4/1/09

A day wasted

April 1st has come and gone and I did not get a single prank played. Sitting in solitude before a monitor doesn't lend itself to tomfoolery and I don't think the kids whose papers I was grading would find it all that funny.

My Sylvan kids were April Fooled out by the time I got them. Now that I work the last two hours of the day, I tend to get the high schoolers who are too cool for that sort of thing. And I did not even want to get the girls started.

I wish one thing had been a colossal joke, however. Our hot water heater is out and is inconveniently located behind a wall panel behind my scrapbooking/piecing table in my overstuffed crafting closet. Dowlan and I spent almost two hours last night getting stuff moved around, picked up, put away and tossed so we could get to the panel. Before I reveal the shocking secret, some backstory needs to come into play.

The year I started teaching, I had a huge classroom and a small budget. And let's not forget that, as an elementary music teacher, I did nine shows a year and all the backdrops, props and set pieces, while minimal, were still part of my job. Fortunately for me, one of my mom's friends retired that spring after teaching elementary music for something like thirty years. Mom brought me a van-load of her bulletin board and scenery pieces. Some of it was really funky vintage stuff. A lot of it was handmade.

I taught four years and quit when Charlie was born. Dowlan had just replaced our hot water heater with a tankless unit, so I filled the rest of the hot water heater closet floor to ceiling with large tubs of teaching materials, stacks upon stacks of laminated decorations and poster and bags containing fourteen years' worth of ballet, tap and jazz costumes. It has been in that closet for nearly three years now.

We opened the wall panel to discover all my teaching materials covered in rat crap. Covered. Giant flying cockroaches kept attacking as we tried to figure out how to handle the mess. (Yes, I know they're technically palmetto bugs. No, that doesn't make my irrational fear of them suddenly dissipate.)

Yeah.

We worked on it til after midnight then decontaminated ourselves, closed it back up with some killer in there and then watched reruns way into the night because there was just no sleeping that off. I left for work at 7:30 this morning and got home at 8:30 this evening to a trashed house and a tired husband who has finally made it to the hot water heater and is trying to now figure out what is wrong with it.

Oh, and did I mention that my in-laws are coming tomorrow night for an extended weekend stay?

4 comments:

Betsy Hart said...

Man alive woman.... I wish I could come over there and hug you. What a horrible day!!

Anonymous said...

I hate it when people say that it wasn't a cockroach--it was a palmetto bug. Hello! Same thing:

The American cockroach is also known as the water bug, flying water bug and, in some areas of the South, the palmetto bug. It is the largest of the common species, growing to 1.5 inches or more in length. It is reddish-brown, with a pale brown or yellow border on the upper surface of the pronotum. Both the male and female are fully winged. The wings of the male extend slightly beyond the tip of the abdomen, while those of the female are about the same length as the abdomen.

There is nothing worse than having one of those nasty buggers fly at you.

austinrosebuds said...

A cockroach is a cockroach is a cockroach. They seem to be supersized in this state.

Sorry for the crap (literally) - if only it had been an April's Fool joke.

Sending good vibes your way!

Deb said...

Ugh... that makes my skin crawl!!!