The good outweighed the bad, but the bad is soooo annoying

Day one is over and done with.  I think it was a pretty successful day, especially considering we didn't even have doors on the building last week.  Most of the ceilings had ceiling panels, I didn't see any exposed wires, and I had a functioning door.  Perhaps the best part is that it was 90 degrees out today and the AC in my room was functioning and comfortable, even with a southern exposure window.  The walls reach the ceiling and I am not at the top of a stairwell anymore.  All of that stuff is good.

However, there is no power to the outlets in the front of the room, so I can't really run my computer.  Granted, it's not going to be that useful until they put the data drops in so we have internet access and my Eno board and projector are installed.  The exposed concrete floor is a lovely shade of grey (I like spelling that color with an 'e' rather than an 'a').  I also like the fine, powdery dust that coats everything, regardless of how often you wipe surfaces off.

Honestly, though, as annoying as all of those little things are, it was a good start to what I hope will be a great year.  Now I just need to figure out what I'm actually teaching tomorrow.  Can't play name games and logic puzzles for the next 179 days.

My daughter has successfully completed three days at kindergarten.  Day one there was no fear getting on the bus.  She has a favorite person to sit with on the bus.  I hope for his sake he enjoys the company, because subtlety does not work on her and it's close to an hour long bus ride in the morning.

Can't open the school cause it's got no doors

After a long summer of watching weekly photo updates of the renovations taking place in my school, I was informed that our rooms would be open for us starting today.  This is the actual quote from the email, "On Friday, August 20^th you can get into your classrooms to begin preparing for the 2010 – 2011 school year."  If you read that, you might think, as I did, that everything was ready to go.  I can work on setting up the room.  I can get stuff up on the walls.  I can organize my desk and storage areas.  In other words, I headed to school ready to get some work done considering that classes start in about a week - August 30.  As I enter the middle school's temporary office location in the high school, the assistant principal looks at me and says with a slight chuckle, "You might be able to do some work in your room, I think you have floors."  Long story short, my room is basically finished.  It's painted, the flooring is down, and storage is in place.  It's just missing minor things like my Eno board (IWB), whiteboard, or even the chalkboard I tried to save from being tossed out.  Some lights were on, but there are no light switches.  I have a lot of desks and such in my room, but I noticed that they were all labeled from other teachers' classrooms.  Suffice to say, I didn't get any work done.


But my classroom is in better shape than other parts.  I have flooring, other rooms just have concrete.  I have a door, the school has large pieces of wood in the entry way.  The doors are supposed to come on Friday, and they are supposed to open to students the following Monday.  I can't believe how many changes have happened to the structure of the school, and I'm excited to have walls that reach the ceiling, a door, and windows, but I can't say that I'm all that confident that the school will actually be able to open in time.  Once it's ready to go, I think that these changes are going to have far reaching benefits to the school, both academic and in the general atmosphere.  My main concern for now, however, is how I'm going to teach without any writing surfaces on my walls.  Should be interesting.

I thought butchers ground meat

Tomorrow is my daughter's 5th birthday, next week she starts kindergarten, and I asked her what she wanted to eat for her birthday.  She chose tortellini, which involves making the pasta fresh and hand folding each tortellino (4 semesters of Italian taught me that tortellini is the plural and saying tortellinis is wrong).  I use the same recipe my grandma used and passed along through my mom and probably originated at least with my great grandma from Bologna and it's always been my favorite food.  I've made it three times now.  The first time turned out decently, but I couldn't get ground veal at the grocery store, so I used their meatball mix which included beef, pork, and veal.  It wasn't quite tender enough.  Last time I bought a piece of veal and ground it up myself in the food processor.  This worked well, except the gristle didn't grind well and left chunks that I incompletely picked out of the mixture as I was folding.  (There was also the side issue of drying them in the oven so the cats wouldn't eat them and forgetting they were there when I heated up the oven for something else.  Baked pasta that has not been boiled yet is disgusting and no amount of sauce or cheese can save it.)  On Monday I went to get ingredients and they had ground veal, but not pork.  I asked the butcher if they had ground pork and she responded that they were out but a truck was coming in on Tuesday.  At this point, many responses flew through my head, all with the common idea that "you are a butcher," "you cut meat for a living," and "don't you have some sort of meat grinder back there?"  Then my thoughts turned to why they had to wait for a truck to bring in ground pork.  With all of that big equipment back there, you have to do more than use the big heated plastic wrap dispenser.  I eventually asked if they could grind some and was met with the reply of, "I guess, but you'll have to wait for it.  How much do you need."  The words themselves weren't so bad, but the total lack of initiative or desire for customer service was.  I asked for my half pound and saw that it was only $1.50/pound.  I don't think they gave me the best quality ground pork; we'll see.  Since I moved here, I've tried avoiding this grocery store because there always seems to be a general atmosphere of inconvenience exuding from the employees whenever they are asked for something.  I refuse to use the deli because they are outright hostile and nobody wants hostility mixed in with their cold cuts.  But this latest episode just confirms my idea that there is something wrong with that store.  Even though it was recently renovated, the only real improvement was the addition of buying beer in six-packs (this state has the weirdest liquor laws).  I'm sticking with Giant.