Three meetings in one month.

Three meetings!

I have missed three different meetings in one month.

I am not a flake, I am a flake, I am not a flake.

This has never happened. Ever.

Where are my marbles?

Calendar(s!) apparently aren’t enough to remind me where to be.

Sticky notes do nothing.

Verbal reminders – HA!

Three meetings?

Will you physically come escort me for the the meeting you have scheduled with me?

Otherwise it just might be four.

5:19 a.m.

That is when my eyes decided they were done sleeping.

On my first day of vacation.

After tossing, turning and trying to force myself back to sleep I crawled out of bed and slinked around the house wondering what to do at this early hour. I thought of  my little dog and wondered what she was doing at Camp Janet, most likely sleeping with the rest of the world.

6:46 a.m

This is when I decided to share with you the fact that I can’t sleep, but I just realized all 4 of the HB readers are probably still sleeping all cozy in their flannel sheeted beds.  Please know I admire you for that….on my first day of vacation.

So,  apparently this was not the year for me to get my National Board Certification. I logged in yesterday morning to be told that I fall short of being a highly qualified teacher. I spent the rest of the day feeling sorry for myself. My students had no clue that anything was wrong, which was exactly how it should be.

I was unaware, until yesterday, of how many hugs my students give me each day. I found their little arms wrapping around me so endearing, a little bit of their light filling the darkness that I was feeling.

I feel so much better waking up today and having tomorrow behind me.

This wasn’t really an email “exchange” I suppose. It’s probably more like an email update, but I’ve already entered the blog title and feel committed at this point. Anyway, here’s a message I received from Hannah several weeks ago as she is starting to realize that she is not, in fact, immune to morning sickness.

Hey.

Captain awesome here.

Feeling super awesome.

Not.

On my second bottle of 7 Up.

Should have seriously bought the 6 pack.

Only bought two.

Teriyaki chicken might rock my world tonight.

Just sayin’.

You know?

Captain Awesome.

Awesomely out.

I enjoy her entertaining funniness even though she had been feeling progressively worse as the earliest days of her pregnancy went by.  Regardless, I feel like I can describe her message then and now as ….  awesome.  Especially since the nausea seems to have passed, and is being replaced by tiredness.

I’ve always  mixed feelings about napping. I’m not one for sleeping during the day or even really sleeping in anymore. It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time in my life – when I was a mean, mean teenager – that I enjoyed sleeping in and staying up super late at night.

When I was a wee little one I had a hard time keeping my eyes open for a 15 minute car ride into town. The hum of the car would lull me to sleep within minutes. I remember sitting in the front seat and laying my head in my mom’s lap to fall asleep.  Seatbelt? Psst.

Since becoming an adult I’ve shunned naps and reserved them for cloudy, rainy, cold, blustery days – days where naps are nearly required and I’ve jumped into enough puddles, done enough around the house or finished a book.

Now that I’m pregnant I’ve learned that I can hardly function without a nap each afternoon. I have a meltdown like a toddler if I don’t get additional REM minutes. Napping is the only solution.  I’m not sure my students would appreciate a mid-day nap.

Today is the first day that I haven’t been in a slumber late in the afternoon. I cuddled up in bed, put on a quiet soundtrack (Barry hooked up a new speaker system for our iPod next to our bed…such a simple pleasure!) and waited for myself to fall into dreamland.

It didn’t happen.

Now I’m blogging and making tomato soup from scratch, grilled cheese sandwiches and pumpkin spice cupcakes for dinner. Jeesh. I went from needing a nap to cooking up a storm. We’ll see how long this non-nap thing works. Now that my nap is gone, I kind of miss it.

Like I said, I’ve got mixed feelings about napping.

You’ve sent people to my house and sent countless junk mails promoting the same deal. I get it. You’ve got a great Triple Play Bundle. If I was interested in it I would have contacted you after the first 40 mailings.  I guess  you’re nothing if not persistent, but I’m not interested. I have no use for home phone service, and I really have no use for 100 television channels to surf before deciding there’s nothing on. What I really want is a great deal on just Internet service, because I can use it for my home phone and television without paying you all of the extra money.  Unfortunately, you don’t offer a great deal on Internet alone. In fact, it’s more expensive than my current Comcast deal. Until you can beat Comcast’s Internet price, please leave me alone.

I’m almost to the point of mailing each of your advertisements back to your headquarters. At least that way you could recycle the advertisements instead of printing more of them, because as far as I can tell you’ve been sending me the same piece of mail every week for the last 6 months.  Maybe that would lower your overhead costs enough to provide your customers with a real deal on Internet.

It is cold, wet and rainy.

Welcome October.

Our morning started with a walk and some peppermint hot chocolate.

Welcome warm drinks.

After our walk Barry announced that he might like to be Darth Vader for Halloween*.

Welcome weird costume ideas.

*Barry has not seen Star Wars

Count me in favor of the plastic bag tax. I try to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store as often as I can, but I admit I don’t always remember it.  That’s the beauty of the tax though.  It’s a little extra incentive to forget less often.  It’s like a permanent ribbon tied around your finger.  In fact, I could have used such a reminder yesterday.

I made a quick trip to the store to pick up two items for dessert. Since I knew I was only going to get two items I planned on carrying them out, gasp, without bags. Unfortunately, I had some trouble with the credit card machine and one of the store employees bagged for me. Apparently, each item needed a separate bag. I guess root beer and ice cream have no business next to each other.  <insert your own root beer float joke here>

Luckily, I was given a foot long receipt to remember what I purchased, and a paper coupon I could use in case I wanted to buy some granola next week.

Perhaps grocery stores could actually store receipt information and coupons on accounts that link up to those nifty little cards they make everyone sign up for.  At least I’d feel like I was getting something in return for my personal information.

On a less whiny side note: Thomas Kemper Root Beer is quite delicious.

Have you ever noticed how stop lights always seem to be red when you’re trying to hurry, but as soon as you start planning on a light being red so you can stop they’ll line up in an unprecedented row of green?

For example, maybe you’re riding your bike home from work, and find yourself in a bit of a race with a fellow Lycra clad commuter. Let’s further imagine that you’ve been exchanging leads and “words of encouragement” with this fellow commuter for the past several miles just to make sure the other person knows you’re really not feeling that tired (my favorite is when someone blasts up a hill and slows at the top so they can smile and exclaim, “wow, that was a good one” while the slower rider tries to catch their breath). At about the third mile maybe you decide you’re going to go for it and climb out of your saddle for a break away on a hill climb with Armstrong like brilliance. Just when you’re starting to get some seperation you’re pretty sure a bee has flown through your helmet air vent and is now stuck bashing around in your helmet.

Your first thought is probably to try and shake the helmet to get the bee out (instantly stopping is too convenient after just starting a climbing power surge). When that doesn’t work, you decide it’s completely acceptable to keep pushing the pace and shaking your head, because you know there are several stop lights coming up that will allow you to stop and remove the bee infested helmet if the shakes don’t free the bee (stopping at stop lights is acceptable and looked kindly upon by local law enforcement). Besides, you’re quite sure that you’re looking like a climbing badass, and a little bee shouldn’t put a stop to that.

On a side note, it’s very difficult to look like a badass when you’re wearing spandex and madly gulping air into your lungs while sweat pours off of your bright red face. I’m pretty sure adding a violently shaking head to the equation slides you pretty far down the badass scale and pretty high up on the “is that guy mentally stable” scale. But that’s beside the point.

Much more importantly, you should never forget that stop lights are not your friend. Never, ever, count on them to help you out. They will always make you late, and they will always kick you when you’re down. If, for instance, you find yourself riding up a hill in an unofficial race with a bee in your helmet maybe you should just pull off to the side of the road and remove the bee, because there’s a good chance this will be the time that all of the lights will line up green.

I’ve seen it happen.

We are members of a wine club in Edmonds and get two bottles a month. I tried to carry our bottles into the house with my arms full of other things and look what happened.

It was distressing, to say the least.