If you’re back in classes, yay! Share! But I was thinking about the olden days when we were kids and school started up again. What do you remember most vividly? Is there anything you miss about this time of year? Got and start-of-school photos to share?
Or not. Hijack away!
Happy Moanday!!
First! It’s good to be juvenile!
For me, eight years of Catholic school meant 8 years of fresh new uniforms. It was especially, er, special at the start of grades 7 & 8 because the girls got to wear skirts instead of the jumpers, so everyone knew who the most senior folk were. So, 2 pics to share - first day of first grade and first day of 8th grade.
Mom didn’t take photos every year, but I did have these scanned. I wish I had a picture from when I started 9th grade. It was my first year in public school and first time riding the bus. I made my own pink dress and matching purse and I found a Carnaby Street style pink hat to complete the ensemble. Now that I think back, OMG, how geeky was that?!?!? But I was 13 - cut me some slack! 
Yoiks! Did I behead myself???
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffeinatin’. YAWN ‘Tis 53 Amurrkin out and clear with a predicted high of 80 and mostly N.O.S. for the day. Spiffin’ da cave is the big item on today’s agenda. Sup shall be red beans and rice with andouille snausages. Belch/fart fest to follow.
New skool supplies were da bomb when I was a cub. Also, makin’ book covers out of brown paper bags. The fear of gettin’ that ONE teacher is also a big memory. This was elementary skool of course where one has only one teacher. There was ONE in every grade everyone dreaded.
Now I need more caffeine and to feed rumbly tummy. Then, onward into the day! Rah.
Happy Moanday Y’all!
Happy Moonday!
A misty 48 degrees this morning. Supposed to get up to 64.
I hope we can open the windows for a bit today. Ripple has horrible gas and the house needs a good airing out. I guess it’s from one of the meds he’s taking.
We didn’t stay long at the park this morning, nobody but Lucy was there and she leaves at 7. We almost didn’t go, I wanted to sleep in. Echo didn’t want to leave because something is under the shed and she wants to get it.
I’m waiting for the store to open so we can take the zen collar back, and pick up some more pill pockets. I’ve been putting Ripple’s pills in the cat’s pill pockets, and we are running low.
I have other stuff to do but it involves making decisions, and making decisions stresses me out.
I remember brown bag book covers.
Hope from the sorting. And Gordie greeted me by grunting, roiling over, and exposing himself. 
I do not miss the hell of school. I prefer the hell of adulthood,because whiskey.
You could tell which kids’ parents had money - they had fancy, store-bought book covers! Oh, how we envied them!!!
FCD called after getting his hair cut, asking me to meet him at the car shop. His car was pulling to the left and had a few other things that need to be addressed before we head to FL on Saturday, so I’m just back from that. Plus there are 2 loads of laundry on the lines - good day for outside drying!
The “bridge” repair is finally done, so no more detours to Leonardtown - huzzah!! We drove over to look at it - quite a long stretch of asphalt replaced, but it’s more of a big culvert than a bridge. Still, it’s repaired after 2 months. Thanks, Hurricane Isaias! 
I’m going to clean the inside of my car, since I have the whole garage to myself at the moment. I need to vacuum, and I want to clean the inside of the windshield. So off to tend to that…
Going back to school in the fall always meant that I was going to meet new people and make new friends. It was great and under appreciated at the time.
Up early despite being so tired, because cats. Ah, well, perhaps a nap may be added to the agenda.
Currently planned schedule items include putting away the dry dishes & basking in the glow of a clean kitchen. 
I also need to get some laundry done, and Monkey & Nikki both need their respective pointy toes clipped. Oughta brush their teeth, too, while I’m at it - I usually shoot for doing it all around the same time, so I don’t slide on toothbrushing frequency.
I have one very crowded rat enclosure that has. got. to. be. cleaned. today. If the youngsters are old enough, I’ll split them off … which means having two clean enclosures ready to go.
First, though, I need to locate some sort of hot food. I’m not often hungry first thing, but I’m ravenous this morning.
Oh, hey, look! The rain stopped & the sun is radiant this morning. Good day for laundry.
Okay, Monkey, I forgive you for waking me up.
New shoes! New clothes (my mom and grandma made a lot of my clothes). New 3 ring notebook! Usually it was too hot to wear new winter clothes though. Of course the school had no air conditioning. Almost every grade had 2 classes. One class for the good kids, and one class for the troublemakers. We found out who our teachers were for the next year on the last day of school. Example, our last day of 7th grade we were assigned our 8th grade teacher. Most teachers didn’t like me because my older brother was a troublemaker.
Went to pull the big trash cart back in, and wound up chatting briefly with an elderly gentleman who was out for his morning walk & stretching in the sun like an old tomcat.
Trash being retrieved, I have achieved one (1) adulting thing already, and it’s barely 9:30 a.m. 
quick, somebody pin a superhero cape on me!
Morning all. Ended up staying up until nearly 1am reading, then was awake by 7am, so nappage is a good possibility. This is “Fall Break” in North Ali-bama, the kids are off school so I’m only having one practice each this week, so if they want to travel, go for it. (I expect less travel than normal). Nothing much on the agenda today, 56F heading for 72F and no rain in the forecast.
FCM, I really don’t remember much about starting school, there was only one year when I rode the bus, all the rest of the time I walked to whatever school I was in. Parents never made much of a fuss about it that I can remember, so I guess I didn’t either.
shoe, enjoy cleaning the rat places…and BTW, how do the cats react to you having a platoon or so of rats living under the same roof?
doggio, way TMI !!! 
All y’all take care this Moanday.
It’s definitely Monday. Usual bus, which is normally a little late, was right on time this morning. On the morning I was running late because I’d had to double back for trivia like wallet, security badge, and transit pass. Watched the bus leave without me, fallback bus never showed. Good thing I can afford Lyft today.
Also had to cope with a minor grocery bag avalanche as I was trying to leave, which delayed me, and had forgotten to blend up breakfast and tuck the bottle into my bag (this has now been handled).
At the rate things are going, I’m afraid to ask what the calls are going to be like.
Up and drinking coffee. It’s already one of those days where I’m eyeballing the wine. Work is okay, but holy moly - overlygirl may have broken a wrist over the weekend, so we’ll be taking an impromptu orthopedist trip. I swear, that girl breaks more bones than anyone I’ve ever, ever met. Overlyboy is late on homework, but luckily not with the crazy teacher. That happens when you try to cram a full semester’s worth of knowledge into half a semester. Fortunately for him, most teachers are giving students clemency when it comes to late homework so long as they are timely with tests and the like. I’m jealous of my mom, who didn’t have access to my grades until parent-teacher conferences. Now I’ve got an app on my phone that makes it distressingly convenient for me to watch them fluctuate from As and Bs to Cs and Ds and up again. I really hate it.
As far as what I miss returning to school in my childhood, I used to love, love, love getting a new trapper keeper and making book covers for all my text books. I also delighted in the feel and smell of brand new books (when we weren’t reusing them, of course). I loved arranging everything so it was super neat and organized, but of course that went to hell when reality set in and I had actual work.
Anywho, first meeting of the day is done. It was scheduled for 30 minutes but I had my crap together enough it lasted 14, including the two minutes I spent fighting with technology. So that was nice.
I kinda hope overlygirl’s wrist is broken. That sounds awful, but sprains are longer to heal and can be more painful while breaks, especially in the growth plate, are usually more straightforward and don’t linger if you cast them quickly. We have a distressing amount of experience with broken and sprained limbs because she’s a crazy active kid, and inherited my tendency toward being accident prone. One year she managed to break six bones. She broke her ankle in February this year. I think the only reason she made it this long without another was the lockdown.
It won’t last long, but the inside of my car is clean!! I vacuumed everything, including a gazillion crumbs from the baby’s seat, and I got the 3 dead bug carcasses out of the back window. I found a dime under the passenger seat, along with random receipts that had slipped under there. My Aldi bags are organized and the inside of the windshield is clean… I hope. I won’t know till I face oncoming headlights.
I think the next chore will involve the house plants that I put on the front porch. Most need some serious pruning before I put them back on the windowsill. And I’m bringing a small table from the baby’s room to sit in front of the window next to me to hold the larger plants. It’s a messy chore, but it has to be done, so I shall do it. Go me! 
One other back-to-school memory - new crayons!! Oh, the beauty of that clean box with the unused array of colors!!
OK, back to work.
The ratties are all in the front mudroom, which has a door between it & the rest of the house - perfect for meeting customers without having them all the way IN my home. It also conveniently keeps the cats out. They mostly just treat the enclosures as kitty T.V. which is no problem.
But when Monkey gets the zoomies, well, he gets overly excited. He already knocked one tub over - luckily there were only a couple of adults, no nest of babies, and said adults were so stunned at having their world literally turned upside down that they were easy to grab and re-count.
So I mostly keep that door shut!
But once in a while, when Monk’s on his good boy behavior, I let him have some T.V. time. 
Nikki is uninterested - she has almost zero hunting instincts and is bored by rodents.
She did, however, love the birdfeeder I had outside the window at my old home.
I need to find a new shepherd’s hook and hang it up for everyone this winter.
Treated myself to breakfast out - a proper sit-down meal at a local old-people diner, with hot tea and a friendly waitress and everything. Thought I’d over ordered & that my eyes were bigger than my stomach, but nope. I was that hungry.
Bacon, eggs, sourdough toast with strawberry jam, and (most of) a pancake. Plus copious hot Lipton.
Kinda wish I’d worn a pedometer the last couple of days; I must have logged miles each shift, to have gotten this tired and hungry!
I always hated going back to school. Well, no, hated is too strong a word. But as a kid I absolutely lived for summer break, and usually faced the end of it with resigned annoyance, at least. Mom would take my bros and me to Sears or JC Penney or somesuch for a big pile o’ new clothes and Woolworths for pencils and erasers and notebooks, etc… and always a protractor, for some reason. The Back-To-School shopping trip was always depressing to me since it meant my glorious days of summer were coming to an end. School was ok once I got into it, I guess, but I’d be counting the days til next summer by the end of September.
So yesterday was kind of fun. The Food Network show “The Great Food Truck Race” is shooting in town, and I saw them setting up on the beach next to where I work on my way there. I took a walk over on my lunch break hoping for some good chow and maybe to sneak on-camera, but alas, the trucks were not open for business. But I did get to watch them shoot a challenge scene and got a good look at the host, Tyler Florence. Mrs. Wheelz was jealous. And I now know a spoiler on who the final four trucks will be next season.
Welp, about time for me to get dressed and hoof it on down to irk. Happy hump day, all!
I was not a skool fan. This side of the pond, uniforms are pretty common, so two of the three schools I went to had one- no fun new clothes for me. I don’t remember much about the first school, except that the teacher I had from age 6-8 was horrid (she really was- I found out later the parents had tried to get her forced out for bullying, but failed as she was also the head).
The second school, after we moved, was teeny tiny and pretty interesting in retrospect. I didn’t hate that one, and that’s about as good as you’d get for me and school. We had 28 students, in the whole school; we were split into one class of kids age 4-7 and one for 8-11, but within those we weren’t really divided up by age, and we kinda didn’t have a syllabus. Barring maths and English, classes had a tendency to just turn into weird projects and bizarre things regularly happened, like to the extent that people think I just had an active imagination as a child and got confused- I did have an active imagination (duh, I was a kid, they do) but nope, it was just a really odd place.
Grammar school just sucked and was boring and regimented and a bit anachronistic. Some of the teachers were nice, most of the students were pretty highly strung and overly cliquey. I couldn’t wait to leave. Ugh, I don’t miss that place.
Anyway, irk in…uhh… a skool… (how did that happen again?) was kinda OK I guess today. Madness is still continuing, but at least it was mostly stuff I knew how to deal with today, and the stoodits were fine.
Morning, all!
Most of my adult life I’ve been going to school every weekday. I’m been a teacher for 34 years. There has only been maybe 7 years I haven’t been ruled by the school day, and even then I was usually taking night classes. We are totally virtual this year, of course. They keep making noises about getting back into the classroom but there is no way that’s going to happen before the new year, and probably not then for the high school. I miss the kids, but don’t particularly feel like dying for them. They are disease-ridden plague-monkeys in the best of times. Now, I’d demand that they be dipped in Clorox before they are allowed to be within 20 feet of me in a classroom setting.
The weather has finally shifted into Fall mode, I think. Highs will be in the 60s next weekend, as opposed to the 100s last weekend. My sinuses may scream, but give me some cooler weather.
Have a great week everybody!