School daze

School starts tomorrow at my university. I was not supposed to teach this semester, but I am “helping” two other people learn the software that runs our on line class. So, I am sort of teaching, but without the responsibility for grades and reviewing papers and such.

Speaking of school, Max started kindergarten last Wednesday. Things went pretty well, though he did have one problem when he got confused and followed someone into girls’ lavatory. To prevent such a thing from happening again, he made a map for himself to take him to the boys’ room next time. This was not just a pencil line on a piece of scratch paper, I’ll have you know. He used different colors of construction paper to do it. Earlier this month, his mom had taken him to an open house at this school. It is a charter school that is very well run, fortunately (not all of them are). While mom talked to the woman who would later be Max’s teacher, Max walked over to a globe and started naming countries. The woman said, “I want him in my class!”

Our friend Karen, who was struck by a car back on August 13, is still in the hospital. She has four hours of physical therapy every day, and is on the brain injury floor now. They give her arithmetic tests and such and she finishes them quickly and hands them back to the therapists. They are pleased with her progress. Her hair is gone, though, shaved because of the brain surgery. She says she doesn’t care about that anymore. I was surprised to get a phone call from her tonight. She called to yell at me for cutting her grass. I knew she would be concerned about that, so I just went over and took care of it. Just in case, I let her son know so he didn’t come all the way over for nothing. She gave them orders to do it from now on. I am kind of relieved, since she has a much bigger yard than we do.

We had an office picnic last Friday. Only about half of the people from our office made it, so there were eleven of us. We drove out to a spot on the lakeshore about 75 miles away. Two women in our office each have double wide trailers out there. You’d never know they were trailers, since they look like small houses. Each one was beautifully furnished, with big decks outside, each one right on the water. We had a great afternoon, cooking on the grill, playing pool, yakking. We started off outside, but the 95 degree humidity drove us inside after a while. One of these women (who works part time) always opens her paycheck in front of me and complains that she’s only working for health insurance benefits. She owns a profitable dry cleaning business, three rental apartments and has this second home on the lake. I should be so poor.