winged orange

I caught a cold. In April. A no good, stuffy-nosed, can’t breathe for crap COLD. I thought maybe I would get lucky and it would be allergies, because my car is covered in green pollen and I’ve been sneezing like a banshee, but my swollen lymph nodes beg to differ. At this point, I’m hoping it IS a cold and not either the a.) stomach virus, or b.) strep throat that’s going around school. Occupational hazard of working with kids, I guess, especially special-needs kids who aren’t necessarily really great with the personal hygiene anyway. If I had a nickel for every time I said, “Go Purel your hands please, bud,” I’d be a rich a lady.

You know, I really like my job, but it’s amazing how my life has become like a game of leapfrog from one weekend to the next since I started working at the school. Part of it is that working my regular job and then working two hours at the tutoring center immediately after is kind of tiring, but most of it, I think, is that my kids are TOUGH. It’s a little crazy; we only have six kids in our room, and three staff (one lead teacher, two TA’s), and it’s still tough. Each of the kids has his own individual challenges that we need to keep on top of. Two of them are mostly just spacey; they tend to “delay their task” a lot by kind of zoning out and they need a lot of redirection. I mentioned the one that’s really work-resistant 90% of the time. I spend most of my time tricking him into doing his work, or sitting with him on his earned break because he didn’t do his work and therefore didn’t earn his break. We have one that’s more ADHD/learning disabled than Aspie, and he’s one of the toughest because he can’t seem to focus on his own work. He’s all over the place, all up in everyone else’s stuff, and he’s so used to individualized attention that he doesn’t work independently at all anymore. One of the little guys is one of my favorites; he’s such a cute kid. He has anger problems, though – in particular, he’s really NOT a good sport, and he’s been known to throw chairs when he loses a video game.  His deal mostly with work is that he gets really off-topic really fast. The last one is a pretty good kid, works pretty well by himself, but has some more classic Aspie/autistic behaviors and some pretty crazy family issues. He probably tries my patience the least.

Anyway. My whole point here was to say that even though I’m feeling icky, I’ve been assured by the lovely ladies at Woolbearers that there will be an Ashford Kiwi waiting for me on May 2, come hell or high water. Happy early birthday to ME. :D

Whenever I haven’t posted for a long time, I forget that I went to school for five years and I forget that I’m sort of able to connect events (however disparate) together in paragraph form. When this
happens, I write a list.

• Part of the reason I haven’t been around is that I upgraded WordPress. For the first time in the four or so years I’ve been running it…I didn’t like it. I couldn’t find anything, all of my nice little buttons in the Write interface (like bold and italicize and photo and blockquote) were gone, and it took me three days to figure out how Akismet picks up spam. Really, the upgrade wasn’t nice to me. Then it occurred to me that something might be wrong with my upgrade, and sure enough, there was. Today was the first day I had a chance to sit down and sort it out. I like it now. :)
• My birthday is in twelve days, according to my desktop countdown widget. I’ll be 24. I’m not sure how I feel about the “being 24″ part, but I love the part where I get free Cold Stone, and get to go get my spinning wheel. I’m probably just going to Mount Holly to get it at Woolbearers rather than driving to Maryland Sheep & Wool (sorry, Elinor!). I really, REALLY wanted to go to MDS&W, but with the price of regular gas being $3.29 a gallon in Jersey and much, much higher in PA and probably MD, I literally can’t afford it. I kind of figure a lot of the same vendors will be at Rhinebeck anyway, and I’m definitely going to that. Elinor, come to Rhinebeck! It’ll be fun!
• Lori had another yeast infection in her throat. I need to make an appointment for her to go back to the vet to be cleared.
• I still like my job. The kids are tough sometimes – one, in particular, is such a great kid when he’s in a good mood. But that’s one day out of maybe two school weeks. The rest of the time, he’s busy refusing to do any work, ripping up his homework, and being a brat. Our school psychologist says he’s one of the most disabled kids we have, and she’s totally right. He’s smart as a whip, but he’s lazy and he’s very rigid and if it’s new, he doesn’t want to try it at all. The other five kids all have their days, but usually they’re pretty happy and smiley and they’ll do their work without too much of a fight.
• I’m teaching Math now instead of English. Did I mention that?
• Know what’s weirder? I like it. And I must be okay at it, because four of my kids had tests so far, and three of them got A’s. The other one got a 59, but that’s because he didn’t show his work when he multiplied and got all mixed up, so I retested him and made him show his work, and he did fine – brought his test up to a 93!
• I’m moving back home in July. How suck is that? :P I can’t afford to live on my own anymore, though. I mean, I can, but Scott and I will never be able to save anything, and I am tired of working three jobs and having nothing to show for it. So he’s going to get a studio, and I’ll stay with him some nights, as well as pay his cable and his electric. It’s not ideal, but it’s only for a year, at which point I’ll hopefully either be back in school or in a better-paying job.
• I’ve been knitting! Not a whole huge lot, because it seems like I only really have time to knit on the weekends. But it’s something. I’ve been working on Pepto for one of my friend Kate’s boys. Whoever doesn’t get Pepto will get Tums. I went to visit the kiddos in March, and I had such a good time. I kind of wanted to sneak one home, but Kate told me I could only have one if I brought him back when he was through being colicky. Meh, not a good deal. ;) Anyway. Picture of the Pepto-in-progress:

If you click on the photo, you can see all my notes in Flickr, which are mostly about my spiffy knitting bag in the background and less about the knitting. ;)

And that’s about it. What’s been going on with you?