Thankful Thursday #78

image courtesy of thetomkatstudio.com

This week I'm thankful for...

• the sounds of train whistles echoing up from the canyon
• Library Day
• parent volunteers
• walks with friends
• my husband's arms
• unexpected cash
• thank you notes
• the men who continue to hammer and drill and make a clatter outside my classroom every day trying to get my air conditioner to work
• the colorful words aforementioned clattering men shout outside my door when their attempts fail.  I can count that as vocabulary instruction minutes, right?  Right???

Thankful Thursday #77

Image courtesy of sweetcarolineblog.com

This week I'm thankful for...

• my husband who tells me I'm smart.  Since he's genius level smart, I absolutely swoon when he tells me I'm smart, too.
• my student teacher who climbed in the A/C closet every morning for two weeks and battled spider webs to manually turn on our classroom air conditioner
• the little one who beaded me a keychain with my name on it.  My last name is long, so it was quite the gift.
• my little ones, even the one who pulled the fire alarm.  Maybe especially him.
• my parent volunteers
• the families who donated extra money to make sure everyone in our class can go on field trips
• the return of Parenthood.  I just love that show.
• So You Think You Can Dance.  I know for a fact that I can't dance and I'm left in awe each time I watch an episode.
• my Ugandan sons
• frozen yogurt
• the opportunity to help my friend buy her very first computer
• days spent helping That Laura decorate her living room
• the firefighters who worked tirelessly these last few weeks to save homes and forests
• my friends at Writers Forum

The Great Machine Strike

Hello, dear ones.  It's good to be back with you.  I know you all have lives and other bloggers you love, so you may not have missed me, but I missed you.  I love writing to you and thinking of you looking at your screen while I'm looking at mine.  I've got so much to write about, but first let me explain why I haven't been around the old Pedals and Pencils neck of the woods.

The machines have been against me.

*I'm far less embarrassed by that reference than I should be.  I watched it when I was sick at home once, k?

Not in a Transformers Dark Side of the Moon* sort of against me.  There aren't huge talking robot cars breaking into my house or anything.

It all began when the air conditioner at the school broke.  My classroom A/C worked just fine mind you.  But when the men in coveralls came to fix the school-wide A/C, mine stopped working.  Stopped working as in it was eighty-eight-lord-have-mercy-degress inside my classroom.  Dear ones, let me tell you that there isn't a tougher crowd than 30 five and six-year olds who are too hot to move and/or think.  Due to the smoke from the fires blazing around us, we couldn't even open a door or crack a window.
TeachingSweating profusely for upwards of 10 hours a day and then driving home in a cauldron of smoke made me contemplate 2 things:

1. How hot can hell really be?


2. Am I in hell right now?

Truth be told, it also made me long for my days in Uganda writing with my sons and daughters in their beautiful open air classrooms that don't need pesky things like air conditioners or for that matter, electricity.  It made me long to sit under the trees with them, looking out over the bush while they entranced me with their stories.

Once word got out that one of my machines had gone rogue, the others followed suit.  My router went on the fritz, taking my internet access and printer with it.  No amount of cajoling could bring the router back to life.  Believe me I tried.  I tried to fix it with the help of customer service agents from all over the world.  I was on the phone with customer service for 5 unholy hours which led to me saying very bad words and entertaining thoughts of taking the business end of a screwdriver to my router, which I may or may not have done while having a full on fit in my garage.

So while I would have loved to write about said ridiculous fit in detail here, the last thing I wanted to do after sweating through my clothes all day was vagabond myself out to free WiFi spots.  The only thing I wanted to do was come home and take an icy shower.  Trust me, sparing the public of my presence during those days was really an act of community service because let me tell you, the funk rising out of my skin was so strong it sometimes brought tears to my eyes when I happened to catch an errant whiff of myself.  There aren't deodorants strong enough for that people, there just aren't.

After the A/C, router and printer went on strike, my classroom projector and camera followed suit.  I swear it's because they were melting in the heat.  My classroom A/C has now been out for 2 weeks.  Luckily for me I have a student teacher who climbs into the spiderwebby A/C closet every day and manually starts the thing up.  What better way for him to get a glimpse of the realities of teaching that to do that every morning, right?  Unfortunately once it's on, it will not be stopped, so we've moved from the sweltering fires of Mordor to the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

But today, dear ones, is a turning point in The Great Machine Strike.  Perhaps they saw the damage I can do with a single screwdriver.  Perhaps their little metal innards were scarred by a full-grown woman melting down in all senses of the word.  Today two men in coveralls came and banged on things in the A/C closet outside of my classroom so I'm hopeful that tomorrow it will be humming away again.  Also a man with a jangling tool belt came and did things to the projector and it's all bright and happy again.  I bought a new router that is speedy and quick and smiles at me with a pretty blue light.

The last hold out is the printer, but I think it knows I mean business because it's beginning to perk back up and make clicking sounds and flash cheerful blinking lights at me like it wants to be friends again.  Just in case it needs a little more convincing, I left the screwdriver out in plain sight.

Image courtesy of flatheadscrewdriver.net