Thoughty Lotto

First:  All Teachers Hate Lunch Duty

No.  Don't throw your carrots.  Or if you do, pick them up.  Can you just at least pick them up like a civilized human being before you exit the cafeteria?  Hey, you guys, I don't care how the napkin ended up on the floor, someone take responsibility and throw it away.  Okay, everybody!  If you are talking to people sitting at your table- you do NOT need to yell.  In fact, yelling increases the probability that the duty teachers will hear the inappropriate things you are saying.  If you must be awful, could you please do it sotto voce? 

My new favorite lunch duty game is to look at the noxious cretins and think to myself "what will be the shining moment of humanity in this child's lifetime?  What is the one greatest thing s/he will do that would move someone to tears?"  Because we all have our shiny moments.  They just seldom occur in a school cafeteria.  And not between the ages of 8-13.

Also, I do a lot of making up new lyrics to Christina Aguilera's song "Beautiful."  In my version, the title is "Dutiful."  And it is all about how these punks can't bring me down.

Second:  I can't remember this one. 


Third:  I have a ridiculous case of pet pride regarding Pepe.  He is not actually very helpful when planting seeds ("No, my hands are not toys, and though I am digging in the dirt, you are not allowed to..."), but he was helpful holding down the measuring tape for Dave yesterday.  And therefore I will post this video:

 



Pepe doesn't make chore time more efficient, but he makes it more fun.

Fourth: I do remember my third thought, but will pass it off as my fourth thought to make me look more thoughtful than I actually am.  It was about the fate of Maine-based business chains, relative to  their presence in the teeming metropolis of Ellsworth.

Mr. Paperback recently went out of business (statewide, not just in Ellsworth), rendering a lot of fine people jobless.  A victim of Amazon and Audible, it just couldn't compete with the changing tides of literary culture.  Bookworms across the state mourn the loss, but we all know that we were 100% responsible for its demise.

On the other side of the coin, Friendly's in Ellsworth went out of business, and has been converted to a Governor's.  Was a bit wonderful to see a national chain go under and be replaced by a local one.  There was much rejoicing by the region- I ate there last night.  It was packed, but service was quick and thoughtful- and it was Governor's.  You know it.  You love it.  I did mourn the loss of the Muskie Burger- and all of the Namesake burgers in general.  All they had was a LePage burger, and as we all know 61% of Mainer's can' stomach that particular dish.   

I used to play a game about Ellsworth when I was in college- it was called "While You Were in Iowa."  I would watch buildings and business come and go, as if by magic. 

Dreams, Memory, and the Way of Lost Things

I have reached the point of chronic exhaustion, where almost anything that passes into my hands, then passes out of my hands, unremarked by me- and is therefore often misplaced.  To date we have a large bottle of cider vinegar living without a cap since my obsessive egg dying last Sunday.  Wine cap, misplaced as soon as I opened it... why yes, it was screw top.  And for the record, just as The Goats Do Roam, so too does that bloody cap.  Passwords for anything related to the internet, except the biggies I check all the time?  Gone.  They melted away when I wasn't paying attention- with a little merry "vwip" noise.  Thank god for the "forgot password?" link, though it would be good if there was a link that said "always."  I am now putting off updating a password I only just updated five days ago. 

On Tuesday, Dave and I spent ten minutes searching for a set of truck keys... that I had just had in my hand... only to find them in Dave's pants pockets.  Neither of us remembered that I had handed them to him.  It was a consolation to me at least, to be in company.

While I am not usually the most attuned to details, the chronic forgetfulness is always worst when I've been under a lot of stress- I'll do things like forget to turn the oven on when cooking things, or to turn it off afterward... shoes?  Forget it.  I end up stumbling about in a constant "I know I had it at some point..."

For the past two weeks I had been fighting with a light at work, that I would swear I would turn off- my dad taught me to turn off lights when not in use!  And then I would look again, and the damned light would be on.  Day after day.  This light is in the dressing room, the furthest switch from my office in the lighting booth- a floor down and a cavernous theater away.  Normally it is the cantankerous costume volunteer, but she's not been using the space since the Wonka strike.  Finally three days ago I broke down and addressed the ghost the students (more on this some other time) think haunt the theater:

"Listen ghost.  I'm fine that you're here.  I am sure you will outlast me.  But could we pretty please work together?  Seriously, if you have to turn on lights behind my back, could you turn on the ones that are closer to my office?"

The ghost wasn't talking.

Yesterday I got in, and I knew for a F-A-C-T (emphasis on the F-ing) I had turned off the light when I'd left the night before.  I crossed the balcony, climbed down the ladder to the stage, opened the door-
and there was a student and an ed tech, working one-to-one.  It was a comfort to see living human faces behind my struggle, and the Ed Tech was pleased (well, sort of pleased) to see who was constantly turning the lights off on him every time he left the room.  With a plea to please, please turn off the lights when he leaves the space, I left the space- and left the lights on.  Only to spend the rest of the day annoyed when he continued to leave the lights on after he'd left.

Still, it was a solid win for my embattled memory.

Which brings me to dreams- Last night was miserable for sleep, to the point where I got out of bed to listen to a book and on-line window shop until I exhausted my eyes with gross consumerism (wallsconce, flush mount, mission style... clear selection, new tab, new store, that's not my Etsy password?  Reset... this is guaranteed to wear me down).  Dave, privy to my shitty sleep, didn't wake me when he went to go fishing today.  This left me open to Oversleeping Dreams.  Not the kind where you dream you oversleep, but the sort of odd, vivid dreams that come with the territory of missing your normal wake-up. 

And I dreamed about my grandmother.  I was with her in the nursing home, and we were talking- and it grew slowly apparent to me, that while she was talking in the bright, and simple way I've become accustomed to, as if she were always reading a picture book to a child-

She wasn't repeating herself.

At all. 

No thirty second loop of short-term memory, no filler syllables sung for the sake of sound.  Sentences.  Sense.  We were conversing.  About death, of course.  I don't recall specifics of the conversation, just the sense of wonder at her cogency- and that when I spoke in return, I was afraid doing so would break the spell.  But we talked, brightly, simply, with no repetition from memory lapses.  This, I remember.

Egg Update

So this morning, while I was innocently cruising the internet for home goods I don't really need or even necessarily want (e.g. chaval mirror jewelry armoire), Dave asks the the following question:

"Can I use your eggs to make egg salad?"







"What?"

"Can I use your eggs to make egg salad?"




.... I try to come to grips with the horror...


                       ..... a mass cracking.....


....all those eggs....  those beautiful eggs.... really, he wants to make egg salad with them?



"No!"

"What?"

"You can't just use them all at once!"

"Really?"

"YES!"

"Are you serious?"

"You can't just use them all at once to make an egg salad."

"I don't get you."


So he wandered off into kitchen to make his breakfast, talking nonsense talk about eggs rotting in the fridge to fester, and then having found a juicy rhyming word, went off into silly song land where he sang made up lyrics to made up tunes while making toast, and frying non-Easter eggs.