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Diaryland

July 01, 2006
day 7
June 30, 2006
day 6
June 29, 2006
day 5
June 28, 2006
day 4
June 27, 2006
day 3

Written last Saturday

What a crazy week. If you had told me that I would have two days off from school and would be out Friday having fun until 3 AM, I would have told you you were nuts. But then again, this week was nuts.

I spent Monday through Wednesday prepping for Back to School night and keeping an eye on the impending hurricane. Wednesday finally rolled around and I got pretty nervous. What kind of questions would I get? What was I going to say? Fortunately my team developed a presentation together so that made me feel a little better. The night finally came and I changed into something nice (feeling slightly bad because everyone else it seemed was wearing a suit, and I don't own one). The parents trickled in for a half hour, and that's when I started. Now that might have pissed off some of the parents who got there on time, but it's not like there were not things to do. My class had set up little paper plate people in their desks, they had written letters to their parents, and there was their work all over the room. There was a lot to check out.

At the end of my speedy presentation I got quite a line of parents. Now, I have to give them credit for not trying to co-opt my presentation with questions about their little kiddo, but geez, it was like half the class. It was good because almost every parent I needed to talk to came into line.

Anyway, I was almost done with the parent parade when one of my teammates came in and said school on Thursday was cancelled. Hmph. I was kinda happy, because I was exhausted after these parents sucked out my energy, but at the same time, we have so much to do, and well, I was bummed and excited at the same time. The worst part of this is that since parents were STILL milling around, I just threw some things in my bag and left. Certainly not my grade book, certainly not my papers I could grade....nah, that would have made things too good for me. Bah.

So I called Jim to tell him, he invited me up to Clarendon for dinner with him and S. I decided to go back to my own place solo since he was a crazy fool, and was going in to work on Thursday, despite not having to. Thursday afternoon I packed my bag and headed over to his place to bunker down for the hurricane. Now, this was Jim's decision. His first idea had been to stay at my place, which, as it turns out, would have been a better idea. At 5:30 pm Thursday Jim's house lost power. When I left around noon on Friday it was still out. I came back to my place, talked with my roommate and discovered that my place had never lost power. Bastards!

Jim left Friday afternoon for CA, and while I was kinda bummed we could not hang out, I knew that gave me the opportunity to hang out with my friend D. who is a new teacher at another school. I met her over the summer at a workshop and then she ended up being in my first year teacher class. She's so fun to hang out with, but I rarely get to do so because for one she lives in Alexandria, which might as well be the other side of the world as far as I am concerned, and because I normally hang out with Jim on weekends.

Apparently she had the same idea, because I checked my phone at one point after setting up my computer and I had like 5 voicemails. One was from D. and another was from S. (Jim's co-worker/friend) Now, being the person I am, I tried to set it up so I could hang out with both. D. wanted to grab some dinner with some other first years, and since S. was still at work at that point, I went out with them, and then we met up with S. in Clarendon. Now, one thing we learned from that evening is that when people do not have safe drinking water or power, they go out. Every freaking place was so jam packed with people!!! Even when we went for dinner it was an adventure. Chili's had a wait of at least an hour. Screw that. We ended up going to a place in Tyson's where the chips were a little stale, but the enchiladas were great, so I was a happy camper. When we went to Clarendon, the bars were packed, so we ended up going to Silver Diner, which was nice since we could just sit around, sip milkshakes and chat. Now, Jim and I have introduced a good number of people to S. and he never disappoints when it comes to cracking them up. I don't know what it is about him, but he's funny as hell.

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