The Punchlines Write Themselves

Here's my favorite quote from the classroom this week.

My older kids were working on their assignment. They are not your pencil-and-paper type crew. More interactive. One of them announced, "I graduate tonight."

"Nuh uh!"

"YUH huh!"

"You're not graduating tonight."

"I'm not talking about HERE, you MORON! I'm talking about FROM ANGER MANAGEMENT!"

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You can't make these things up.

Is Pink Floyd Still Around?

Pardon me while I go a little bit ballistic. After I'm done, I plan to go out for coffee with a girl who is a little bit pregnant, a guy who almost won a horseshoe tournament, and a quadruple amputee who was close to releasing his hand grenade correctly. No, I'm not. Silly! I don't even drink coffee.

I don't know if I can take much more. I don't demand much from my custodian, Cus. A simple sweeping and wastebasket dumping daily is enough for me. The aura of godliness is not in the divine plan for my classroom. I have a place for everything, and like everything in its place. Even those stacks of files and odd papers piled here and there. Yes. I don't like people touching my cheese nor my classroom equipment. Therein lies the problem.

HEY! CUSTODIAN! LEAVE THOSE DESKS ALONE!

I wish Pink Floyd would write a song with that title. Or even that hook. It needs to become common knowledge. An unwritten workplace rule. Sometimes, in my daydreams, I confront Cus. "Who do you think you are, that substitute I had six years ago? It is MY classroom, and I decree the feng shui of my domain. Not you. How would you like it if I went all Fast Times at Ridgemont High Mr. Hand on you, and showed up at your house? But instead of teaching you a whole year's worth of history, I moved your couch back one-and-a-half tiles? Eighteen inches! You would be able to tell. And I can tell!"

If I don't take the time to move twenty-five desks back to the proper positions, I will not be able to walk across the back aisle of my classroom all day. My floor plan is carefully designed to allow maximum access around the perimeter, yet cram students into the middle like oversize sardines.

It's not like we leave furniture scattered willy-nilly like flotsam piled randomly by a hurricane surge. Desks are left in straight rows, lined up on the tile corners, with chairs pushed in at the end of each day. One can walk comfortably down the rows, even while pushing a broom if one so desires.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, nor re-interior-decorate the classroom. It's overkill.

End of that little bit of a tirade. Let's go out for a 44 oz. Diet Coke.

Gains And Losses During Snoozitude

I think I have been lapsing in and out of consciousness.

One minute I'm typing away, the next my head bobs backward with a crunchy neck sound, and I see gibberish on the monitor. I'm sure it's some wacky conspiracy designed to discredit my writing skills. It couldn't be my five hours of sleep each night.

At least I'm not like my mom. She reports that she sits down at her computer desk every night at ten, and fiddles about while watching the news. Then she finds herself face down on her forearms at 2:00 a.m. That's just weird. Everybody KNOWS that your head should bob backwards, not forwards. I think she must be some kind of alien. That would also explain her penchant for expired foods. And green bean sandwiches.

Besides, with her face down on her forearms like that, her open mouth is just asking for spiders to crawl in. You know about that, right? How people eat X number of spiders in their sleep every year? My students like to bring that up a lot. I make it a lot harder on those spiders. They have to be Tom Cruise Mission Impossible skilled to drop down and land in MY mouth.

Kids these days. They don't know the proper way to nod off to sleep in class. They need frills. Like textbook pillows. I really need to invent some saliva-proof textbook-pillow-cases to market alongside book covers. Wait! Kids don't use book covers any more. They just gouge the not-heaven out of those textbooks without a care in the world. Even though we write a damage report to try and make them pay. What we need is a good enforcer, like that Seinfeld library cop.

And more hours in a day. And night.

The Scenario Could Be Better

Snow, snow, everywhere...and not a flake to give Mrs. Hillbilly Mom another snow day.

Greedy, isn't she? An insatiable slacker, lounging about her basement lair with a vat of Diet Coke, scoffing at the working world. Bwah ha ha!

The sides of the road are dotted with chunky towers of hardened sleet-snow. They look like so many non-concentric mini-Stonehenge rocks. At least they did this morning. Then the temperature hit 50 for about an hour this afternoon, and on the way home, The Pony declared them now to be Easter Island shrunken heads.

We were sorely disappointed last night around 6:00, when an automated phone call came in from Newmentia. The Pony's hope sprang eternal, but when he picked up, it was only a message that a certain holler of Hillmomba would be running buses on the snow route. We got the same call tonight. Indeed, where the roads were not plowed, the coating is now like slippery cement. Nothing's crackin' that frozen pavement.

Tonight I am worried about the rain. The low-water bridge already shows evidence of rising water, what with the melt-off over the last two days. We'll see if a detour is in order Tuesday morning.

Winter just got here. Spring needs to take a back seat. And hold its water. And shut the not-heaven up.

Every Potty Has Its Pooper

Farmer H and the #1 son spent several hours removing a toilet today.

Actually, the toilet removal took less than five minutes. It was everything else that took hours. They have been replacing the diamond-patterned, blue-and-white linoleum floor of the boys' bathroom with a replica of a hockey arena. No ice, of course. But a shiny piece of wood with all the requisite markings and stripes. They did the half under the sink a couple weeks ago, and today was the toilet half's turn.

I suggested to Farmer H that he might as well just replace the toilet. Not that we're made of money, and tear out toilets every time we use one. We're not exactly the artist formerly known as Prince. And it's not that our sons' waste material is strong enough to plug a leak in the Hoover Dam. We've had that toilet for fifteen years. I think we can fancy up the place with a new one during the makeover.

The #1 son remained behind (heh, heh, I said behind in a post about toilets) while Farmer H took off to Lowe's for the replacement. I chose not to hang around with bated breath waiting on the arrival of the new pooper. So the incoming throne was installed without my supervision.

While I was cooking supper, Farmer H started a conversation with me from the living room. He loves to do that. It's like a hobby with him. He especially cherishes these talks when I am trying to hear the lying meteorologists, or when I have the exhaust fan running on the stove.

"How do you like the new toilet?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen it."

"I asked for the best toilet they had." (I envisioned Al Bundy and his Ferguson. The King of Toilets). "It's an old people's toilet. Kind of high."

"Great. The boys have an old people's toilet."

"I kind of like it. You will, too."

With that introduction, I had to go check it out. It's only an inch or two taller than our other toilets. No support bars on it. No lifty thingy that pushes you back to standing position.

I'm hoping there's not a walk-in tub in the boys' future.

The Flibbertigibbet

How do you snap a picture of my Juno?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you show her likeness in a photo?
A ferret-on-crack, a honey badger who don't care...an escaped manic lunatic with no gown?

The exonerated egg-stealer in repose:

Juno is contemplative. The lovefest has been delayed. "Why no huggie? I don't recall being bad. If it's about that shop towel that was next to me in the front yard, well, all I have to say is that thing was not put away like it should have been, and anything that I find is fair game. They're an acquired taste, those shop towels, and can't hold a candle to that damp paper towel I found after the new hockey-themed floor was laid in the boys' bathroom. A paper towel which was quite tasty, and not at all sturdy like one might think."

Of course, it took eight shots to garner two usable photos. And they are not what a normal person would call usable. Only a Juno-snapper would term these pictures a success. That's because when you try to snap Juno's picture, she is already three poses ahead when the shutter shuts.

Most of them turn out something like THIS. And that is only IF you can actually get a shot with her in the frame:

 

"I'm over HERE, Humanmommy! HERE! Right in front of you. Why you stand so far back, eh? I must touch my nose to your neck. I think I'll just jump down, here, and get closer to you. What? Why you yell at Juno? Stop? Sit? No? What does this mean? Can't you see I am wiggling all over? Come closer! We hug, no?"

Her constant companion, the shepherd/lab Ann, remains steadfast and calm. The bark of reason. Her muddy brown eyes are no match for Juno's bright clear photo-blurred soul-windows. Ann's an empathetic, loyal, woman's next-best friend, without much spark.

Ah...the furry kids. As different from each other as human kids. Yet we try not to show favoritism.

That's EGGSACTLY What I've Been Saying

The Pony is doing a science experiment that requires heating some eggs to a temperature of 150 degrees. That means that I put them in the oven for ten or fifteen minutes. Everybody knows you can't microwave an egg in its shell. Everybody except one of the #1 son's teachers, who put an egg in its shell in her microwave. The egg LOOKED just fine, according to #1. It still looked fine as the teacher started peeling off the shell. Then, when she was almost done, KAPLOOEY! The thing exploded all over the place. Let the record show that she was NOT a science teacher.

So...we are not using our very own personal chicken eggs for this project. Home-grown chicken eggs have a much thinner shell than commercial eggs. I did a trial run tonight. I put an egg in the oven at 150 for ten minutes. The Pony reported that while it felt slightly warm, he thought it could go for fifteen minutes for the real experiment. I told him to go get rid of the warm egg. He put on his Adidas slides and slid across the hard shell of the sleet/snow/frozen rain on the back porch. Down down down he flung that egg. I could not see it from where I was standing on the dry decking, but The Pony reported that the heating must have ruptured the yolk membrane, because the smashing explosion shot yellow goop in all directions across the snow.

While this chicken-fruit bomb was being detonated, Juno was around the kitchen-nook hump on the other side of the back porch by the laundry room, gobbling grease bread, garlic cheese breadsticks, and half a foot-long sub roll from all three dog dishes. You snooze, you lose at this canine cafe.

Farmer H came in from feeding the goats, and asked if we gave Ann, the black shepherd, an egg. "No. But The Pony threw one off the back porch just now." Farmer H declared that she must have picked it up, because she was carrying one in her mouth and rolling it across the snow in the front yard.

SCREEEEEEECH! That's the sound of a phonograph needle on an LP. There's no way Ann could have been carrying that Pony egg. It was in smithereens. And furthermore, Farmer H elaborated that it was a GREEN egg. Not storebought. He asked The Pony if he had dropped one out of the basket when collecting a few minutes earlier. Nope.

Now I could gloat. "See? It's NOT my dog eating your eggs. So there!"

"It is TOO your dog."

"Nope. Juno is my dog."

"Well...Ann is your dog, too. Tank is my dog."

"Stop blaming Juno for all your missing eggs. Just because she has a glossy coat. I told you all along that I see Ann with the eggs, and Juno follows her around and licks the empty shells."

Finally. My doggie has been vindicated. I thought it was obvious enough when Tank was found INSIDE the chicken house every evening, and only one egg was being collected. Farmer H swore that Tank the beagle was not big enough to get eggs out of the nesting boxes. Huh! These wacky chickens don't lay in the nesting boxes.

Farmer H decreed that The Pony should leave no stone unturned in gathering eggs in the future. Short of following the hens from sunup 'til sundown, I don't think this mission will be a success.