How much am I loving being 10 minutes away from them?!

The Crying Game

Remember when I signed up to work in a daycare center? Yeah me neither. While most of the students here have been in school for a week now, the 4 year old pre-K kids just started today. It is like we are situated at the Wailing Wall. I do not think there has been a moment of silence since I stepped into my office, no lie. The school also smells immensely different today. Hmm.

I'm having an existential crisis (again)

It is so difficult to dislike Sarah Palin since she looks so much like Tina Fey. But then she opens her mouth...

The only - and I do mean ONLY - thing I can find positive about the possibility of a McCain/Palin win is that, for the next 4 years, we would have absolutely awesome SNL skits.

To my Republican readership of 1, sorry. I'm hoping you're skipping reading my blog while you're at the beach. ;)

Oh, the joy of laughing at other people

At work, I have Yahoo as my homepage, since my work email is through Yahoo and I keep that open most of the time. Sometimes I am hooked by the headlines on Yahoo's front page. Thus, one of my new favorite pastimes: reading the comments section after Yahoo news articles. These people make me feel so smart! I highly recommend it. They also get incredibly mad at the writers for posting things that "waste their time." Um, you just wasted forever signing in to leave a comment. Don't read the article if you don't want to! But I digress; I'm starting to repeat myself (another favorite thing of these commenters to do).

I'm ready for a weekend. I am not ready for a hurricane.

Ooh, I forgot one!

Today is the release date of the new New Kids on the Block album! Blogstretch, I can't believe the new Spoon made your blog, but not this classic. Tsk tsk.

And my absolute favorite thing of the day was finding out the gender of B-squared. But that's not my news to tell to the blogworld. :)

p.s. Yes, I know that means the title should say I forgot two.
p.p.s. Yes, I know I could have just edited my last post to include them. But then I would only get credit for one post in Katie Lucas's eyes, and I miss being her go-to blogger.

These are a few of my favorite things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. No, wait... fast forward to today.

My favorite things:

- Discovering that Healthy Choice's new non-frozen meals are fantastic (at least the Sweet & Sour Chicken).
- Getting hugs from my girls from summer who came back to school today.
- Learning that, "Miss Lauren, I celebrate you" means that my coworker wants me to get the h* out of our office while he puts somebody in his/her place.

My least favorite thing:

- A mouse just ran 2 feet away from me along the wall. I screamed. For the past 15 minutes, I've been talking to myself and tapping my feet to try to get it to stay in hiding until I can brutally murder it with a painful trap. Ugh... I HATE mice! Maybe I should start singing Julie Andrews; that should keep it away.

Once again, books take the cake

I've gone back to my roots this weekend. What roots, you ask? Tequila shots and choreographed Cyclone dances? No; even further back than that. Back in the days before I was an English major, I (gasp) LOVED reading. I mean, I was a total bookworm. My major took a little bit of that from me, since I had so much to read that I could not read it all, much less read anything extra for fun. Even after graduation, it took a while for me to really read for fun.

Gradually, it has come back to me, but this weekend has been "back to me" like when I used to pack a kazillion books in my hot pink weekend suitcase out to my dad's house for two days, just in case I finished them all and ran out. It was fab. I finished one book ("Good Things" by Mia King...I'd give it a C), read another book ("The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Jeff(?) Haddon... A), and delved into a third ("The Human Stain" by Philip Roth... too early to tell). I am a VERY slow reader, so this has been a marathon for me!

Don't worry, I still found time to imbibe a little of the nectar and play an hour of Photo Hunt at Blake's bar. I am also back to TV tonight, although my current favorite show, "Intervention," is disappointing me tonight. Not only are they splitting the hour-long episode over two cases, but one is OCD, not drugs/alcohol. WTF? Not my cup of tea. Maybe they could tell I was getting addicted to the regular format and content. I crack myself up.

Yee haw, pass that dip!

I knew I was officially back in the South when I opened my sister's newspaper yesterday and there was a sticker on the top saying, "Do you dip?" Underneath it was a phone number to call to do a research study. Yeah let me go ahead and tell you what it will find: dipping is n-a-s-t-y.