No Verb

Whenever I feel intimidated by a certain task, I am absolutely unable to start said task. However, once I start, I generally have no problem completing the task, nor do I have a problem in doing it well. I was like that through nearly every paper or project I had to do in college and high school, yet I nearly always managed to finish on time and even get a good grade. I was like that for every week of lesson planning during student teaching. Unfortunately, I am confronted with the same issue right now. On Wednesday, I have to turn in various items related to the first week of school to the people at my new school who are training new teachers. Most of it is already done, far ahead of schedule, but what I have not started (except for creating a rather snazzy blank lesson plan form, if I do say so myself) are the full typed out lessons for all of my classes for the first week. This is a rather time-consuming project, and although I will have lots of work time at school this week, I will feel much better the sooner I get it done. Also, once I finish these lessons, I can start planning for future units, which will make my life much easier come wedding-time. Ack. I know what I need to do, and I know I can do it, but every time I sit down to work on it, I find other extremely pressing needs, the current one being to bake biscuits. We don’t necessarily need biscuits, but I have a quite intense desire to bake some RIGHT NOW.

You can say “I have a bone to pick with you,” but you can’t say “I have to pick a bone with you.”

Today was my last day taking care of Kaylee. My first day wasn’t that long ago, but I got pretty attached, darn it. I took her to the pool for an hour or so this afternoon, and she had a great time, but when it came time to shower after swimming, she threw the requisite tantrum: hanging onto me with her two-year-old-monkey-death-grip-naked-little-self, wailing and sobbing in the echoey public bathroom. What made me think I could shower her AFTER I got dressed, I have no idea. Basically I was soaked. After the apparently traumatizing experience, I wrapped her up in her little ladybug robe while I tried to mop myself off. She was still crying, so what did I do? Hold her? Yes, but first I took her picture. That is just the kind of thing that would have totally pissed me off when I was her age (or now), but I did it anyway.

So now tonight is my last night to stay awake and go to raves and be out of control before starting school. What am I doing? I just ate some Cookies and Cream ice cream; I think I’ll watch an episode of “News Radio” (that is just how much C loves me. He let me borrow “News Radio” and watch ONE EPISODE ONLY without him).

One thing that C and I will not be doing at our wedding is reading each other some beautiful, sentimental poem/song/aphorism, etc. Nor will anybody else be doing so. Do you want to know why? Number one: it is tender. Number two: what are we supposed to do the whole time? Gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes for a whole minute? I would either laugh about two seconds into it, then C would start laughing, and we would be uncontrollable; or I would gaze around the church and probably look inappropriately bored. It is kind of like being sung “Happy Birthday.” It is a good thing it is such a short song because after about three seconds, I get tired of smiling and reveling in my apparent bliss at being sung to.

Category of people: Probably librarians. They wear cute little glasses, and they’re helpful, and they like books.

Kind of iced tea: The kind from Wildflower Bread Company. It has strawberry of some sort in it, but it doesn’t taste waxy like the kind from Paradise Bakery.

Card game: Ziggity, otherwise known by Dante as Doobity. The cards are clear, it comes in a tin can, and you get to spell words while you play.

Item in/on my desk: The bag of Jolly Ranchers and the plastic box full of assorted pens are going to fight each other for first place.

That is all.

We have a new car, and if I do say so myself, it is pretty damn cute. It is a Scion Xa (no, not the milk truck looking thing, the cute little hatchback); it is gray. We found out after test driving one and then deciding to buy one last week that they are highly sought after and apparently not often found. So we got quite lucky to find one exactly as we wanted it, color and everything, and we only had to drive to Tucson to get it. Lori and Peter drove us down to Tucson on Saturday, and we drove it back in a horrendous rainstorm, and it did oh-so-well. You may call it by its Euro name: Le Scion: C’est genial. That’s right, we didn’t name it, we sloganed it. I just used a noun as a verb without permission from Noah Webster or the OED. Take that.

Madeline: “J., I just can’t sleep! I’ve already counted princesses, and I’ve already counted unicorns, and I’ve already thinked about good things. What else can I possibly do?”

Lori is back from France. Does it get much better? Harry Potter and my best friend all in one three day period? I think not.

C. says I’ve been stolen. Not true. I paid him so much attention when I could have been reading. And I did it joyfully and voluntarily. But never mind, because he has me back undisputedly. I finished the book tonight. I feel like little bits of my soul have been ripped out. Aside from that, the book was great. I pity the fool who don’t read Harry Potter.

It’s going to be as if I didn’t exist when the 7th book comes out. That lousy JK Rowling is stealing my wife before I’m even married. Even when J isn’t reading the new book, she’s thinking about it or talking about it.

So I’m only halfway through my Harry Potter induced trance with the new book, and it has been 43 hours since the book became available at midnight on Friday/Saturday. Shameful, you say? I know. When the fifth book came out, I read the whole thing within about 30 hours (and by read, I actually mean devoured because I had to know who dies in the end, which means that I had to read it again in order to get all of the details). And I have to work tomorrow. Yes, work. That pesky thing that will prevent me from reading. I must know who the half-blood prince is! This is how much of a nerd I am: MJ and I got to see each other for the first time in 2 weeks-ish, and we spent about 2 hours in her room in Flagstaff yesterday reading Harry Potter. That’s all you get for now. I’m wasting valuable reading time.

C: “I want you to do research tomorrow while I’m at work. You’re my little research assistant.”

J:”What? That’s degrading! Here’s what I’ll do: create my own rating system for cars. The rating system involves goldfish crackers. The more I like a car, the more goldfish crackers it gets.” (Note: this system has pros and cons. Pros: I get to eat the goldfish. Cons: Not convincing C that I’m a worthy and responsible car shopper. Also not less degrading than being his “little research assistant”)

C: rolls eyes

J: “I’ll tell you right now, the Volkswagen Golf gets the most goldfish crackers.”

C: “You want a Golf? We’ll get you your damn Golf.”

J: “Except I kind of wish it were called something better than ‘Golf’”

C: “What do you want? A princess-mobile?”

Can you believe the indignity I suffered tonight? Honestly.

1. Register: This will be fun. Crate and Barrel is one of the droolingest (I made that up!) stores ever, and I get to pick things there! Things that will go in the apartment where I will live with C!

2. Try to find out more about my job: I’m hoping to be able to find out at least what classes/books I will be teaching so I can start reading/planning. Oh man. Now that I typed that, I’m scared. I’m about to start a real job. But I guess I shouldn’t be scared. I did the exact same job in Germany, and I just didn’t get paid for it. All I’m adding now is something good. If you have any suggestions of ways I can look older than my students, it’s time to let me know!

3. Look for a new car. C and I had originally thought we would try to only own one car. It saves us money; the streets and freeways of Phoenix have one car fewer to clog them up. But alas, it won’t work, especially with my new job. We’d drive ourselves crazy. Officially out of the running: Mustangs, Crown Victorias, H2s, Mercury Cougars.

4. But Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on Saturday morning! Yippee yay yay! But them I’m apparently supposed to go look for cars AFTER that. C should have a hard time yanking my curled up body out of the front seat and the book out of my trembling hands. When the last book (you know, the one that had 700+ pages) came out, I read it in two days. Two days when I was working about 12 hours a day and sleeping about 0 hours a night.

5. Finish getting addresses together so we can prepare our invitations for the mail! I’m mostly done. C’s part is what still needs to be done, but I include it anyway because I may have to bug him about it. Yeah, just kidding.

What I am doing today:
Going to Kierland with Sabine. Take that, list. You won’t get any checkmarks today!

6 The number of days until the new Harry Potter book is released
21 The age that MJ turned today
96 Days until October 15 (i.e. Wedding Day, Our)
8 Days until Lori comes home from Paris
3 The number of hours that I slept last night
33 The number of minutes until Iwill fall asleep whether I’m in bed or not

C and I just returned from a delightfully delightful weekend in LA visiting Chad and Kristin and eating good food. We went to Amoeba Records, so C felt pretty much rapturous. We went to a wine shop called Du Vin and tasted (and bought) some inexpensive but yummy wines. We ate Indonesian food and Tapas and Indian food. I destroyed C in Twenty Questions on the way home (who knew it would take him about 50 questions to get The Oxford English Dictionary?). We invented Two Questions. It goes like this:
“Is it a concept?”
“No”
“Is it the Michelin Man?”
“No, it’s olives”

I’ve had several concerned phone calls and emails and one very nice note on my bed when I woke up this morning (from my Daddy) and just a generally encouraging attitude from everyone who knew about my stressful job decision-making status (including the very nice man whose daughter I take care of who gave me a high five and said, “you go girl!”), and so I want to say thanks and also tell you about the decision I made. I turned down the job from the second school and accepted the job at the first. I just had an in general better gut feeling about the first, and the more I thought about it, the more I really wanted to work with the people I met yesterday. But the bigger decision was not which job to take, it was whether I should take either. By accepting the job at the first (actually accepting either would have had the same result), I really screwed up our honeymoon plans. Instead of having the whole week AFTER our wedding off for October break, I now have the week BEFORE the wedding off. So Vancouver is out the window (at least for October), but hopefully we can still go soon. Shoot. Now I’m starting to feel guilty for messing up those plans. P.S. C was very much involved in the decision making process, and he was very supportive of that decision, but I still feel guilty. So I think I might be a real adult now? I have a respectable job (with health benefits) and I’m getting married. What do you think?