No Verb

“In the movie ‘The Joy Luck Club’ the characters have a tight bong with each other.”

Really?

25 year old C is at summer camp. He has an important co-camper: The Pope. The Pope apparently also loves lanyards and campfires, so he is visiting. The summer camp has provided all campers with green sheets. Is that good enough for C? No. He has to bring his own RED sheets. He is much more comfortable sleeping on red than he is on green. One night, when he is trying to go to bed, he discovers his red sheet is gone. He searches frantically, not finding the coveted sheet. Finally, as a last resort, he searches the Pope’s room. There is the sheet, underneath the Pope’s sleeping little head. Why did he steal it? It matches his hat!

“What? Drywall is the new fluoride!”

C and I have now been married for exactly a week. Pretty much exactly. It is 4:15 right now, and that’s about the time our ceremony ended last Saturday. Everything was beautiful and delightful and perfect and lovely. We really couldn’t have asked for things to be better. The honeymoon was great; going back to work on Thursday was not so great, but I think we’ve managed to get ourselves out of the party/vacation mode, and next week should be much more normal.

Being married has been pretty great so far. It is hard to explain, but as most of you are married, you probably know. It is nice that C doesn’t have to drive me home at the end of the night anymore; we are home. I’ve been packing our lunches; we did laundry today, washed dishes, did some other general straightening up, and it was just so nice to do it together in our own house. That’s about the simplest way of summing it up. Just great. More later.

Something that you should probably know about me is that I am capable of putting together a closet organizer/storage shelf thing, including, but not limited to, building shelves, mounting them to the wall, hanging three clothes bars AND reinforcing them, and building the shoe rack. It involved no less than the following: a drill (2 different sized bits, plus the phillips head screwdriver attachment), a screwdriver, a hammer, and a whole lotta my huge muscles. It is the hottest closet organizer I’ve seen this side of the Mississippi, and it will support the weight of our clothes and shoes to boot! Not that I’m bragging or anything…

1. While trying to paint the bedroom, I knocked over the toilet that was sitting in the middle of the bedroom while the bathroom was retextured. I promptly cut myself on it and had a gimpy finger for a few days. When people asked, I simply explained that I cut myself on a toilet. End of story.

2. While trying to clean out the fridge, I was washing the glass shelves in the bathtub (still no functional sink), I somehow shattered one into a million exploding pieces. I don’t even know how I cut myself, but the blood ran heavily.

3. Yesterday, I was inspecting the bathroom baseboards when I noticed the new quarter turn water valves my dad had just installed. They were so shiny, and so I turned one, shooting a veritable geyser of hot water up to the ceiling and soaking my dad and myself.

What will I do today?

C and Liam and I went to see Clap Your Hands Say Yeah last night, and it was pretty excellent. Of course, now I can’t hear anything out of my right ear, but I guess that’s the price you pay for standing next to a speaker.

The bathroom and kitchen now have flooring, and today we should actually have a toilet and a stove. How’s that for liveable? 6 more days.

Yesterday, soon after I woke up, my mom started packing up boxes of my stuff, and they started loading my car. I can take a hint. I’m surprised I don’t have a footprint on my butt. Don’t worry, my feelings aren’t actually hurt. They’re just trying to help…

Yesterday at about 3:20 pm my last students walked out, and at almost 5pm, I left after having completed my first quarter of teaching. People keep asking me if it feels good, but I think I’m still too tired for any reflection to be able to take place. Except for the following: it has certainly gone by quickly. Just nine weeks ago, it seemed like our wedding day would never come because I had to teach a whole quarter before it could get here; I can’t believe nine weeks have gone by.

I suspect that when I recover a little, I’ll feel relieved and still overwhelmed a little by the enormity of doing this three more times before summer. Thank goodness for the Arizona school calendar; we have a break after every quarter.

I think I’ll spend at least the next hour collapsed on the couch with a cup of green tea and a book. I’m determined to finish The Bell Jar this weekend, otherwise I think it may never happen.

Ten days until the wedding. Our wedding. We have one bed, two rooms with flooring, ten recessed lights, two ceiling fans, one shop-vac full of tile dust, zero toilets, and zero working sinks. We still have ten days.

After nearly eleven hours at school today, two meetings, one cup of coffee, three brownies, two students caught plagiarizing, one student suspended, two chapters read aloud (twice!), and three tests administered, I graded nearly 100 papers and turned in final quarter grades for 163 students. Two more days of school, then twelve days off.

So that October downward spiral into fatigue and lack of confidence and discouragement everyone told me would come with the first year of teaching? I might be there; I might not. Let’s hope this is the worst it gets. If it is, I can handle it. I’m feeling uncreative and uninspired and frustrated. I hope my students aren’t feeling that way, although I suspect they might be. We all need the break.

our condo is starting to look like a place i’d like to live. i’m going to need to transition to calling it “home”, instead of “the condo”.

tomorrow: appliances, bed, mattress, countertops, flooring, bathroom. baseboards?