Mine sucked. How was yours?
or, Why does my life Hate America?

Friday: First day of Summer School. Yes, yes, I am aware of the absolute stupidity of starting summer school on a Friday. Yes, I can only assume someone in charge somewhere is also aware of it. But they are giving us today off, and needed to make up for it somehow so the kids got a full week. Of course, that means the students in class Tuesday when things kick back up again will be very different from the ones who showed up Friday. I know this because fewer than half of the students on my class lists were present Friday; although during the course of each block (summer school is two two-hour blocks a day) many newly registered kids came into class. Turns out we registered nearly 200 students who were not foresightful enough to sign up for summer school before the end of the school year.

Once I could actually settle down and get some teaching in, it wasn't so bad. But there was mess after mess involving trying to get an accurate count, ex-ed students I don't know what to do with because the district hired no ex-ed teachers to find IEPs or discuss accomadations with us, taking attendance on-line with new and different logins, students roaming the halls because, well, that's what they do. Then there was the mess with trying to distribute bus passes.

See, my school district relies very little on "yellow" buses when it comes to high school kids; instead, we provide the kids who don't live within walking distance (2 miles) a county bus pass, and they ride the county buses instead. This is, first of all, a huge expense for the district. Second of all, it is very difficult to get right on a day like last Friday, when there are kids from all over the city, most of whom are not from our school, and many of whom just registered that morning. It doesn't help that the summer school principal--one of our usual APs--is not very good in charge of things. She was last summer's summer school prinicipal, and last year was bad, but this year she seems to have forgotten the lessons she learned that made most of last summer bearable. So you end up with her very explicit PA instructions to dismiss the students, and the summer school assistant principal, being mobbed after dismissal by students who never got their bus passes, shouting "GO BACK TO YOUR CLASSES! YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN DISMISSED!"

After the halls had finally cleared, I said to another teacher, "That was a circus." She said, "I was going to call it someting else. It also starts with a C."

Friday afternoon was not bad. I stayed late after school and got some grading and planning done, and then I went to hang out at Panera and read for a while. Sarah had the day off and preferred me out of the house, so I complied. (Sarah's parents were supposed to come visit this weekend from Denver, but, we found out Monday, they had to cancel, since her dad had carpal tunnel surgery the week before without calling to tell us!) I picked up some rabbit veggies and then got the dog from day care and went home. We watched Pieces of April, from the Netflix, which we subscribed to after cancelling the Showtime. Without any premium channels, just about the only movies we can get on the TiVo are from IFC or commercial channels. :( The movie was okay, but ended about how you'd expect.

Saturday: We spent the morning and afternoon clearing out the overgrown brush and weeds and the occasional maple tree sapling in the back by the alley, in the space where we're hoping to put in a parking slab this fall. It was hot and deathly humid. We stuffed nine-nine--of those tall lawn bags with, er, stuff we pulled out. We crammed them all into Sarah's Corolla and I drove off to the self-service place where you can dump your vast quantities of lawn and garden waste, only to find out that they were closed. They were supposed to be open until 4 PM, but I was one of a pretty steady stream of cars and pick-ups filled with debris pulling up and reading the sign on the gate that offered no explanation for the closure, just a statement that it was closed.

It was already starting to rain when I got back to the house (the rain is important here), so I knew that 1) we couldn't just leave the bags sitting outside to get wet through if there was a chance we'd have to drag them back to the dump next week, and 2) they couldn't sit in Sarah's car all weekend. So the bags got crammed into empty corners of the garage.

After I showered and felt a little calmer about things, we decided to order pizza for our own little July 3 spectacular. As we sat down to order, I heard a "drip." And another one. And another. Turns out, water was just pouring down the living room wall. This was in the same place where we'd had some minor leak damage earlier in the spring, and just that past Monday had had the roofers out to repair. Turns out they made it worse. A lot worse.

I had to rip open walls in the crawl space in our bedroom to put in 3-gallon diswashing tubs to catch the rain (we had no buckets). In the pouring rain I climbed up the ladder to pry off some of the aluminim soffet to let the water trapped in there drain out. I called and left a polite but very firm message on the roofing company's answering machine. And the pizza was late--way past the hour they'd promised. Grr.

Things seemed to settle into a mild tizzy, rather than a panic. We were catching most of the water, we thought. At least, there was no more water running down the wall. (I was also thankful that, you know, it wasn't blood--that would have meant an entirely different set of problems.) I toweled off. Then the pizza place called and apologized and said the pizza would be free.

Did I mention that this whole time I had a horrible, pounding migraine?

I did set the alarm for 3 AM so I could dump the water if necessary from the tubs we were catching it in, but it most have stopped raining sometime between 1 AM and 3 AM, since the tubs were not full and there was no dripping, so I went back to sleep.

Sunday: The weather stayed mostly dry; Sarah mostly slept; I mostly read. Our original plan was to stay out late and watch fireworks at the local park Sunday night, since we both had Monday off and could relax. But Milwaukee, in its infinite wisdom, has all of the city parks doing Fourth of July crap today on the fifth. We still haven't decided if we're going out tonight or not.

We went out Sunday, though (after shutting the crazy dog in her crate), for dinner and to see a movie. No, not Fahrenheit 9/11, which would have been patriotic, I suppose. Not even Spider-man 2. We saw Saved! down at the cheap theatre (very good, recommended). Afterward we grabbed some frozen custard and watched the various fireworks displays from the southern and western suburbs from a distance as we drove home.

The dog came out of her crate, and wouldn't go potty. She was spooked by the fidiots (the same kind of fidiots I ranted about last year) setting off fireworks all over the neighborhood. I even walked her around the block a few times, for about half an hour, in the almost middle of the firggin night, but she wouldn't even mark anything. Arrrrgh. And the fidiots kept shooting of the firecrackers; the air smelled like sulfur all around the neighborhood.

And that's just the first three days of this holiday weekend. Now I'm sitting here waiting for the roofing company to call and hoping that the grayness outside doesn't turn into any more frigging rain. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Rosemary's sucked too.