Friday, August 17, 2007

Coming at You Live from...

Amy and Ben's kitchen. Baby-sitting on a Friday night. Wahoo! (I'm only joking. Between crazy game convention and a high school football game, watching Bryn is definety the best option.)

It's been a bit of a week for me. In fact, I think it's been one of the roughest starts to school that I've had. (This is the point where all my public school teaching friends groan and tell me to get over it). Now, I know that I see only a fraction of the students that my large, public district compatriots do, but my student load has doubled this year, I'm teaching twice the number of classes, have twice the number of mentees, and am sponsoring two independent study projects. Don't get me wrong, I love my job. I love every piece of the 5,000 things that make me feel like a train has run me over by 1:37. I just wasn't quite ready for this week. I thought I was, but I forgot about the emotional drain of teaching. I get so energized for 45 minutes at a time that I crash afterwards. Who knew teaching writing had so much in common with herion addiction? Strike that. A lot of writer's did.

Well, whatever the week was, it's over. Suellen and I have safely navigated our charge to slumberland. I've finished grading a stack of essays (yep, I am that jerky teacher who assigns homework on the first day), and I'm betting that once Amy and/or Ben returns, I'll be off to slumberland as well.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

The End of Summer

For me, summer officially ends tomorrow. We have our all-school picnic, and the kids come on Monday. Needless to say, I'm quite ready. While my lessons are planned, and everything is set on paper, I'm not mentally up to the task quite yet. Hopefully a yummy breakfast will kick-start me tomorrow, or something like that.

In other exciting news, this week has not been very exciting at all. I had meetings most of the week, and then Suellen and I drove to Bloomington for what is now know as the 'wine rack debacle.' So, about 3 weeks ago,my brother orders me a birthday present (bear in mind that my birthday is June 22). He doesn't tell me what it is, only that it's being shipped to his dorm. Then I get a call. It's too big to fit in his car, and could I please come pick it up. We couldn't coordinate schedules then, so he agreed to call me later. Well, he called later. Much later. As in Thursday afternoon on the day it had to be picked up by 4:00. So, Suellen and I move everything around to drive down there to find that my brother has bought me a 6 ft tall wine rack. (How he ever thought it would fit in his Geo Prism is beyond me). Now it is a very nice gift, but it's huge, and it won't hold all our bar ware/stem glasses. To cut a long story short, we drove 3 hours round trip to pick up a box that barely fit in our SUV, drive it back to Indy and take it directly to the Target and return it. Very thoughtful gift, made for a very long afternoon. But we found a replacement wine rack that fits and is functional, so it's not all bad.

That's about it. So much for summer.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Mice, Not Mickey...or...D-Con Danger

Since our house was built in what used to be a cornfield, it makes some sense that every summer we get a little visit from some furry friends. Now the first year, they left willingly. I moved the nest, and they didn't come back. Last year was more involved. I stumbled upon newborn (I mean so newly born they looked like worms) mice. I couldn't bring myself to move them (and there by sentence them to death by neglect), but luckily my dad was coming down later in the week. I made him move it to a very safe space somewhere far away where I'm sure they lived happy mouse-lives until the end of their days. Despite being a traumatic experience, they mice left after we moved the babies and we had no more signs.

Until this year that is. For several weeks we've seen them run through the lawn while mowing. I'll admit. I ignored them for a while hoping they'd go away, but they didn't. So I set out to search the vast internet for humane ways of getting mice to leave. (I did not want to face the idea of picking dead mice up out of our lawn.) To my surprise, I found a vast array of products from 'sonic blasters' to stuffed owls to Predator Pee (yes, folks that's a brand name). Intrigued at the idea of covering my problem areas with bobcat urine, I ordered Shake Away Critter Repellent. I arrived in a discreet brown box and I shook, and I waited, and I shook again, and I waited. And, you guessed it - shocker - mice really aren't all that afraid of pee when they are already comfy living in your yard.

So we set out to find the main nest and resort to more deadly methods. I had been dismantling our rotting woodpile for a few weeks, and Suellen's brother Stu is in town so he helped me moved the rest of it today. I was sure we'd find them there. No luck. So Stu and I (well pretty much just Stu) lifted and moved our "patio" (by patio, I really mean the 3x3 ft concrete square outside our back down since we had to spend a bunch of money on cat surgery - see below - and couldn't afford to put in a patio this summer). Guess what. Mouse central. And they have probably already burrowed under the slab for our house. So Stu and I traveled to the local hardware store to seek defensive measures.

I should note here that I am a very paranoid person. If there is something to worry about - tornados, avian flu, bankrupcy - I'll generally worry about it. This partly why I didn't want to use mice poison in the first place. I'm afraid that our cats will escape and it eat. Or our neighbors' dogs THAT ARE CONSTANTLY IN OUR YARD (no anger there) will eat it. Or the kids next door will eat it. Or the baby birds on our porch will eat it. Or I'll accidentally get it on my hand and eat it. And then we'll all die. But I can't take the mice anymore. And I know I won't be able to take it if they decide to try and come in for the winter. So, Stu did the manly duty of placing mouse bait in the proper places, and now I'm waiting for D-Con to politely persuade my furry friends to live elsewhere.

Until then, it's just wait and worry.