Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

I hate the children. I want to leave them behind. I say, screw the $22.50 an hour and a pox on educating the underprivileged.
I called in sick on tuesday simply because my throat still kinda hurt and I knew after three hours of "Dameka stop washing the blackboard. Alonzo don't stab him. Get in your seats. Stop stabbing him" I would be a deaf mute. Last thursday I was trying to explain to the little monsters that my two pet peeves were a) saying someone ewas a 'girl' as an insult and b) saying "gay" as an insult. It took me five minutes because they kept demonstrating other things that I could put on my list of "most annoying behaviors.
They'll never fire me. They only gave me this group of hellions because their previous two teachers lasted a day each. I wonder if I can convince Alonzo to stab me so I can collect disability.

The monastary cat is obviously related to breed of dachshaund kitties that room the parking lot of the Dover, Delaware Denny's. His legs are no more than 2 inches long and his fat belly hangs on the ground. He also smells like diesel fuel and had a hairless paw for a while after an incident with hot beeswax. I really like monastary kitty the way I like all freakish creatures.
Friar Tuck has taken to having sleepover in the greenhouse with monastary kitty, leaving the tell-tale signs of empty wine bottles and a flannel pillowcase. He has taken to calling monastary kitty his therapist.
Patrick likes his job and more importantly he likes Friar Tuck so the phrase, "y'know if they'd just let you have sex...." always stops itself before being uttered.

Okay this is totally the flu-like symptoms or the cough medicine talking but:
my internet phrase of the day is : "your mom's a social construct".

Most of us have ended up with the bland accents of people who watch TV but everybody's got one or two words that bring their accents out. For my dad, as evidently for Cara, this word is "IN-sur-ance". For my sister-in-law, "ed-u-ca-shawn". For me it's the "oh" part of "oh my god!" that makes me sound like Garrison Keiller.
But for my roomate Patrick that word is "poop", spoken with a John Waters nasal twang and a special horribleness all its own.

I have flu-like symtoms. This means that I could call the flu vaccine double-blind study I did in the fall and earn an extra $25 (plus a 10$) target gift card by letting them swab my throat. Of course, I'd have to get out of my pajamas and somehow 25$ isn't worth that much to me, what with the price of gas and all.
When I purchased what is affectionatly known around these parts as a "rice burner" I thought I'd be laughing all the way to the rice pump, filling my car as well as my body on cheap starches. Of course, I later found out this is a simply a metaphor. My rice burner is actually a gasoline burner, just a smaller, cuter one less like to explode at 100,000 miles.*

*both my apple-pie burners this past year have had at $1200 part literally explode at pretty much exactly 100,000 miles.

Becky and I are both losing it from lack of sleep; me because I'm working two jobs and covering for her and Becky because her national health conference is in three days. So, we both showed up for work tuesday morning. Our client was gearing up for one of those bang-your-head-on-the-bathtub-scream-kick-punch kind of mornings when I walked in but the sheer novelty of having two of us shifted her into to the happy attention seeker mood that I love.
That and the extreme goofiness that Becky and I get into when it's 7 a.m. and we're jointly cajouling a mentally retarded teenager into brushing her teeth made it an awesome morning.

We lost power on the second floor of the house yesterday. DTE is having a devil of a time restoring our power; I imagine they have had to call over to the Edison Museum at Greenfield Village* to find our original electrical schematics. Okay, so I'm making that up. But our electricity was installed in 1900 and the only time it's been updated was almost certainly by someone on LSD or possible Bruce Campbell** So, in the meantime I'm the only compound member with electricity in my room. The Cap'n has therfore moved his 6 baby chickens into my room so their heat lamp can stay plugged in.
I am undone! I take every available moment to pick up as many baby chicks as possible and snuggle them. I also invite everyone who stops into our house, including the electric company workers, to see the collection of adorableness I have stored in my room.

* Greenfield village is like a smaller more Henry Ford oriented Colonial Williamsburg. My uncle used to be a tour guide at the Thomas Edison exhibit but got bored and told lies to schoolchildren to entertain himself

** Bruce Campbell used to live in my house. Now that I know this I blame all plumbing leaks and electrical failings on him.

I wrote my former thesis advisor wanting a recommendation letter to get into urban planning school. This was his reply:

Leah--

Of course. I'm make up all kinds of good stuff about how you were
always looking for ways to rearrange the buildings on campus and
what good ideas you had for Chestertown, including dredging
canals so it could be called the Venice of the Eastern Shore.

Professor Day



Joy.

I went to type a grant proposal on Andrew's work computer. This gave me a rare chance to interact with Andrew while he was not high. Sadly, Andrew cannot give me his full attention as he is teaching 10th grade English at the time.
So I type and I type, filling my proposal with amazing rhetorical flourishes (ie. lies) (for example: "Students complete non-traditional tasks increasing their self-esteem and learing real life skills" translates as "Oh my God. Quit your whining. You can totally use a chainsaw while pregnant.") Meanwhile, Andrew is discussing the pros and cons of circumsion, mostly cons, with a deeply skeptical group of about five teenage girls. It's not untill I'm ready to leave that I realize Andrew is theoretically teaching them about Edgar Allen Poe.