I’m kind of feeling like I’m in the cheapest of cheap hotels in Orlando or some other Southern place where it’s still warm and there’s no air conditioning. I don’t know if I have a fever, but I’m boiling hot – Rob says he’s freezing though. I know that I have a bit of a cold, but this is mental. I mean, if I were in Orlando, why couldn’t Mickey Mouse at least be here to entertain me?

Today was Thanksgiving, so we went to my mom’s. There were 13 of us there, and the turkey didn’t stand a chance. I brought roasted carrots and these rolls. Which worked out fine, except for the fact that apparently our oven is an inferno. 375° for 20 minutes? Yeah, more like 10 minutes, maybe 12. When I checked them after 15 minutes the first batch was already starting to burn on the bottom. The second batch I left in for about 11 minutes and they were fine.

I’m trying to get myself geared up to work tomorrow. This is not something I’m looking forward to. Just because it’s a two-day week (yay!) so the kids are going to be super excited about that. SUPER excited.

And finally, thanks for the comments on my last post. I know that all my infertility posts are a little samey and boring, but it helps to know that there are people out there who actually read them, and care.

Thanksgiving is on Monday! That means Rob and I schlepping over to my parents’ (admittedly, now that they live in the same town as us, it’s less of a schlep – 15 minutes as opposed to 35) and having turkey with a dozen other people. 4 in my brother’s family, 5 in my sister’s (plus possibly whatever one of my sister’s kids’ friends who is staying at her house because they’ve been kicked out of their own place – I won’t comment on this), and my parents.
I will be bringing the rolls and the carrots and beets. We have tons of carrots and beets in our garden, so I’m going to pull them out and roast them up (my mom just boils the heck and nutrients out of any and all vegetables which wouldn’t be very delicious at the new house, because they have chlorinated City Water and no water filters) with some olive oil and pepper and hope that works out for people. As for the rolls, I think I’ll use this recipe, probably doubled.

Next week is going to be an interesting week, workwise. Monday, Thanksgiving, so no work. Tuesday and Wednesday, work as usual. Then Thursday and Friday are convention days. I’m really looking to the convention – one of my students is speaking on what it’s like to be in school when you are (high-functioning) autistic, and I look forward to seeing his presentation.

So. To my fellow Canadians, I say Happy Thanksgiving Long Weekend! I am thankful for plenty of things, and my readers are one of them.

I like my glasses – they’re a pretty good shape and colour for my face and they’re different from others I’ve seen. But I’ve had them for almost three years now and to me, that’s like wearing the same pair of shoes or top or something every day for three years in a row.

This morning I checked my insurance online and it turns out that they will pay up to $150 for glasses (yeah, this pair cost over $300 – I have terrible eyesight and they need to thin my lenses and all that business. Plus the frames themselves were fairly high priced).

Someone told me about Zenni Optical, though, and although I’m slightly skeptical about ordering glasses online, I’m also kind of… very excited about $8 for frames, with lenses and lens thinning included.

I like these ones, and these ones, and these ones, and I kind of like these ones. Actually looking through their website I can find probably about 20 frames that I like alot, in all the price categories (they go from $8 to $40ish). I could conceivably get four or five pair of glasses for less than $150.

This is something I’m going to have to give more thought to.
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So the other night before I went to bed I was complaining to Rob about how when I’m trying to read in bed, the pillows get all squooshed down and annoying and I’m not comfortable and I hate it wah wah wah I am a big whiny baby I know. And he said “Maybe we should get a couple of bed wedges. And I hollered “YOU PROMISED ME THAT YOU WOULD NEVER GIVE ME A WEDGIE! EVER! EVER IN OUR LIVES! AND NOW YOU WANT TO GIVE ME A BED WEDGIE?”

Not exactly my finest moment.

Man. I have been proper wiped out since the beginning of the school year. Totally and completely exhausted, both physically and mentally by the end of each day. I think it’s because of my class sizes. My smallest class is 29 students. My largest is 34. think about that. 34 12-year-olds, me trying to keep them all attentive, on-task, and not jumping off the discount classroom furniture (I think it’s discount. It must’ve been. Either that or it’s super old. Half my chairs and 2/3rds of my desks have something wrong with them). It’s a high-energy job, that’s for sure. I’d say that I wouldn’t change anything, but I would. I would change my class numbers to 24 instead of 34.

Today I confiscated four cellphones throughout the day. My neighbour across the hall took away three in the span of one hour-long class. I have nothing against the kids owning cellphones, but when they decide it’s time to start texting in class, it’s really very insulting.

AND THEN! I had two of my classes doing a project on wetlands. My instructions were clear. This is an individual project. Here’s the part of the textbook where you can find information. You can also use any other sources you can find, as long as you cite them. Here are the four topics I want you to cover when you’re making your brochure. Don’t copy directly out of the book – put things in your own words. Plagiarism isn’t cool.

So I picked up the projects today, and was checking them out – and in the first ten that I looked at, three had entire sentences just copied directly out of the book and off the Internet, and four of them had identical text. One of them did the work and the others copied off the first. I was all “Guys! How dumb do you think I am? Wait, don’t answer that.”

Mentally exhausting. Physically exhausting. And yet I love it.

I had a fairly crappy week, aside from the whole McDonald’s thing. I won’t get into it here because surprisingly there are some things that I don’t talk about on the Internet, but it was a sucky week, and Thursday morning was like the crap icing on the urinal cake.

Speaking of Thursday, it turns out that someone from McDonald’s read my blog post, so she contacted me and asked for me to give her the information as to which restaurant it was so that she could “fix things for you”. Of course then when I told her, she said “Oh! You’re in Canada! I can’t help you. Here are some phone numbers you could call though”. I don’t like calling phone numbers. I have trouble hearing, and I just hate the phone anyway. Seriously. What kind of website doesn’t have an email option?) Maybe I’ll write them a letter. Which will probably go ignored, but who knows?

Anyway. Friday turned out to be a fairly good day. Work went fine, there were no mishaps, and although I had detention duty, there was only one guy in detention and he was one of my favourite students who was only in because he’d forgotten to bring a pencil to his math class twice so there was no tomfoolery or anything.

I have been saving up for new clothes for a few months now. Yesterday I decided “Right, that’s it – no more of this wearing ratty old capris in near-freezing weather”. I might also have had some encouragement from Rob, who I daresay is getting tired of seeing me in the same bra nearly every day (I only have one bra that fits me, and then one other one that nearly fits so I wear it when the other one’s in the wash). The state of my underwear was deplorable, people. So although it pained me incredibly, we headed to the one and only Fat Lady Store in our town.

Luckily, they were having a sale, or what constitutes a sale in their world: Buy one, get 40% off on a second. Now, considering nothing in that store was below $50, I was still paying quite a bit, but I got:
2 sweaters
2 pr of pants
2 bras
some underwear and socks.

I also had a bra fitting to find out once and for all what my size is. Turns out my boobs are bigger than my head. No, really.

Rob pointed out the irony (is it real irony, or Alanis Irony ™?) of the “waiting area” where they have seats for husbands/friends of people trying stuff on in the dressing rooms to sit, relax, have a glass of water and read a magazine, the magazines available are in the ilk of “Shape”. Not that we Larger Ladies can’t be in shape (I know many who are in better shape than skinny people), but it’s kind of counterintuitive for a store whose income relies on people being plus-sized having magazines with articles along the lines of “What are the best fat burners for you? Find out here!”.

I would put up a few photos of my new clothes, but I’m not in a modelling mood right now, and I’m watching Medium (Everyone got haircuts. Ariel’s new haircut is kind of cute, but also kind of makes her look like a fish, especially when she cries).

About once every two or three months, on pay day, I go to McDonald’s and get breakfast. It’s wrong, but it’s soooo good. I decided that, after the week I’ve had, this morning was my time to have a sausage McMuffin. I left home a few minutes early, and went through the drive-thru.
When I drove up to the pickup window, the lady handed me my paper bag with the sandwich in it. Then she handed me the Coke I’d ordered (I needed caffeine but I refuse to drink coffee). The Coke which, it turns out, didn’t have the cover on properly.

You see where this is going.

Coca cola spilled all down my front, my pants, inside my shoes. My socks were soaked. My shirt was covered in brown liquid. I looked at the lady inside the drive-up window, who had watched this all transpire, and she closed the window and turned away.

I know. It’s McDonald’s. It’s not fine dining. But you’d think that if you work in the service industry and you see a customer being doused in drink due to something you did (or didn’t do), you would at least be trained to say “I’m sorry”. Not to close the effing window on them.

I stayed there, staring in the window, until she opened it up again and looked at me. “Um, this just spilled all over me, because the cover wasn’t actually on it”.

“Oh. Do you, like, want a… napkin?”

“That would be nice, yes. I think I’m going to need more than one napkin, though. The entire pop is spilled all over me.”

“Do you want to buy another pop?”

“Absolutely not. Shouldn’t I get a refund or something? Or another drink to replace the one that spilled all over me because the cover wasn’t on properly?”

“Well, no… I mean, I don’t know. I mean. Can you park and come inside? I’ll get my manager to come and talk to you in a couple of minutes.”

Now, if I didn’t leave right then, I was going to be late for work. So I said no, and left. Where I took off my socks and wore sticky-inside Coke shoes, wet pants, and a light green shirt with brown stains on it. Luckily I keep a cardigan at work, which I just slipped on (even though it didn’t really go with my outfit but whatever) but it was a warm day today and I was sweating within minutes. I taught my first class, and I had a prep second. I knew I didn’t have time to get home and change so I went to the dreaded Walmart and bought a new shirt. My pants had dried and were dark, so the pop didn’t show, but I absolutely needed to change my top.

So the $1.60 pop I bought (and didn’t get to drink) ended up costing me $30, plus however much dry-cleaning is going to be for these clothes. Plus I am trying to figure out how to clean dried, sticky pop out of the interior of leather shoes. I mean, I can’t just throw them in the washing machine. It’s absorbed into the “lining”, so even just a warm wet cloth isn’t going to work all that well.

On the bright side, the class I taught first period? I had them again fourth period. And one of the girls was like “Madame, did you change clothes? You were wearing different clothes this morning!” and I said “Yeah, this is a new thing I’m trying. I change between each class”. “Wow, Madame, you’re a total diva”.

So at least that made me smile. Because the rest of it was definitely not a nice way to start my day.