Never doubt the Nazi Stepmother instincts.

We have progress!  Chris worked last night but then came home and started working on the back room again.  At least half of his stuff is out of the living room and he sat down with me to go over this next week's craziness.  He'll be working almost constantly so I'll be back to dinners and dog walks and homework- mine and Ant's.  I told him we would be changing things up this year and while he agreed to my demands, I'm not really sure he knows what he's in for.  His reading test scores are great and his grades are not, which means we can take what's on all my report cards and apply it to him:


Jenny Ant has so much potential, she he just needs to apply herself himself.

Math grades are okay, but his test scores are barely meeting standards.  I want him to be completely proficient in everything they're doing because math only gets harder and I don't want that to keep him from pursuing science or engineering later on.  I told him we would be doing Jenny homework whether or not there was school homework.  We will also be reading.  He will be working in the room with me to limit distractions.  Nazi stepmothering or not, he will have a solid base to work from later on.

Besides, it was my Nazi stepmother instincts that brought me to the school yesterday to try and meet his teacher and get the school supply list.  Ant won't even be back until Monday so he'll miss the first day, so I thought I'd try to catch him up as much as possible.  I was a little thrown to see that the construction is still going on.  They do not look ready.  I found some people unpacking files from boxes (!) in the nurse's office and was sent on a wild goose chase to find the enrollment guy.  He asked what grade Ant was in.

"Sixth."  Oh my god, is that right?  That can't be right.  No, I'm pretty sure that's right.  Let's see, we put him in 2nd when he got here, that was 2007... 


He couldn't find Ant's name and I thought Oh my god, I'm a bad parent.  I don't even know what grade he's in!


I confirmed spelling twice and Ant was not on the sixth grade list.

"Did you return the enrollment package that was sent home last year?" he asked.

Say it with me: "What enrollment package?"

I can only return it if it came to me in the first place!  You mean you sent something that important home with a 12-year-old?  Your delivery system is FAULTY!

ANT IS NOT ENROLLED IN SCHOOL!!!

Good grief.  I am led to one of the trailer classrooms to fill out paperwork.  The room contains 2 teachers trying to transform the mess into a classroom.  I called Chris to relay the news and ask for Ant's birth city.

"He's in sixth, right?" I murmured.

"Yes."

Oh, good.  Let me continue with my outrage.

It doesn't matter that he went to that school last year, he has to enroll again!  How am I supposed to know these things!  Isn't there some kind of checklist for this?

"Oh, Anthony, you haven't returned your enrollment package.  Take this note home to your parents and return it signed tomorrow."

Instead of metal detectors at my front door I need important paperwork detectors!  I will have to check his bag before he can come in the house!  I will have a stick to rifle through his belongings.

"Excuse me sir, but what is this?"

I finish the paperwork and the enrollment guy asked if I was aware of the uniform policy.

UNIFORMS!

"The last thing I saw was the vote!  I didn't know what uniforms had been decided on, or even that uniforms had been decided on!"  Your delivery system is FAULTY!


This is when one of the teachers came over to introduce herself as the Parent Involvement Coordinator.  I asked if that was for parents to volunteer or involvement with their own children.

"Both," she said.

"Sign me up."

Monday is going to be ridiculous.  Go to school, come to the school to find out what teacher he has, get the school supply list, buy a uniform shirt, pick Ant up from the airport, take him to buy school supplies, take him to find khakis or dark blue pants, (Khakis!?!  Are they insane?  We'll get him dark blue Dickies.) bring him home, take care of the dogs, make sure he unpacks, make dinner, and at some point do my homework.

Tuesday will likely be laundromat.  Oh my god, uniforms mean doing laundry more often.  Sigh.  This is going to be a busy year.

It may not be likely, but it's still possible.

92 on the first paper, 96 on the second paper, great responses to my next draft at the peer review today... and I just poured water down the front of my shirt.  Success can't follow us everywhere, I suppose.

My favorite response in the peer review was:

"I just love how I can hear your voice."

Today wrapped up three weeks- there's only two left.  Whew!  Ant is enjoying his Southern California vacation and will be back soon- this is my last weekend to accomplish my work in silence.

We've been working on getting the apartment tamed- it has been an unholy disaster.  I think I said that I tried to clean and was immediately overwhelmed.  I decided that Chris and I should use his time off this week to clean up.  :D  He agreed for some reason and we did some serious work on our room and his nightmare in the back room.  The living room is still hideous but progress is progress.

I'm off to take the girls to the river.  Maybe I'll finish my paper tonight so I don't have to do it last minute.  Yeah right.

Ridiculous.

I'm done ahead of schedule.  I wrote the damn paper AND finished my homework and was putting it all together for the portfolio and thought, "What is missing?  I'm pretty sure there were four components to this: revised paper, artifact, draft with teacher remarks... what else?OH GOD.  The cover letter."

I have to write a one page cover letter explaining my reasons for writing the paper, what I changed from the draft and whatever other questions are listed in the syllabus.  ARGGGGHHH.

Herd those cats!

My homework is finished and I'm near the end of revising my paper- only to find that I have taken too much out.  My paper is now at least a page short.  Gaarrrgghhh!  What sucks is that it really is better like this.  I'm going to take the girls out but then I'll go back through my draft and add a lot of that caca back in. When my teacher gave us back our first paper (92/100) she went over some of the problems she saw.  She said there were a lot of good points and good quotes but a lack of support.  She emphasized that we have to constantly connect back to our thesis and used the metaphor of herding cats.  I think that image will stay with me forever, but in a good way.  I see all my crazy random thoughts slipping out to the sides and me trying to go back and forth herding them all through a doorway.  Not only is that a fun image but as Tracy will tell you, it is one that fits my papers well.

Oh yeah, I have a blog!

I have been busy with this horrible class and trying to start preparing for the fall semester.  I'm trying to organize my office and this whole week it's been just me and Solo- everybody else was in Topaz.  There has been NO time for cleaning up this week, just school, work, come home and crank out some homework, eat, pass out.  It's making me extremely frustrated to live in such ridiculousness.  If Chris ever has a spare moment he's going to clean out the back room and try to turn it into something other than a complete nightmare.  I really do want to move somewhere that has a washer and dryer and a yard for my girls but if for some reason I got a job somewhere else we wouldn't want to be stuck in a lease.  Sigh.  For now I'll just have to schedule in lots of walks with my ladies.

They came home yesterday while I was at work.  Ant is still in Topaz and the plan is for him to ride with Chris's brother back to L.A. and go visit the family.  He hasn't really been home all summer.  I have tentatively moved the nice hand towels back into the linen closet.  I bought him a bunch of books recently and he took several with him but I kept back the Uncle John's audiobook.  I told him we'd keep that on reserve for our next drive to or from Topaz.  I don't see that happening anytime soon.  :(  I said it might be really late in the summer, but we'd listen to it together.

Chris texted me at work yesterday:

I'm home come home

All three of them were napping when I got there.  It was just as quiet as it had been all week.  Riley wandered out into the hallway to look but never barked- she just wiggled her way over to see me.  Jasmine never left her bed.  Later on I coaxed her outside to potty and she went straight to bed.  Maybe an hour after that I was folding laundry and she got right up and came to sit in front of me, head down.  Uh-oh.  Her collar disappeared at the lake so I put my hands on either side of her jaws and walked her into the hall (where there's no carpet).  Sure enough, she started urking and barfed up something I can't begin to identify.  Somebody's learned the warning signs, huh?  I'm always so grateful when I can get her to the bare floor.  Dogs find the carpet such a comfortable place to vomit.

They were both exhausted after spending the whole week playing at Topaz.  Jasmine gets worn out after one afternoon- and she never spends more than a weekend there.  Riley does, but she's also 11 this year. ELEVEN.  She was trying to jump onto the bed to give me kisses and started yelping.  Chris said she got hurt being a vulture- she was stepped on a couple times because she was underfoot hoping for food.  Apparently those injuries are still tender.  I'm going to have to do walks at the park where she can wander or not, depending on how she feels.

Chris spent his mini vacation sleeping on the futon mattress inside his van.  I know he's extra exhausted from staying up late and not being able to sleep in.  Our bedroom is dark as a cave- it must have been super awesome to be woken up by the sun.  He's out cold now and I'm going to let him stay that way for as long as possible.  He worked last night despite his exhaustion and he's working all weekend.

This is how things go- I'm stressed and busy all week, he works all weekend.  :(

I'm going to force myself to knock out some homework during the silence.

Hep

It's official, I'm a whiner.  I don't know what kind of classes the other girls are taking, but no one thought this class was an excessive amount of work.  One girl said she had a class that required 120 pages of reading a night.  That's a lot, but this class isn't far behind, plus there's the writing.  Whatever.  I'd like to check out my teachers for the fall and make sure none of them are grad students.

Speaking of which, a fellow work study found a class that could seriously be a lot of fun.  It consists of reading, one month of weekend classes, and a trip to San Francisco.  It's upper division, which is what I need, but it's only 2 credits.  In order to take that, I'd need to find a 1 credit, upper division class.  Even if I found one, I wouldn't fit.  They're all serious science labs and such.  My coworker suggested asking someone in the English Department if they would let me do an independent study for one credit.  If that actually got approved I could possibly still work this fall, but more importantly, seriously decrease my workload and free up my schedule.  I'm also not entirely sure this is a good idea.  Should I even give this a shot?

Your feedback is requested.

By the way, I finally checked online- I got an A in Ceramics.  Whew.

Hidden Valley

I met Jody over at the park this evening.  It was pretty nice out and our dogs haven't seen each other in a long time so they ran around like crazy.  Jasmine actually jumped out the window rather than wait for me to open her door.

Riley's usually the first one to start walking behind us, but as the dogs poop out they join the caravan.

Snoopy, of course, never gets tired.  If you look hard you can see her way up ahead.

Back at the Dodge we gave them some more water.  Riley jumped in and was ready to go home.

Jasmine was especially tired and didn't make it that far.

After a brief rest she played with Snoopy and Lucy some more but Riley stayed in the car.

By the way- I love living here.