Yesterday

Yesterday was both brilliantly beautiful and heartbreakingly awful. Tuesday night, I started feeling a little under the weather with a sore throat and didn't sleep well. I woke up feeling kind of mentally hazy on Wednesday morning but made it to school wearing the correct color for my field day team (the 12 of us were the polka-dot team). We spent an hour in the air conditioned school auditorium where I sneezed nearly non-stop as we watched skits and sang together as an entire K - 12 school body to start the day. Then we spent from 8:30 til 12 playing a variety of games outdoors. I had an awesome team of kids who worked together and even EXCEEDED the maximum number of points possible for the day! The little kids were cracking me up and the older kids did an awesome job of looking out for them. And the weather couldn't have been more perfect. It was sunny and breezy and gorgeous. It was also the third day in a row we had with no rain!

During our 30 minute snack break around 10:00, I managed to sneak away and call Aswan, hoping that his interview would be finished. It was. His visa was denied. After I got over the initial 5 minutes of feeling crushed, I was fine. We knew chances were slim anyways. The reason they gave him for being denied was that he didn't provide convincing evidence of a desire to return to Indonesia (thus becoming an illegal immigrant) after his visit. There are pros and cons to him coming and also to him staying. So though we're a little disappointed, we're alright with the outcome.

Having the distraction of field day and lots of little kids to keep track of kept me from dwelling on it, so the timing was actually better than I expected - I had been dreading all these things hapepning on the same day.

Field day lasted until 2:30, but I got permission from the powers that be to excuse the yearbook team from the after-lunch portion of the day so that we could work. We were in the freezing cold computer lab from 12:30 until 9. It was awful. I just got sicker and sicker throughout the day, watery eyes, runny/burning nose, man voice, blurry vision, sore throat, mildly dehydrated from the morning, but water hurt my throat, etc. We had no dinner, so we were extremely hungry. Four students had to leave before 5, so that left four of us to finish everything.

I spent about the last 5 hours there fighting a bad, grumbling attitude. I mean, I wasn't supposed to be teaching that class in the first place. And each time I would check in with the students throughout the year on the progress of their pages, they'd tell me they were finished. They spent a good part of the year on Facebook and watching Lady Gaga on Youtube. So now we were all having to pay the price. I managed to keep my mind out of that gutter most of the time, but it got harder and harder as time wore on and my stomach got louder and technology kept failing us. Two pages that had already been completed somehow got deleted by the network server and had to be remade. Some pictures were missing. Some weren't in the right place. As I proofread pages (which had ALREADY been proofread and corrected by the principal), I was finding names mis-spelled, grammar errors, lots of small inconsistencies, etc. Then we realized that we didn't have anything with enough capacity to transport 135 pages of Photoshop files to the printer. After several moments of panic, we ended up using one student's 160G iPod. But the school computers wouldn't read it. So we had to use my laptop to hack onto the server, connect her iPod to my computer, and use that to transfer the files. But it too failed three times, and I ended up having to reformat her iPod (thus deleting all her files off it) before I could put anything on it. We finally got it to work and went home. Finally.

I came home, ate dinner, and went to bed before 10. Some days you just need to.

Today I have a fever and I am sweating bullets, but I only have to teach 3 classes, so it's all good.