Long Weekend -- No Plans

Another busy week gone down the tubes.

Lab has been filled with people. Made corrections to my powerpoint projects, burned 6 copies of 7 presentations only to find out later that there were a couple typos so I need to fix them and burn them again.... Grrrrrrrrrrr. I am taking everything home again and going over them with a fine tooth comb before I do a final burn.

Wednesday was the formal retirement party for the district. I was one of only a few of the middle school personel who attended even though our principal and band director were both leaving. It irritates me that more of our staff were not there. I didn't want to go either, but heck these are people we have worked with for years. Off my soap box I go. It was fun and I had my one tequila sunrise.

Most of the retiring people had worked over 30 years in our district and two had grown up in our district and gone to school here. The high school art teacher had been teaching here 35 years and the kindergarten teacher 39 years. So many years of dedicated service. It will be a very different year next year in all our schools.

That party lasted quite late and next day was the eighth grade dinner, a sort of send off of the eighth grade students with a talent show and potluck. I was drafted to help with makeup and costume changes for the M.C.'s who were spoofing several of our 8th grade teachers. This required some very quick changes including the final one where I put a bald wig and sponged a makeup beard on a kid in only a few seconds. It was weird, he looking like a mini me of the big German teacher he was spoofing. It was hectic, but fun. I helped earlier with decorations as well. Last year we lost a couple of our main stays for this dinner and next year another will retire. I fear I may have to step in and take over parts of it. I think it is a great way to say farewell and have a final party just for those kids and their parents. They also get their language arts booklet with writing samples from all their school years along with a water bottle with their graduation year imprinted on it.

Today I am exhausted. I have been replying to flurry of e-mails from a couple different problems. Our union is changing our insurance plan in order to gain a raise next year and we had to get everyone to vote in a span of 24 hours. We were not terribly well informed, but managed to get a vote in anyhow. I was put in charge of collecting votes and answering questions. I hope I did not steer anyone wrong, but we were pretty well backed into a corner because of the way the teachers voted and the outrageous increase in insurance costs for next year.

I also am involved in the storage issue at the theater. Not enough room to hold all the set pieces props and costumes that we really need to be able to store. The powers that be are reluctant to let us store things if it looks at all messy (but we store things in places that only we will be looking at) It frustrates me to have to deal with storage along with everything else. I just want a building that we can call our own to keep some things in. Our budgets are too small to keep making things new for every play and some things cannot be made or are dissapearing too quickly like telephones and appliances that set an era. Ah well enough griping

I am going to try to clean my house this weekend and sleep in as much as I can.