Save me a chair, okay?

When I came home from my weekend away at Whistler last Sunday evening, there was a plastic patio chair abandonned at the side of the road near my driveway. I remember thinking, “Oh, somebody had a garage sale and forgot to take their chair in.” Then I thought no more about it.

Monday morning when I left for work, the chair was still there. Monday afternoon when I came home, it had been tipped on its side, but it was still there.

Tuesday morning, still there, tipped on its side. Tuesday afternoon, it had been moved behind the sidewalk and was sitting properly.

Wednesday morning, it was still there. Wednesday afternoon it was in the same place but tipped over.

Thursday morning, still there. By this time, I was thinking, “Whose damn chair IS this?”

By Thursday afternoon, I’d had enough. I marched over and claimed it. It’s a perfectly good chair. Now I have another chair on my back patio. For free. Yay me!

Too much!

I have been feeling extremely frazzled lately. I just feel like I have so much to do and no time to do it. And that makes me slightly panicky. And wide awake at 4 am.

There’s a lot of stuff that teachers have to do for year-end, and in my particular role, I have to individually assess a lot of kids. That also means writing reports on each of them, and making the requisite copies. Then there’s the final report cards of the year, which I was informed yesterday, are due in the office in two weeks. I won’t have finished assessing by that time, so how will I write report cards?!

I’m involved in a number of additional activities at work too. There’s a retirement party that I’m helping to organize – and apparently I am supposed to help write a speech and be the MC as well. There’s a thank-you tea for the many parents who give of their time at school to help make it a better place for their kids. (I don’t have to do much for that except lend my good china teapot and later run the dishwasher.) The big school play is coming up, and I’m the official side-curtain-putter-upper. I did this twice today, mainly because I put them in the wrong place at first since it seems that I am an airhead who doesn’t listen when people tell her exactly where to put things and also doesn’t remember exactly what she did the year before. Sports Day is quickly approaching – not sure what I’ll be requested to do that day, but it will be something, I’m certain.

It also looks like I’m going to have to move classrooms for next year. That’s a big job, especially since (what I hope will be) my new room is down a small flight of stairs. This means that when I start transporting my things, the only way I can do it on a trolley will be to wheel said trolley outside and around to another classroom’s fire exit door. Otherwise I will have to haul individual boxes one at a time down the stairs and down the hall. I could rope some kids into doing it, but that would depend upon whether or not the person who is currently in (what I hope will be) my new room moving their things out first. That may or may not happen. They may prefer to move at the end of August. I don’t. Sigh …

Then on the home front, my mom has now decided that she would like to sell her house in the next year or so. She wants to start hunting for a condo now. She wants me to go out looking every Sunday with her, when there are open houses. Every Sunday. I don’t think so – but she’s my mom, and she depends on me for stuff like that, so how can I refuse? The best I can do, I think, is offer her every two or three Sundays. I hope she’ll be okay with that.

I haven’t been grocery shopping for two weeks. My bathrooms are – um – less than clean. I practically begged DD to vacuum on the weekend – and she hates vacuuming more than I do! Laundry gets done sporadically – but there would definitely be no ironing if we had any clothes that needed ironing. I need to renew my car insurance in six days. I need to at least start thinking about our trip to Greece and Istanbul (we leave on July 1st): getting Euros and Turkish lira, finding my plug adapter, buying a converter for the different electrical current, deciding what clothes to bring and what I still need to buy.

And I’d like to have a bit of a social life now and again. Granted, I did go away with my women friends last weekend, but I’ve seen PG exactly twice in the past two weeks. He’s going to forget what I look like at this rate!

I know it’ll all happen, that I just need to plan and prioritize and plug away at my list at a steady pace. But DD is hounding me to go for a walk with her at the moment because my exercise routine has been shot to hell recently, too. She’s also taken to hounding me to go to bed at a decent hour because she doesn’t want to hear how tired I am all the time. She’s a bit worried about me, I think. She’s out of school and only working three days a week right now. Of course she’s got TIME to worry about me!

AARRGGHH!

I’m too busy!

Maybe I should just drink more.

WWWW 2009

The graphic to the right was designed by my friend Lainey.

I’m just back from the annual Wild Wimmin’s Whistler Weekend with eleven of the best women in the world. This was the eighth time we’ve gone, with more or less the same core group. As usual, we had a blast!

We rented a house for the weekend in the ski resort of Whistler, which is about a two and a half hour drive from home for most of us. We love going there, because there’s something to please everyone. There’s the incredible mountain scenery for those who like to sit on the deck all afternoon and read. There’s hiking along many kilometres of forest trails, past lots of lakes and rivers. There’s mountain biking. There’s skiing and snowboarding, even this late in the season. There’s gondola rides up Whistler Mountain and the new Peak 2 Peak gondola, which goes between Whistler Mountain and neighbouring Blackcomb Mountain. (It has the longest span ever between two towers – 3 kilometres! No way I’d go on that, is there?!) There’s wandering around the pedestrian core of Whistler village itself, with all the shops, restaurants, and of course, the people watching. There’s often free musical entertainment in the various village plazas throughout the day. And in the evenings, there’s the nightclub scene if you’re so inclined.

The Wild Wimmin were actually pretty tame this year, relatively speaking. Friday night, after arrival, we had a feast of junk food and appetizers and alcohol. We stayed up until the wee hours, telling stories and laughing and getting progressively louder (and drunker). Saturday, most of us spent the day in the Village, walking, window-shopping (and sometimes even buying something), and having a bite to eat and a drink at one of numerous outdoor terraces. It was such a beautiful, hot day that there was no way anybody could resist sitting outside and soaking up the sun.

And every year, I run into some old friend or acquaintance who I haven’t seen in years, and this year was no exception. I was in the Gap, looking at jeans, when I heard my name. I turned around, and there was a woman whom I’ve not seen in four years. Her daughter and my DD started kindergarten together and were very good friends for many years, so our two families knew each other quite well. Her husband was also there, so we spent about 45 minutes chatting and getting all caught up in each other’s lives. It was really great to see them after all these years.

Saturday night, the Wimmin stayed in again, basically repeating what we did on Friday night. This was a first, as in the past, we have always gone out for dinner, then those who wanted to, went out dancing. But this was cheaper and just as fun, we decided. I swear, the rest of the year I never laugh as much as I do on these weekends!

I am truly blessed to have the amazing friends that I have, and I really love our Wild Wimmin’s Whistler Weekends! We are a group who absolutely value and respect one another, and we are able to have the most incredible heated discussions – practically arguments at times – and then turn around and forget the whole thing with NO hard feelings ever (at least I think so!). We are all so diverse and interesting, and we have never yet run out of things to say.

Except when one of our group announced that she was pregnant. Then there was a – very brief – moment where we had nothing to say!

Say what?

Today was the day that next year’s kindergarten kids visited our school. Every school does this, and every kindergarten teacher organizes this visit a little differently. My school has three new kindergarten teachers this year, so it was REALLY different than it’s been before.

Because our school has both the regular English program and a French Immersion program, they were expecting about 80 kids. (Have you ever seen 80 five-year-olds together in one gym? It’s quite alarming.) They decided to do a rotating station approach, with six stations. Which meant they needed more teachers than the three of them to run a station. Which meant they asked me to help out, with the express request that I “do something in French”.

So this morning I found myself sitting on a gym mat in a corner of the gym, surrounded by groups of five-year-olds. Six different groups of five-year-olds, plus many of their younger brothers and sisters, plus their proud daddies and mommies and grammas and babysitters looking on and snapping photos. I taught them our hello song “Bonjour les amis” and our goodbye song “Au revoir les amis”, along with waving hands, clapping hands and stomping feet. It’s actually the same song, exchanging “bonjour” for “au revoir”, depending upon whether you are coming or going.

Anyway, I sang those damn songs about 15 times for each group, which, if you do the math, means I sang the same stupid song NINETY times in the space of an hour. That’s more than once per minute – and only about two kids per group had the courage to try to sing with me. But they all waved and clapped and stomped like the pros they are when they’re five. I think they had fun. I had a sore throat by the time we were done.

But I actually had fun too. Especially when one little girl very excitedly told me that she already knew how to say hello in French.

“Do you really?” I answered, in my best impressed voice. “You must be a very smart girl! Can you tell us how to say hello in French then?”

She proudly shouted, “¡Hola!”

Oh, crap

DD and I were enjoying a beverage outside this weekend. It was a warm, sunny day – and heaven knows, we haven’t had a lot of those around here lately. I was putting off starting dinner. DD was telling me all about the new laptop she’s planning to buy. The baby birds were screeching …

Oh yes, the baby birds. We seem to have a nest of some bird or another in one of the gutters on the roof. (Not the leaking gutter. This is a different one. You know: different gutter, different problem.)

These baby birds, like all baby birds, are noisy as hell. They are noisy as hell starting at 4:30 am. I know this because they have woken me up two mornings in a row with their screaming for food. I suppose I didn’t notice them prior to this weekend because they were too tiny to make much noise. Quite honestly, I hadn’t even noticed that there even was a nest up there till this weekend. Now I know.

So we watched the mother bird being run ragged to feed her progeny. Back and forth she flew, worms dangling from her beak. As soon as she would alight on the edge of the gutter, about half a metre away from the nest, the screeching would begin. She would dance around a bit, checking over and over again for predators, then she’d give in to the frantic cries and hop down to her babies. The cries would crescendo, there would be a great fluffing and flailing of wings and beaks, then there would be silence and the mother bird would fly off to get the next installment of dinner.

And of course, what goes in must come out. Look at the roof. Charming, eh?