ingrid

One of the hardest things about living in the city is just getting rid of things properly.

A lot of things have changed drastically about my life in the last few years.  First of all, I have these kids and people in their misguided kindness want to give them cheap, plastic crap.  Plastic is truly an amazing invention, and there are wonderful uses for this miracle invention.  Unfortunately, those wonderful inventions usually do not come from the Dollar Store or have “MADE IN CHINA” written on the bottom of them.  This stuff flows into my life at an alarming rate, especially considering that I don’t buy any of it.  It is prizes at school, presents from kid friends, stuff strangers give my children in stores because they were particularly cute that day.  The end result is all the same though.  I trip over it, pull it out of Inez’s mouth, pick it up from the yard or the bathroom floor one too many times and it is banned to the Salvation Army box.  Once there, I must covertly smuggle it out of the house and trundle it into the trunk of the car.  It has to be in a box WITH a lid on it, not viewable by child eyes, as the minute they see it they wail, “But I LOOOOOOVE this!”.  Love my ass.  I just found it in the toilet.

Once in the box, in the trunk of the car, the job is still not done.  First of all, my husband is fighting me every step of the way because he doesn’t want stuff in the trunk.  He takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out….  Once it goes in, I really need to get to a donation site quickly to make sure that it doesn’t end up in the front foyer again, but this is hard considering my daily schedule.  I also have to get the box to the proper donation site without kids looking in or seeing a donation receiving person looking in.  ”But I loooooooved that!” will ensue if this rule is breached, and even worse, the person receiving the donation has been known to take out the PIECE of GOD DAMN PLASTIC and give it back to my child!

Second thing that is hard about city living is living without a farm truck.  I don’t have one.  I don’t know anyone who has one.  Every other week we have a 33 gallon container of yard debris that we can put out, but moving into a largely unkempt house on an unkempt lot, there has been a ton of weeding and pruning and yard work to execute.  There is bamboo, which is a plant from the devil.  You cut it, it grows, you cut it, it grows,  you…. anyway, I think you understand.  Throughout the last few years, I have created way more than 33 gallons every other week of yard debris.  I compost, (two different bins!), I cut it up, I mulch as much as I can, but still I have too much and no way to haul it away.  When it does start to overwhelm the yard, I can rent a pick up ($35 for 3 hours), and haul the stuff to a yard debris place (between $10 and $20 a load).  If I got a babysitter while doing this job, that is $11 an hour.  As you can imagine, it adds up and it wasn’t much fun in the first place.

The third thing that is hard to get rid of is just plain old wood waste.  It isn’t legal to fire up a big old bon fire like we used to do in Sheridan.  Around here you have to haul stuff away to a specific facility (see above).  Currently I am trying to get rid of our old chicken coop.  Rather than sawzall it up and hope that my Dad would haul it off when he comes to visit, I thought I would Craigslist it for free.  Poor choice.  Although I found a taker, and waited for her all day, she never showed up.  It turned out she didn’t have a pick up.  So the old coop sits in my front yard, waiting for a taker… hopefully with an F-10.

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I have had a bunch of people comment on how I am not writing.  Well, yes, remember how I said that I would not be writing?  All my creative powers (and non-existent time) is being poured into one effort— to finish classes for my continuing license renewal in order to stay employable.  And yet, I have still heard, “Wow.  I remember that you said you would not be writing, but you are really not writing… like at all!”.  It is true.  But now I am pleased to tell you that I am almost there.

I’m referring to the end of the madness… my classes are almost done.  I fully intend to send the last project off tomorrow, and then I can be a somewhat free woman again—look onward to a brighter tomorrow and all that.

Meanwhile, things still need to happen around here whether or not classes are finished.  Laundry still needs to be done.  That damn dishwasher still does not load nor unload itself once or twice a day.  I hate that thing.  Our refrigerator “fill yourself” option seems to be broken.  No matter how many times I check, it is still lacking the basic ingredients that every household needs.  And the kids.  They need all sorts of help doing things— (So helpless!  So needy!  I tell you, don’t have kids.  They can’t do anything for themselves these days.  Even the baby is useless, useless, useless!).  And get this— the worse thing is that we seem to be invaded by mice.  Just because I can’t get the food off the floor (those kids again!), they think it was left out for them.  Au Contraire raton!  That is for the shark to clean up, which I plug in faithfully each night, but he still seems to be in the same spot each morning as though he went nowhere.

Sigh.  A brighter tomorrow.  And better appliances, please.

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Hi friends,

It is so nice that you have been regularly reading my silly little posts here.  I do so appreciate that.  I thought I might let you know though that I am turning the screws (on myself).  It is time to focus in on finishing my classes in order to retain my teaching license.

Let me take a break for a second to bitch about something.  Let’s say that you are a marketing executive.  You have been one for many years, successfully even.  If you decide to stay home for a few years and take care of children, does the American Association of Bankers make you go and take 9 credits of graduate level classes just to make sure that your head is still in the game?  And if you are a plumber, does a guy in a grey jumper charge you $1000 and make you take a class on installing a wax seal under a toilet? Hmmm.  I didn’t think so.  I got the master’s degree that was required, for God’s sake!  I spent the money.  Now let me just live in peace!

Teachers Standards and Practices would like me to read a little Gilgamesh and Ramayana just in case I have become stupid since staying home with children.  And now, I have so much of that to do before Thanksgiving that it is consuming my life.  How much can one parent get down while caring for three young children?  Not much let me tell you.  Interestingly enough, I have a totally different relationship with time now that I am doing this.  I divide each day up into these tiny increments.  I try to put something in the microwave WHILE running to the bathroom, because God forbid that I waste time watching the microwave and THEN running to the bathroom.  I am totally wringing minutes out of each day in efforts to do what really feels impossible.  You know when you have a lump of nervousness and despair up in your throat because you are so stressed out?  I have that.

And yet, fear not!  I will triumph in the end!  I have one credit done and only 8 to go!  I won’t be posting much for a while though.  I need to work, I fear, even though writing here is more fun.  Thanks for the love.  I’ll be back soon.

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It’s freaking hot here.  So hot that you wish you could peel your skin right off and toss it by the door.  So hot that you would like to crawl in the tea bags sitting in the sun tea jar on the porch and pack your pores in camomile.  So hot that you wish you were a little green worm on the basil plants.  So hot that the dark hole under the apple tree looks like a welcome place to pop in.  So hot that you want to grab hold of one blade on the fan and just ride it around and around all day.  So hot.

I don’t tolerate the heat well.  I spend most of the day walking from room to room trying to gauge where the absolute worst and absolute best places are in the house.  I open windows in the morning and then try to close them at exactly the right moment to preserve optimal coolness.  I take showers.  I splash my face a lot.  I think about November.  I whine.

This evening the kids crashed out in the basement (the one comfortably cool place in the house), and I put Inez down to sleep in the portable crib in our room, which is considerably better than the sweat box that we call the kids’ room.  Inez fussed for a while and finally dropped off to sleep.  I thought maybe she was uncomfortable, but when I went to check on her, this is what I found:

Nice!  I felt like a big meanie putting the diaper back on when it is so freaking hot, but some things have got to be done.  Stay cool folks.

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Sorry I haven’t been much up to date on goings on around here.  The thing is that I am super crazy busy at Bible Camp….

I am doing the music portions of our church’s camp for 2-7 year olds.  There are 70 kids going crazy with art, music, story-telling, and games for 4 hours all this week….and it sort of feels like a life-time.  I did this last year, except I was a coordinator.  This year I am doing the same music-leading duties, but no organizational stuff, which truly I don’t do a great job of anyway.  I make confident decisions, but I have a hard time caring much about the woman who is stressed about the kids not washing their hands well enough, or the person who wants the chairs “RIGHT, EXACTLY, BACK WHERE THEY WERE”.  I pretend to care, but I don’t really.  I pretend like I don’t think those people are crazy, that I respect their input, but in reality, I am standing there thinking, “How long do I have to sensitively listen to this person before I can go about doing exactly what I want to?”.  I tell you, I am MEANT for leadership, eh?!

It is interesting leading music.  I am actually not “performing” for more than about 25 minutes at a time, but it is super exhausting.  I am up there with my guitar singing super loud, being hyper and trying to be animated and excited.  It is like teaching but super compressed.  I feel like I have just put on a Broadway show…. but in 25 minutes.

The other part of my duty is to pull out the kids who are falling apart (for whatever reason kids fall apart), and be nice to them and get them re-integrated to their group (except not screaming or pitching a fit).  Again, camp is for 2-7 year olds, so they fall apart for all sorts of reasons.  I tell you, I wonder about the sense of having 2 year olds.  They cry.  They whine.  They do things that 2 year olds do.  I find myself sort of disliking the whiner/criers and being so grateful that mine are not.  Of course, a great guy in the kitchen today noted that he would have been a whiner/crier, that he was a sort of nervous kid, so I really have got to stop thinking mean thoughts about the whiney/cry-ey set.  They grow up to be great people too.  Man, where is my patience?

I wish I could put some pictures up here, but as I am working with other peoples’ children, I just can’t.  Anyway, it is super fun (in a really strange way), and if I do not fall down dead of exhaustion by the end of the week, I will update stuff around here again.

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Well, not really.  In truth, I am a fairly hardy person.  I only get really depressed when I don’t get enough sleep and last night I went to bed at about 8:30pm, so I surely got enough sleep.

But ANYWAY, I am sort of down about my chickens.  I think the thing is that the chickens have represented pure joy for me thus far.  I have only felt enthusiastic and excited about them and suddenly all that good feeling has been tainted by the awful egg eaters.  And it isn’t that it is gross so much, because I have gotten over that.  It is that it is such a huge waste of time and energy to feed these birds if they aren’t even going to give me eggs.

On that note, things are sort of looking up.  I am collecting eggs more often, and I put three dumby eggs in the nest.  The thought is that if they try to peck them and find that nothing happens, maybe they will give up.  I am also trying to let Agnes off her nest once a day (she is the one brooding the now EIGHT eggs).  None have disappeared since Friday, although she did seem to break one at the end of last week.  I don’t think that was purposeful though as she was still sitting on it, not eating it and it looked crushed rather than pecked.  Maybe she is trying to tell me that she can only handle 8 eggs under her.  Let’s hope we make it another two weeks!

I read somewhere that when you remove a chicken from the flock, you kick it down in the pecking order.  Wow, that sure is true.  When I take Agnes out of her brooding box once a day, Attila, the dominant hen, lines  up to peck her.  I actually have to guard Agnes and make swiping motions with my foot to keep Attila away.  Broody chickens are weird…. sort of like women in labor I think.  I take Agnes out of the box and put her in front of the water trough, but she’ll just sit there all spaced out unless I physically dunk her beak in the water.  Then she drinks like she is dying of thirst.  I have to dunk her beak several times to get her to drink up.  Attila meanwhile, is waiting to show Agnes who is boss.  That dang chicken even goosed Agnes at the water bucket while I was holding her!  I felt badly about that one.

In short, my chickens are a big old pain in the butt right now.  I am ready for them to knock it off and go back to being wonderful darlings.  I guess first I need to cure them of bad habits.

Okay, and to address that, what is the deal with “internet information”?  Some sites say that there is no way to cure egg eating, others say that chickens can be taught not to by shutting them in a dark box for a day, others say you can only cull the chickens, another that you put salt in the drinking water and they will get the minerals they need and stop, still others say it has nothing to do with nutrition and is just a behavioral thing.  Where is the real info?  Most frustratingly, most sites do a long list of the things to do to avoid egg-eating, unhelpfully mentioning that the best course of action is to avoid it ever starting.  Well thanks for nothing!  I know that and now it has started, so what do I do?

I’m going to be hopeful though and hope that it stops as soon as it started.  But now I am worried about this weekend when I had intended to go out to visit my parents.  It looks like I will just be leaving the problem to further develop as I won’t be here to collect eggs three times a day and my chickens will be penned up bored with lots of time on their hands to peck at eggs.  Man!  Frustrating!

1 Comment | In: Current musings, General bitchin', chickens | | #

It is spirit week at Francis’ school and that means DRESS UP! Who is more excited about dress up: Francis or me? Definitely me around here, but once she learns that her mom can make her the WAY COOLEST kid at school, then maybe she will quit fighting me.  Why did she not want to lace leather straps all the way up her legs?  That would have been awesome!  Actual conversation on Super Hero day:

“Hey look, you can wrap these around your wrists for supersonic power bracelets!”
“Naaaw!”
Yeah, it will be so cool! Here, let me just pin those on for you!”
“Moooooommmmm!”

Another actual conversation on Nerd Day:
“Mom, what really is a nerd?”
“It’s a goofy person.”
“I’m an urn!” (Zephyr)
“But is it a stupid person or a smart person?”
“It is a smart person who is also goofy in some ways; kind of like your Dad”
“Look at me! I’m an urn!” (Zephyr)
“Oh.  What?” (totally confused).

Nerd Day? What is this? What I really wanted to say was, “This is our society’s way of exercising anti-intellectualism. The masses are afraid of you unless you are thoroughly unexceptional and unchallenging. If you are not, they will come up with some mean name to attempt to put you in your place.  They would like you to be average and unthreatening.  Luckily, the ones in charge in the end all all bitches and nerds, so all you have to do is wait it out babe!” But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “Hey, you need striped socks and that gnome hat!”.  I’ll fill her in when she is a little older.

Urn Day

Super Something

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Once upon a time we all lived on our little farms in our little villages, or maybe we had miserable little hovels in the middle of huge medieval cities.  Anyway, we lived somewhere in contact with “our people”, and I can’t help but imagine that the world might have been a little easier in some ways.  Raising children for example.

It is bizarre that the only job title that attempts to describe what I do AND that people seem to understand is “stay at home mom”.  It is bizarre because “staying at home” is little of what I actually do.  I wish sometimes that I could stay at home.  Staying at home would be a lot simpler than the crazy racing around that I do.  I often wish that I lived with three generations of family or had my sisters all next door (or one farm over as the case might be).  People who complain about not getting any freedom from their families don’t get a lot of sympathy from me.  I would like to move my parents or Brad’s parents right next door.  Freedom be damned…. I want help.

There is so much to be done and none of the schedules match.  Francis needs to be at school at 8:50am, Inez starts napping right around 9am.  Zephyr goes down for a nap at 1pm and would like to sleep until 3:30pm, but I need to wake him up at 2:45 to get Francis by 3pm.  There are chores, and diapers to be washed, food to be purchased and kids to put to bed.  My work day stretches to 9pm just to finish dishes, (as I have to jump up from the dinner table to put kids to bed).

Child number three really pushed me over the edge in many ways, but it also spurred some very healthy changes.  One change is that I actually take people up on what they offer.  When the neighbor says, “Well I can take Zephyr to the park if you want!” I actually let her.  If someone says, “I’ll walk Francis home from school whenever you need it”, I actually call and arrange that.  I try not to worry about seeming like I am taking advantage of others.  After all, they offered; I’m barely holding on here.  My job is to accept.  

I also try to accept people, rather than being all over-protective and paranoid.  No, I haven’t run criminal background checks on every mother who offers to walk my kid to school, but you know, my gut says it is okay.  My gut says that it is important—- essential to surviving right now.

Along with accepting though comes some complications.  Reciprocity makes life easier in many, many ways, but you have to store so much more in your brain, and my brain is fairly taxed from the demands of my normal life.  This week has been sort of hilarious.  Let me run it down for you:

• Tuesday I had to teach a class at Francis’ school, so I brought the kids to school where another mom watched them while I taught the class.  Bringing the kids involved packing a wagon about a mile high as I needed to bring 20 pounds of clay plus all the stuff that I fired last week.  I pulled the 70 pound wagon 6 blocks to school while carrying Inez on my back.  Ridiculous.
• Wednesday the neighbor walked Francis to school.  This gained me 20 minutes to prepare to drop Zephyr and Inez with the other neighbor for babysitting.  I spent my 4 hours free cleaning the house, washing diapers and doing the grocery shopping.  I picked up Zephyr and Inez at 1pm, then at 3pm, picked up Francis and brought the whole crew to church for religion class.  We were there until 4:45pm.  Luckily I had made dinner at 11am that day and wasn’t too stressed heading into the evening.
• I woke up at 5:30am to try to get some time to work on my teaching classes.  Ha!  I had the poor judgment to think that I could take a shower.  The kids woke up about 10 minutes after I started homework.  At t 8:00am, the neighbor dropped her son over here (she is substitute teaching today).  I walked everyone to school then returned, and tried to put Inez down for a nap.  Yet another neighbor’s 8 year old came over.  I am teaching him art lessons in trade for her putting my kids to bed on Gospel Choir nights.  I worked with him for an hour and a half.  15 minutes before he was to go, my sister came by and dropped her two boys off while she went to a doctor’s appointment.  My friend Angela stopped by to pick Zephyr up for a fun time.  I was to finish my art class, then take Inez plus my two nephews to Omsi to meet up with Zephyr and crew.  Now we are home for a quick breather (I have 5 minutes) and then I go pick up Francis and neighbor boy at school.  I have the neighbor until 4:15pm.
• Tomorrow morning the neighbor walks Francis to school again.  Oh thank God.  
• Next week I babysit for a family down the street in exchange for a future date.  I think this should go well.  My kids are pretty flexible so we are putting everyone down to bed at their house and then I will move mine back home.  All the mess is at her house!  Ha!  And she thinks I am doing her a favor!

I couldn’t do this without help.  I am so happy to have a community of people to work with.

Okay, five minutes are up!

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I was feeling sort of dull and like I hadn’t experienced anything new lately, so I thought I would convince someone to shove me in an MRI machine.

On Thursday I tripped down to the old “Cancer Center” (note to Providence: this is not a comforting sounding place to go for a doctor’s appointment) at Providence and hopped up on the gurney for an adventure into sound and space.  I think they played Pink Floyd in there, but I am not sure.

Actually, they didn’t.  And I had experienced an MRI before, but not in a year or so, so it was time to take a peek into the old brain to make sure everything was getting along well.

You see, about a year and a half ago, I started having these really alarming episodes.  I would suddenly feel a little sick to my stomach, then the light would look sort of weird and otherworldly, and then I would just get all blind in 1/3rd of each eye.  I could see okay from the outside of my eyes, but somewhere in the center would be a big blob of nothingness.  Blind.  Truly.  This would last for about 30 minutes and then disappear, leaving me confused and sort of tired.

The first time this happened, I was sort of scared.  I needed to drive and get Francis somewhere and yet I knew I could not drive being unable to see.  The second time it happened I sat right down and cried.  I thought, “I knew it!  I’m going to be blind by 40!  Why did I fantasize about being Helen Keller?  It’s just not that great!”.

The third and fourth time it happened I did something that I rarely do:  I got on the phone to my doctor and tried to find out what the hell was happening to me.  My doctor sent me to get an MRI “just to check things out”.  I don’t know about you, but I had no idea what I was getting into.  I knew that they put you in a tube and that the space is sort of tight, but as I don’t have a lot of claustrophobia issues, I thought I would be fine.  I sort of imagined that I might be able to take a nap while I was in there.

Little did I know that being strapped down to a table and plopped in a MRI is about the LOUDEST place you could ever hope to be.  That first MRI was awful.  I laid in that white plastic tunnel and just cried as I was blasted with robotic nonsense cacophony.  I felt like the noise just drilled into my brain.  I hated it.

This is how the MRI works: (from Alberta Health Services informational webpage)

MRI is a non-invasive procedure that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to construct pictures of the body. MRI imaging is based on the magnetic properties of atoms. A powerful magnet generates a magnetic field roughly 10,000 times stronger than the natural background magnetism from the earth. A very small percentage of hydrogen atoms within a human body will align with this field. When focused radio wave pulses are broadcast towards the aligned hydrogen atoms in tissues of interest, they will return a signal. The subtle differences in that signal from various body tissues enables MRI to differentiate organs, and potentially contrast benign and malignant tissue. Any imaging plane (or “slice”) can be projected, stored in a computer, or printed on film. 

I love how peaceful that description is.  It is a “powerful” sound, not a deafening one!  The machine makes the worst sounds I have ever heard.  It makes crazy “we are now melting your brain” noises so even if your eyes are shut up tight, you can’t help but imagine the machine malfunctioning and shooting laser rays into your skull.  And you can not escape.  And you can not move.  And you can not sing along to try to make the noise better, nor pray, nor think as the noise is roaring through your brain even with the earplugs and baffles.  So basically it sucks and makes you feel like you are dying even if you are perfectly healthy.  And you are stuck there for more than an hour.

So a year and a half ago, I did my “just in case” MRI and they found a special extra thing in my brain that they called a “lesion” but I like to think of as a brain spot that gives me special powers.  They injected me with this dye stuff during the MRI to see what would happen with the brain blood barrier and apparently, the dye tells them that the lesion is probably not something bad.  Bad lesions, versus special extra ones, take on blood.  Cancerous tumors and such suck up all sorts of blood, so please, everyone who loves me, do not get dramatic on me…. I’m not dying yet, or rather, I am, but just VERY, VERY SLOWLY.  After the special powers were found, I was sent to a neurologist and she wisely diagnosed me with occular migraines.  The special powers might not have anything to do with the migraines or they might be the markings expected to be found in the brains of those similarly afflicted with the ‘graines.  I was told to come back to have my “brain do-dad” (her real words!) checked out in 6 months.  I was also told that I was not to take birth control as a migrainey person was at a much higher risk for stroke when using hormonal birth control.  I then did what any reasonable person would do after being told to not take birth control pills:  I got pregnant.

When pregnant, you can not be MRI’ed, or should avoid it if possible.  I did.  I continued to avoid it for another 12 months, but then I had to face it.  I faced it last week.

There were some bumpy spots on the road to the big white tube.  I had an appointment scheduled for Monday morning bright and early.  When I got there and was all ready to jump up on the tray, they noticed that I had written down that I was breast feeding currently.  

“Oh, you do know what the contrast does to your breast milk, right?” they asked.  Wha?  Apparently the substance in the contrast dye passes into breast milk and scientists have little idea of what it might do to babies.  They do know that it kills people with kidney problems though.  Hmmmmm…..

The technician then asked me if I had 24 hours worth of breast milk built up because I wouldn’t be able to feed Inez for 24 hours.  WHA?  Nursing women will know that this is unbelievable!  That is a lot of breast milk!  Of course I didn’t have that much!  So I was rescheduled for the end of the week, which in my mind would still not be quite enough time for me to pump that much.  I feed Inez about 8 times a day, maybe 4 to 6 ounces at a time.  When I pump, I get about 8 ounces if I haven’t recently fed her.  When I have fed her, I am lucky to get 2 ounces.

So this was my week:  feed the baby, feed the family, feed myself, pump out milk.  Rinse and repeat.  After about 6 hours of this schedule, I felt exhausted.  I felt like Someone had hit me over the head, or maybe I had the flu, or maybe had run 15 miles but forgotten about it.  

Time for a picture:

This was awful.  If I never have to interact with a breast pump again, I am fine with that.  It is exhausting to have your body feed just one baby.  It is over the top to try to feed and create a future food supply at the same time.  I was baffled thinking that I could drink a whole Nalgene bottle full of water and hope to extract more than that in just a couple days.  How could I possibly put in enough liquid in order to take out that much?  But I did!

Anyway, I did the MRI on Thursday and it wasn’t half bad.  The sounds were horrible, but not as horrible.  Because they only needed to look where my special powers are, it was much, much shorter.  

Inez and I even lived through the 24 hours of no nursing (during which I had to continue to pump out my zombie breast milk and dump it down the drain to infect fishes in the Willamette River).

Science is a wonderful thing, but I am happy to not have to be part of the wonder this week.  I go to have the images read in a week or so.  I’ll let you know if anything is exciting, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

9 Comments | In: Current musings, General bitchin', How strange | | #

TSPC is Teachers’ Standards and Practices.  They make sure that we teachers are smart enough to jump hoops.  They also make sure we send the checks on time.

I have to renew my teaching license before my birthday next December.  In order to do this I either need to substitute half the year (NO THANK YOU!), work at least half time, (and pay HOW much in babysitting?), or take 9 credits of graduate level classes.  I need to keep my certification as I fully intend to return to teaching in the next 8 years; if you let your certification lapse, it is a REAL pain to get it back again.  With two kids at home and one in school for the not-so-convenient hours of 9am to 3pm, it seems I have little choice but to take the classes.  Normally I would not complain much about the classes.  I like to learn.  It would be fun to jump on the MAX and head downtown for classes in a (probably) air-conditioned classroom.  That would be a good use of my summer and probably more fun than washing diapers!  But guess what?  There are so many teachers who need to take these classes at the same time that the gods of continuing education are offering something called “distance education”.  Oh Lordy!  Almost all I have to choose from is internet courses!

And guess what?  Not only am I going to be stuck at the computer doing 8 credit hours, but they are friggin’ expensive.  I am taking Literature Based Writing and World Literature for the classroom and it will only add up to $1470.  Couldn’t I go on a cruise with that much money?  Hey— maybe I could take my classes ON the cruise?!  

I do get to take the only “live” class of the 9 credits I need.  It will actually be really cool— I am taking Drawing the Strengthen Literacy at the end of June and I am looking forward to it.  Two days of drawing class will be like a vacation for me.  I think I will get a pedicure on the way home from THAT class.  Would it be distracting if I wear a sunhat and bikini to class?

But that is expensive too.  Please tell me that other underpaid professions have to do stuff like this.  You do, right?  Other people have to take classes every 5 years for the privilege of making less than $40,000 a year, right?  Excuse me while I go write a nearly $2000 check to allow me to remain a teacher.

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