Back to work

I went back to work this past week—a short three day week that seemed longer somehow than a regular week. I was large and in-charge, since the other managers were on vacation. Fortunately, nothing managerial happened the whole time. Many people were out, so it was just us skeletons there. It was so quiet I actually got some things done, working on the third edition of my textbook and the second edition of a DVD we did for the teacher job fair last year. I am reading the textbook over word by word, and I still like most of what I have there, so it gets harder to find things to change for each edition. The DVD will be much cooler than the first edition, since we plan to sprinkle interviews with recruiters and students throughout. Before it was just me as a talking head and some video of the different segments of the teacher job fair.

Good news—I have just about caught up on my pile of New Yorker magazines! All it took was about two weeks off of work. I read several articles about Iraq that helped my understanding of the whole thing, as well as some wonderful fiction and opinion pieces. I was on the web the other day and pulled the trigger on another year’s subscription. Let’s see if I do a better job of keeping up this time.

Max was at our house this weekend. On Saturday he and Shane were making cookies. Kathy remarked that it was a good thing, too, since Da (me) was a cookie monster. I told Max that he looked like a cookie and so I would eat him. He went to great lengths to show that he was not, in fact, a cookie. “Look, he said, holding out his arm, “A cookie is flat and I’m not flat!” I responded that maybe he was one of those gingerbread men. He said, “Put your hand here”, indicating his chest, “A cookie doesn’t have a heart that beats! Look, I have veins!” I had to agree that he was a boy after all, and not a tasty treat. He and Shane worked on the Lego “Mission to Mars” construction project. It is very complicated and very cleverly designed—nothing a five year old could do alone. I hope it stays together for a while. He and I watched a DVD of an old TV cartoon show—“Pinky and The Brain”. He was very intent on the show and didn’t say anything until it was almost over—laughing at a joke that I thought he wouldn’t get. For the cognoscenti, it was the episode where they build a “chia Earth”—that’s the line that broke Max up, flashing a great big gap-toothed grin (as he is missing three teeth across the front.)

New Year’s Eve was a bustling event, since everyone came to our house: Lois and Greg, Priscilla and John, their daughter Lisa and her boyfriend Brian (who for some reason is known as “Lambie-sheepie”) and the his mother Chris (who was at loose ends with nowhere else to go), their son Matt and his girlfriend Meghan, who is cute and smart and likes horses. By 10pm, everyone was still here and it looked like they were here for the duration. We were boring ourselves talking about basement flooding and household stuff, so I asked if anyone would like to play Scrabble. Lois enthusiastically jumped in, but several others said, no, that’s boring. We got four of us together and we started playing. I figured that the people who didn’t want to play would just sit in the living room and continue boring themselves. Wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t want to play but they came over to kibbitz, tormenting poor Meghan with their ideas for words. The rest of us told them to leave her alone and let her play. The boyfriend’s mother sat behind me and started poking me, so I turned around and said icily, ‘I know what I’m doing.” That shut her up but she still hung on my shoulder for the entire game.

I did win with a crushing triple word score, he says modestly.

At midnight we all went out on the porch and shot off those little champagne bottle poppers. Then our guests made their way home, full of the prospect of a new year and another chance to put things right.