Spring Broke
The weather seems to finally be changing for the better. Inevitable, yes, but the seeming-interminibility (made-up word) of winter make it feel that winter is just messing with our heads.
Welcome to spring. Currently in my area the temperature is 70 degrees under mostly sunny skies. Fortune has smile upon me because this week is also my spring break. Time to recharge, recuperate, and relax to get ready for the big push of the last ten weeks of second grade wonder. (To do: Fairy Tales, Fractions, Biographies, Rainforest, and a billion other things.)
Except that I have way too much to do to get that relaxing crap done. Everytime I’m not working on grad school (all week) or my classroom, I can actually feel my blood pressure rising and an almost panicky feeling kicks in. I’ve tried really hard to enjoy my time. The timeline of my week:
Friday: Spring Break! Woo! Dinner at a crappy restaurant with the in-laws! Woo! (Company was good, food was baaaaad)
Saturday: TLEMK heads to Chicago for time with Dev. I head to Rousseaus’ to bother them and eat their food.
Sunday: Fork of Words show and the Red Line Tap in fauxChicago (Rogers Park). Show was good, the Sacrament of the Sick (the opening band) was not. Here’s a great transition for a Sunday night show at a dive bar: Crazy angry metal band into trancy, folky, mellow awesome music. I have no idea how the third band was; I’m afraid they might not have played anything but Disneyland music from the rides (”It’s a Small Mr. Toad’s Wild Haunted Mansion”) so I left. We stayed in Chicago that night, and the next day I headed back to the ‘burbs.
Monday: Good idea: Let’s go to the boats and play craps! No one is going to be there on a Monday night! $5 tables! Spring Break! Woo! Bad idea: Not when you’re $100 up (ten minutes in) and then frittering it away to an eventual dead even, and then one last desperate field bet makes you lose five dollars for the evening. At least I got Sweet Tomatoes for the evening.
Tuesday: Went to school (work) for three hours and cleaned. I am amazed at what an hour of cleaning does to the classroom. If I had any of the organization gene, this would never be a problem, but I’m such a mess and usually focus, on, you know, teaching. So until the breaks, cabinets are messy. Got home and got ready for… poker. Drinking. Introducing Guitar Hero to Deli. More drinking, which contributes to me losing another five bucks. Tuesday night also saw the return of Frantastics Wings to my belly. Oh Frantastics, how I’ve missed you. (Is it any wonder I gained a small baby’s worth of weight over this break?) The Guitar Hero is so addicting to people that they stayed after cards broke up. This never happens, and I know it’s not my company people are staying for, so it must be the Rockin’ Out. Josue and Waj left around midnight, and Deli and I continued to rock out until I passed out.
Wednesday: Back to work again as I continued the spring cleaning. Got cabinets cleaned, and got my desk cleaned off (first time since AUGUST), started working on the rainforest unit, fed the tadpoles, etc. Didn’t get as much done as I wanted to (running theme) but it was good to go in and “putter”. Worked out twice, and watched tv in the evening. Very quiet day.
Thursday: TLEMK came back (WOO!) Went to work again (are you sensing a theme here?), and continued to putter in the class. I took some more pictures of our tadpoles and put it up on our class website. Came home (did NOT work out) and rewatched all the tv I watched on my own (this time with TLEMK.)
Friday: We got up waaaaaaaaaaay too early and traveled down to Champaign to give one of my sisters a tour of the beautiful campus of the University of Illinois. It was really gorgeous (and during Friday afternoon is when I started writing this tome), though quite breezy. When the wind starts to move me you know that it’s more than a zephyr kicking through the endless prairie of East-Central Illinois. After touring the campus and getting my tour guide on, we hung out with the CU crowd for the evening (thanks CU crowd, including Kenny, Stuck, Sarah, AJ, Joy, and anyone else that popped in and out.) which included delicious bad Mexican food and our warm-up for the baseball season, the great Bull Durham.
Saturday: Got up early to take V back to the ‘burbs for a wedding shower. I went to school to check on the tadpoles and pick up some things to work on. Saturday night we went to see Thank You for Smoking, of which my inspiring recap can be found here. After we got back, I started a new book which I will be recapping in-depth soon.
Sunday: Slept in, lost an hour of sleep, and panicked because I have not gotten NEARLY enough done for my various projects in grad school and otherwise. Worked on grad school, and had dinner with V’s family. Very full circle for my spring break.
Spring break. I know that I didn’t get everything I wanted to get done. I go into the last ten weeks nervous about my thesis, and hoping I can get the kids to learn as much as they can. I needed to relax, and unfortunately everytime I relaxed, it made me panic. It’s hard to enjoy the weather when you feel guilty for enjoying it even a little. Spring broke, and broke me a little. So, this will be one of my last posts until about May.
Wish me luck.
RSS Trackback URL 2. April 2006 (21:02)Filed under: General