Woman On Fire

I know posting has been down to an all-time low here lately, and for that I'm sorry. I just don't how many ways I can say "I'm not dead yet, but I'm fresh out of blog fodder" without making your heads explode. I know *I'm* getting tired of hearing that, and it's my blog!

School has been a bug-bear. I seem to have the royal knack for pissing people off lately. There's a lot of pressure on teachers these days -- it seems like if we sneeze, we piss a parent or three off. I have a child who is a Jehovah's Witness, and while we don't want to offend the family, we DO still have to teach the child about holidays and the like. If for no other reason because we teach calendar skills, and if we ask what the holiday in March is, the answer would be St. Patrick's Day. That is not a deliberate slight to people who don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but we can't NOT teach that because one family doesn't approve. You know what I mean?

My new Girl Scout troop is going well -- there are 17 of them! I was worried that I wouldn't have enough to make up a troop (which is five) and here I am with one of the largest troops in our area! I'm liking it. Most of them seem very excited to be there, and they seem to be happy with all of the things we've done so far. I've got some not-so-attentive parents, but I chalk a lot of that up to the fact that I don't see them every meeting.

Juggling Freak's birthday is next week. I was torn with what to get him this year, and seriously considered a unicycle. He, understandably, wants to TRY OUT a unicycle first to make sure he doesn't kill himself on it. This sounds awfully cautious of him. This is also the man who wants to flamethrower our big oak tree in the backyard because it sheds bushels of leaves no matter WHAT season it happens to be. This is also the man who got on a wild hair at a woodpecker who was pecking our house, and would have killed it, had we actual firearms in the house and not just a black powder replica. Now, I freely admit that by the end of that particular situation, I would have gleefully killed that woodpecker myself for pecking my bedroom eaves at seven in the damn morning every Saturday. Instead, we tried all the things the avian vets recommended: nasty-tasting sprays, decoy birds, changing the wood out. None of that worked. JF finally paintball-gunned it away. I hope he didn't kill the bird, but I also hope he's too scared to ever come back.

Offspring is tempermental. It's the age. Half the time, she pretends we're not there, and when she's forced to actually --UGH -- *interact* with us, she does a lot of eye-rolling and grunting. Then when she wants something, I hear "Mommy...." She hasn't called me Mommy since she was about seven. Not unless she's angling for something. We've actually all been sick, and she's been more lovey since being sick. I think we all sort of revert to childhood when we feel unwell, and she's holding true to that.

Speaking of sick, we've all been passing around a virus of some sort within our family. I have spent most of this week with sinus congestion of massive proportions, so much so that I had supressed hearing in one ear due to cloggage on Wednesday. My throat has been so raw that I have honestly LOOKED FORWARD to taking NyQuil just for the numbing effect. I took Mucinex, which tastes like bug spray, just to get some relief. This illness, whatever it is, has kicked our collective asses in a MAJOR way this week. My throat is no longer on fire, but JF has been stumbling around with fevers of 102 and 103. Not good in adults. I'm surprised he's been able to function. I know I got all muzzy-headed, and I wasn't battling fever, just congestion.

So, that's all I got. Not much. Still alive, though not really feeling like "alive" fits after this week. Just surviving.