Friday, February 08, 2008

This is the week that was

At one point during yesterday's chaos I heard myself asserting that things couldn't possibly get any worse. Those words came back to haunt me at 2 a.m. as I lay in bed trying to block out the sound of my husband in the next room tossing his cookies--loudly. He had violated the First Law of Healthy Travel: Never fill your gas tank and your stomach at the same establishment.

After a week of complications caused by less-than-rational individuals (student with guns and 1000 rounds of ammo on campus, other students expressing desire to cause severe bodily pain to said gun-toting student), weather (flooding, trees falling, wind whipping the door open while I tried to fill the wood-burner, daughter waiting out tornadoes in the basement of her dorm in Kentucky), quirky job searches (first candidate cancelled, second candidate got stranded at O'Hare, second candidate finally arrived 12 hours late and had to have all appointments rescheduled), classes (graded 28 essays in just 24 hours so they'll be out of the way when the next 48 papers come in today, and let me just say that at this point I don't ever need to see a work of literature described as "relatable" or, even worse, "really relatable"), and sheer bad luck (choosing the shower stall with no hot water after a hard workout on a very cold day, knocking all the pens on the floor not once but twice while reporting the shower malfunction at the main desk of the rec center, dropping all my dirty sweaty workout clothes on the floor while picking up the pens)--after all that, I was really looking forward to the husband's return from his travels and a good long restful sleep.

Ha! And again I say, Ha! I was still awake at 3 a.m., and the alarm rang at 6:30 as usual. Today's forecast calls for no guns, no floods, no candidates, and no vomiting--which will make those 48 student drafts so much more bearable. All I have to do is stay awake and go through the motions and before you know it I'll be able to close the book on this bizarre week--and not a moment too soon!

No comments: