Aimee made us Chicken Tikki Masala tonight for dinner. On top of her cooking’s mouth-watering deliciousness, I happened to have also selected two fantastic bottles of wine for the occasion. Win, win. There were wins all over the place.
The only loss for the evening? The Wet Willy Zack gave me while we were posing for this picture.
Oh my sweet husband,
always doing me favors,
brought water to bed.
Sleepy and thirsty,
my mouth, Sahara Desert.
Zack solved the problem.
Then I fell asleep,
my trough of water in hand.
We slept for an hour.
Bed bound tidal wave.
Betrayed by my vial.
Wet. Wet and very cold.
Too sleepy to care.
Why change the sheets when you could
just sleep on a towel?
Never more glad for
discarded laundry piles.
Love, saturation.
Me: Do you know who the new Chief of Police in Dallas is?
Zack: No, I know they are supposed to get one, but I’m not sure who it is. I think it was this guy who was Kunkle’s right hand man.
Me: Is that the one that nobody wants?
Zack: I think so.
Me: Why? I thought Kunkle was a good Chief?
Zack: Crime rates have gone down under him, but he’s not very well liked.
Me: Oh. Okay. Aren’t you proud of me for knowing that Dallas is getting a new Chief of Police?
Zack: Yeah, actually, I really am. How did you know that?
Me: I don’t remember. I think I saw it on the news or something.
Zack: Do you know the name of Fort Worth’s Chief of Police?
Me: Phoenix?
Zack: Might as well be. (Note: Fort Worth got a new Police Chief recently; he was recruited from Phoenix.)
Me: What is his name, really?
Zack: Jeff Halstead.
Me: Like, you’re standing steady in a hall?
Zack: If you want to remember it that way, I guess.
Me: MIKE MONCRIEF.
Zack: Mayor of Fort Worth. Good job. Do you know Dallas’s?
Me: Ron… Howard.
Zack: Ron Kirk used to be the mayor of Dallas.
Me: Laura… Ingles.
Zack: Laura something-or-other used to be the Mayor of Dallas, yes, but she’s not anymore.
Me: I don’t know who it is now. The gay guy?
Zack: That narrows it down. I don’t know if he’s gay or not. I think his name is Tom Leppert.
Me: Tony… Horton. Tony… the Tiger.
Zack: Are you trying to name the Prime Minister of England?
Me: Well, the old one. He’s not in that office anymore, right?
Zack: Yes. And it’s Tony Blair. Not Tony the Tiger. The country’s motto is not, “We’re GRRRRRREAT BRITAIN.”
Possible sub-title for this post: Three Pictures and One Idiotic Moment
While this little girl was playing her accordion on stage, I commented to someone that it was cool to see a girl wail on a hotbox like that. I can’t even remember who I was talking to, but they whirled their head around, looked at me and said, I’m pretty sure you mean “squeeze box.” I was all, Oh yeah. I did mean that. Because accordions are much more talent-show-friendly than smoking weed in a car with all the windows rolled up. Even if you are really, really good at smoking weed inside of a car.
If you want to know the shortcut to my officemate’s heart, listen up. Get her a Build-A-Bear.
The Officemate (a.k.a The Secretary, mentioned here and here) is always decorating things. She takes campus beautification quite seriously, and truly enjoys making sure the school is always properly adorned for the next approaching holiday. During month leading up to St. Patrick’s Day, she had a bright green frog sitting in a small, stuffed-animal sized rocking chair beside her desk. Frogs are admittedly not an animal necessarily associated with St. Patty’s Day, but amid the sea of green clovers and pots of gold sprinkled about the office and the lounge, he fit in quite nicely. When the Easter decorations replaced the St. Patrick’s Day decorations, she moved a stuffed rabbit into the teeny rocking chair. Everyone who came into the office got such a kick out of the stuffed rabbit, The Officemate decided to keep the rabbit there. She adorned him with a pair of glasses she pulled out of the lost and found and a mini-coloring book. The Rabbit has been happily reading his little book in the corner for quite some time now.
Since The Rabbit’s been there, approximately 332,308 people have told The Officemate that she needs to go to Build-A-Bear. I guess the stuffed animal + reading glasses + book combination made people think to tell her that, “Hey, if you like to decorate stuffed animals, you should go to THIS PLACE.” The Officemate had never heard of Build-A-Bear before the rabbit moved into the office, so she was interested in it. Not so interested that she’d gone herself yet.
This is a long story to get to the point. Which, I’m like, more than halfway there.
Anyway, I decided that I should make The Officemate a Build-A-Bear as a parting gift. She’s a total gift giver; she comes to work with little things for me almost every Monday. They’re usually just sticky notes or highlighters or little things, but her love language is most certainly in the realm of gift giving. I wanted to give her something to show her how much I’ve appreciated her friendship during my time at the school.
I went to Build-A-Bear. I picked out the most adorable little Coconut bear, filled it, found some purple scrubs on the wall (fate!), threw them on, and I was out of there in a flash. Zack and Gabby were with me while I was building the bear, and they both were pretty amused at how similar the bear was to me. Zack was cracking up about the fact that their nurse’s scrubs happened to be purple; Gabby was entertained by how close the bear’s coloring was to my coloring. She’s a cream colored bear with brown eyes. I am a cream colored human with brown eyes. I told Gabby, “Oh, yes. The correlation there is no accident.”
So you can imagine how happy I was when The Officemate, upon pulling the bear out of the box, (just after declaring it the ‘best gift she’s ever received’) said, “AND IT’S WHITE, JUST LIKE YOU.” I love that the color palate wasn’t lost on her. That’s just one of the reasons that I’ll miss her when I’m gone.
There are just no words for this level of cuteness. I love being a Tia.
Zack and I went back to Fort Worth’s waterfall today. And this time I took my lighting equipment.
I wasn’t really trying to take the best pictures in the world, I was mostly trying to see what it was like to use lighting equipment in the outdoors during the daylight. And it was awesome. The flash and the umbrella and the sunlight all combine to create the bizarre effect that Zack is standing in front of a green screen. Or a back drop. It cracks me up.
The backdrop effect lessens when you include the feet. So here’s me, doing my best dolphin impression.
After we waded in the river for a while, Zack and I hung out on a park bench for a while. Then he yawned, and I caught it on camera. After that, I was just plain inspired.
Today has been decidedly less frantic than yesterday. I love Saturdays.
I think the feeling I like least in this world is when I am frantic about anything. I am so exhausted by the feeling of being constantly out of control, constantly freaking out about something, everything is wrong, everything needs to be fixed right now OH MY GOD EVERYTHING IS SO SO WRONG. Surely that’s normal, right? Surely nobody likes to feel frantic.
Whether it’s school or home or work related anxiety, feeling frantic totally knocks me out. This week at work was an insane week. We had our Pre-Kindergarten sign-ups this week, followed by a day when our principal was out of the office, followed by a day when our principal was in the office, and let me tell you. That last day when our principal was in the office wasn’t any less crazy than the day when our principal wasn’t. The last three days have each been so insane, so utterly frantic, each in their own unique ways, that I arrived home every day in a semi-catatonic state.
As soon as I walked into the house, I have sat on the couch and just stared at the wall for about an hour. During that hour, Zack has tried to get me to vent about what’s been happening that’s left me in such a coma of exhaustion, but I’ve been too beat down to even talk about it. I mean, it takes ENERGY to be able to compile sentences to explain to a loved one why you’re totally pooped. I haven’t even had the energy it takes to figure it out for myself, much what it would take to explain everything to my significant other.
So I hadn’t explained anything. Zack’s just been staring at me like I’m some weird mute-alien version of his wife and I’ve just been sitting here like a bump on a log, wishing I could verbalize what it is that has me so flustered that I can’t even talk. Then tonight we went out to dinner, and while we were sitting outside waiting for our table, it finally came to me. The problem is how damn frantic everyone is all the time at school. I need control and order and systems and organization. I have all of those things in my life, and I have them there for a reason. I need them. Hell, I went to therapy for control issues. Therapy! And so it makes perfect sense that a staff of 40 people running around a building for 8 hours a day like ants from a freshly-smashed mound, practically painting the walls with all of their frantic energy, would totally and utterly exhaust me.
We had a 35-minute wait for our table tonight. I think I spent 27 of those minutes talking my way through the world’s longest run-on sentence, explaining all of these feelings to Zack. Then my dear husband, ever concise with his verbiage, simply said, “You only have 9 work days left.”
That man knows how to comfort me.
Today I sent three kids home from the nurse’s office at 2:30 in the afternoon. It’s rare that I send kids home that late in the afternoon. Usually if they can survive all the way to 2:30, I ask them to go back to their classrooms and go home at dismissal. Not today, though. Because today, I was following emergency protocol for ingested poisons.
Because today, 3 of the 4th grade boys at my school drank themselves a round of Germ-X shots. That’s Germ-X, as in, hand sanitizer. Why would 3 boys all drink themselves a round of Germ-X shots? I’m glad you asked. They drank them on a dare. On a love dare, no less. Turns out, a certain persuasive 4th grade girl told these particular 3 boys that if they wanted to date her, they were going to have to prove their love. How, oh how could they prove their love? They begged to know. Persuasive Girl’s eye glinted to the corner of the room. Who ever will drink some Germ-X, she told them, obviously really does love me.
And so three 4th grade boys were escorted to my office by their teacher, who informed me with a straight face that these boys were about to be Love Sick in a way that they had never bargained for.
My wife loves Nascar.
I was going to pick apart her previous assertions to the contrary, but I don’t quite have the penchant for elaboration that she possesses, so I’ll plainly say it: Sarah loves Nascar.
Now that it’s out of the way, we can move on to more important things like the cost-benefit analysis of pharmaceutical consumption. If the movie The Princess Bride has taught us anything (the most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia) it’s that consistent and minute exposures to a substance builds up an immunity.
Thus, if you consistently take medicines, they will become less effective. Conversely, repeated exposures to pollen in the air will only result in my body’s increased defense toward this particular irritation. Sarah says she’s not impressed by it, but really, deep down I think she is. It worked for Wesley. It will work for me.
I could be wrong, but hey, the shortest way to this woman’s heart is with Nascar tickets. Turn Left Baby!
