My plan for the weekend was simple: take no work home and instead spend time cleaning the house, getting caught up on some reading, and attending a baseball game. The plan started going to pieces on Thursday morning with the onset of the Defective Sub Calls, or maybe it was Wednesday night with the Furnace Clang of Doom, or maybe it started in January with Search Committee Madness. At any rate I find myself at home today with a pile of grading, no radio, no car, and no way to make my work-free weekend a reality unless I run away from home on foot in the shoes I almost abandoned in California because they're falling apart.
Where to begin? Search Committee Madness resulted in no hire, so this week I spent a number of hours I cannot reveal interviewing internal candidates to serve in the interim. I collected poetry analysis papers in my American Lit class on Monday, but despite all the interviews, I made good progress on grading so I should have been able to finish up and bring no work home this weekend.
But I hadn't counted on the Furnace Clang of Doom. I don't know when the furnace started clanging because I was in California at the time, but last weekend my son-in-law, who can fix anything, diagnosed the problem, ordered the part online, and devised a way to make the furnace continue to provide heat without the clang while we await the arrival of the part. (For peace of mind, I heartily recommend marrying someone who can fix anything, and if you can't marry him yourself, get your daughter to marry him or, as a last resort, try kidnapping--except a person who can fix anything might possess a MacGyver-like ability to wriggle away.)
Anyway: the Furnace Clang of Doom started up again on Wednesday night. The clangs were timed perfectly, arriving just as I was about to drift off to sleep. I don't know how to make the clanging stop so I tried to rouse my husband, who could sleep through the Apocalypse. He resisted alertness, muttering odd and unhelpful phrases about turning socks inside out, but I finally applied sufficient motivation to get him to attend to the clanging and make it go away sometime after midnight.
The Defective Sub Calls started at 5 a.m. No, they weren't calling for Defective Subs; the calls themselves were defective. Normally, early-morning robo-calls offer the resident substitute teacher an opportunity to press 1 for "sign me up!" or press 2 for "go away and leave me alone!" These calls offered no robo-voice and no options, and they kept cycling around again and again, ringing us urgently to alertness about every six minutes.
With all that clanging and ringing and midnight stress, I was in no condition to grade a zillion papers on Thursday, and Friday was totally clogged with meetings, which is why I have a pile of poetry analysis papers to grade this weekend.
But I could put them off until tomorrow and spend the morning cleaning house while listening to my favorite Saturday-morning NPR shows...except the radio suddenly isn't working. How can I clean without "Car Talk" and "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me?"
I could zip off to the nearest little town and buy a cheap radio...except my husband's car wouldn't start this morning and he was in too big a hurry to jump the battery so I told him to take my car to the Farmers' Market and he won't be back until around 4 this afternoon, long after my favorite NPR shows are over.
I could walk to the baseball game. Let's see, 17 miles each way...if I start now, I can probably get there before the seventh-inning stretch if my walking shoes don't fall to pieces first.
So I find myself in a silent but dirty house with papers to grade and floors to sweep and miles to go before I sleep and no way to get there except by walking.
This calls for a walk in the woods with the dog and the camera. Spring is coming! I welcome the season with open arms as long as it doesn't clang, ring, analyze poetry, or demand an interview.
4 comments:
“I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning I tripped on the skateboard and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.” (From the book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day)
I listent to npr on my computer when I'm in the sunroom. Is your computer near enough to give it a try? (It's weirdly lagged compared to broadcast, but if you aren't walking between rooms with a broadcast radio in one and your computer in the other, it's fine.)
Thanks, but one of the disadvantages of living where we live is that we get reliable radio reception in only one room in the entire house, and streaming anything over the internet simply isn't possible with a slow dial-up connection. That's the price we pay for living in the sticks.
"Car Talk" hereabouts was interrupted by "live coverage of talking heads giving opinions on Libya." That probably should have been written all in caps..."LIVE COVERAGE..." I listened for a few minutes and then went outside to dig in the garden.
BTW, I typed "Libia" into google and got "Problems with swollen libia!" See your gyn for details.
D.
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