Holiday Cliché

I’m in a good mood. I’m definitely in the holiday spirit. I got my requested snow day last week so my tree is decorated and my house is festive. I started my writing out my Christmas cards yesterday, and what gifts I haven’t yet purchased are on a very organized list. I’ve been making holiday treats and plans and am looking forward to vacation. Life is good.

I say all this up front because I’m about to go on a rant. (It has been a while, hasn’t it?)

Why is it that all advertisers and journalists feel that it is important to force every commercial or news story about shipping or shopping into The Night Before Christmas format. Ugh. All those forced rhymes and cadence. So overdone. So unoriginal.

If there was any important information, like shipping cut off dates for Christmas arrival, I missed it in this morning’s 4 minute rhyming news story on NBC. Given that I have a package to get out to Tamara in Seattle it might have been nice to have gotten and retained that information. Instead I just got annoyed as I listened to another abomination of one of the greatest stories ever. In fact, I think I tried to block it out.

Just sell what your selling, or tell what your telling. Leave the story book alone.

No Time for Awkward

Yesterday was a day that I really wanted to go to the gym. I know. Who am I and what have I done with my former self? That's not to say there's a dramatic physical difference; in three months I've lost 13 pounds, 10 in the first month, 3 in the last 2, making the average I guess around a pound a week. But it's not about the numbers. It's not even about feeling better in my clothes. It's about feeling better period. I have more energy, I'm more motivated, and I'm doing something good for myself. I don't even find I'm fighting urges to go home and hibernate. I like to go the gym. Take yesterday. The end of the school day was particularly frustrating and I felt frazzled, so I looked forward to sweating out some of that negative energy on the treadmill, to some me time before going home to correct more papers.

I got there just at that time before it starts getting really busy, which had been getting earlier and earlier before Thanksgiving. Getting there before 4 used to be fine to avoid the pre-dinner rush, then 3:30 was safer, and now even 3:30 is pushing it. I was glad I pushed myself to get there at that time--and relieved when I saw the parking lot was especially empty. Yay. No fighting for my favorite treadmill!

Yet 4 in that row of 6 favorite treadmills were taken. Two [wait for it...] by students. I HATE that.

Don't get me wrong. I don't hate the students. Quite the contrary, as they are two very good students that I'd put on my list of favorites (which teachers don't have, of course). I don't feel weird for them to see me in sweats or for them to know I exercise, it's just well...I don't want the gym to be an extension of school. I may as well be shooting hoops in the gym when the bell rings.

What makes it worse is the reaction these girls have. I try to wave right away and get the moment over, but as happened the last time, they pretended not to see me at first. And I stopped trying to get their attention until they acknowledged me on their way past my machine. They seem uncomfortable and awkward, as if seeing me on the treadmill is the equivalent of witnessing parental copulation. Or just figuring out that they had to have sex in order to have them.

No matter how fast your machine is set, you can't run away, girls, I want to say. Let's get over the awkward moment and move on. We're here to work out.

But, oh, that's right. When I'm there I'm not their teacher.

The Day After

The snow turned to rain yesterday (in the evening we actually had thunder and lightning), and the wintry scene out my window quickly disappeared. Nonetheless, I remained in the spirit and took advantage of the time and decorated my Christmas tree. I didn't get my cards done, but I got around to one of those monotonous projects of going through junk mail and catching up on shredding and recycling. And I thoroughly enjoyed my day.

Today I am rested and ready to catch up on the correcting that I need to do to prepare for mid-quarter grades, which are due at 7:30 tomorrow morning. I'll hide in my room during my free periods and do some power correcting, thereby also avoiding those useless, waste-of-energy conversations with colleagues who will complain about the snow day, about the overreaction of the weather forecasters and the 500 superintendents in the state of Connecticut who called off school yesterday. I'd rather get our earlier in June, they'll say, and I'll be hearing Charlie Brown's teacher in my head. wah wah wah wah wah wah

I say what's done is done. No use wasting energy complaining about what you can't take back. I'm sorry if you didn't enjoy the day. I did enjoy the day. I got a Saturday in the middle of the week. And now there's no use in me complaining about my anti-snow day colleagues. Especially since I have correcting to do.

SNOW DAY!!!!!

I promise today, on my first snow day of the season, to do my best not to sit and do nothing but read. I will decorate my tree and write out my Christmas cards and maybe correct some papers. On second thought, I will not correct papers. I will decorate my tree and read and enjoy the pretty scene out my window (and maybe a Brandy Alexander). tee hee

Getting Home

One of the first pieces of advice I got as a college student at Simmons--probably from an upperclasswoman--was, if you ever get lost [in Boston] just look for the Citgo sign. From Kenmore Square it was just a walk up Brookline Avenue back home. Fortunately, I never had to use it, I never got lost...

When I found myself driving through Kenmore the other night I felt compelled, as I hadn't before, to stop and take a picture of this Boston icon that was for many years my compass, and now will be part of my window of the world .

In My Next Life...

I might be a photographer. Or maybe I should try to sell some of my best photos in this life. Rent a booth at a high end town fair (West Hartford comes to mind) and sell prints of Tuscany, and London, La Jolla and Boston.

Or I could be a chef. With a show on Food Network. I could hang with Guy Fieri, and finagle a way for Deanna (and Gordon) to meet Ina Garten, and for Amy to meet Nigella--or get her own show. All my nieces (well, technically some are first cousins, once removed) who like to cook (and who put a tiara on my pillow at our Thanksgiving sleepover at Dawn and Henry's)--Meredith, Amanda, Maddie, Jenna--would be over the moon. I could influence the next generation of chefs. Maybe I could even hire them.

I might go the retail route, though, because I think I'd also like to be a shop owner. If I were, only the back of my eyelids would ever see 5:30 in the morning. If not a bookstore cafe, I would own a very cool boutique (of course, I would) selling handbags and jewelry and scarves and other accessories. The packaging would be art. And then I'd also enjoy being a buyer for Crate and Barrel, and get to travel to far away places on someone else's dime, to shop for dishes and vases and fashionable imports.

But for today, and the foreseeable future, I am a teacher, who had to ask permission from the principal to go to the bank so I could take care of a debit card fraud issue (how scary that some scam artist has my account information and ran a test 0 dollar PIN transaction; how fortunate that I am vigilant about my accounts!), who caught a student cheating and later sat and watched her cry, and who is oh-so-happy the weekend is here.

Let it Snow!

I want snow. Which means, really, that I want a snow day. In fact, I need a snow day. Not just for the mood (although I really am over the 65 degree weather in December) but for the opportunity to get ready for Christmas. Aside from a bunch of correcting I could catch up on, I have sixty invitations to my parents' 50th anniversary party to address, Christmas cards to write out, and a Christmas tree to put up. And those are just the high priority items from my list of things to do. There's always more I can do--closet and storage bin projects come to mind--but I'll get to those, and to my growing stack of new books I want to read, on subsequent snow days...but first I need one. The first of the season. Preferably in the next week or so.

Pleeease?....

My lucky snowman looked silly sitting on my desk the other day while it was rainy and balmy out.