Today Lexi and I came home from our play date around 12:30. I pulled the car into the garage, put the emergency break on, turned the car off and got out. As I was unbuckling Lexi from her carseat I noticed that the car was moving backwards. Yeah, you read that right. It was rolling backwards and out of the garage with my kid half strapped into her carseat still inside. I couldn’t open the driver’s door because at the time my thought was “if I open the door, the door will hit the garage wall and wreck the car even more.” I tried to reach the emergency break through the window but couldn’t because now I was in danger of getting smushed into the garage wall. So the car kept rolling. And rolling. And rolling. Until it stopped. And it stopped because our neighbors have a nice picket fence directly across the alley from our garage. Okay, they used to have a nice picket fence. Now the have a mostly nice picket fence and a partly smashed up picket fence. The smashed part is about the same width as our car. At this point I am now back in the car and shaking because I looked at our neighbor’s yard and realized that if the fence hadn’t been able to stop the car, the car would have gone through the fence and over a retaining wall. With my kid in it. Don’t worry. Lexi’s fine. She thought it was pretty fun. I’m fine. Even the car got off with only a few dings in the bumper. And because we are honest people we left a note for them telling them to call us and offering to repair the fence. Several hours later they still hadn’t called but they were out back when we came home tonight. We went over, apologized (a lot) and they told us not to worry about it. Seriously. I broke their fence and their response was “it’s okay, we needed to replace it anyway.” So that’s the story about how we have the world’s greatest neighbors and how I am such a spaz.

Lessons learned today:

1. Always make sure the emergency break is completely engaged and the car is in gear.

2. Abby is a spaz.

3. If you are going to back your car into your neighbor’s fence make sure they don’t care and are planning on replacing it.

4. Honesty is always the best policy.

5. Shut the garage door before you get out of the car so if this happens again the car can only roll 3 feet and damage your own property.

Our laptop died. I’m not quite sure what happened but I came home from work to find Kevin on the desktop talking to tech support and the laptop showing the Mac equivalent of the blue-screen-of-death. Basically, the hard drive crapped out on us. Don’t know why. Can’t fix it. And can’t get all of my stuff off the computer. (Side note: Do not yell at me for not backing up all of my stuff somewhere else. I know the importance of this. We have a separate hard drive that the desktop is backed up to on a regular basis. I thought the laptop was getting the same treatment. Apparently not. D’oh.) Kevin made an appointment with the guys at the Genius Bar and they had to be the ones to break the bad news to us.

And tonight I realized how much I use the laptop, especially since I rarely use Kevin’s computer.

Want to take a guess how long we will last before buying another laptop? Here’s a tip - guessing in hours instead of days will give you better odds.

Yesterday I got sick. I thought it was allergies but then it turned into an ad for Nyquil. I took 2 of the nyquil, slept for 5 hours in the afternoon, woke up, did lesson plans and talked to Kevin for a while, then went back to sleep around 9:30. I slept until about 10 this morning. But I woke up in the middle of the night with 102 fever. Today I felt okay - not great - so I did stuff around the house, watched TV, worked on lesson plans and then I tried to go to bed around 10. Well, it’s 11:30 and I’m not tired. I should be tired but I can’t sleep. Part of it is because Kevin and Lexi are in Kansas and part of it is because of how much rest I’ve had in the last 24 hours.

When Lexi was born we got a whole bunch of coupons for various free offers. One of them was for a series of pictures at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. It was at “professional” photo studio (as opposed to JC Penny’s or Babies R Us). The deal at this place was if we came in for all 4 sessions they give us 1 picture from each session for free. The sittings are also free. Basically, they are hoping that we will buy a package of pictures for family and friends at each session. But their prices are really high (I think a 5×7 runs about $40 - sorry, I can get 10 pictures and 24 wallets from JC Penny for $30) so obviously we didn’t buy anything.

Today when we went in for the last photo shoot the photographer asked us how many outfits we brought. We only brought one. He made a comment a long the lines of “so this is only for the panel of pictures then?” It was in sort of a “thanks for wasting my time” tone. He took about 15 pictures of Lexi standing up - not really putting much effort into getting her to smile or making sure she was posed right for the picture. At one point I made the comment that she was leaning over sort of far and so he stopped and suggested we move her closer to the stool. He shot that one pose and then said, “well I think we got one you can use” and went to get the appointment book to schedule a time to pick a picture. Kevin asked if we could try some of her sitting. He let us, but didn’t tell us how to pose her, basically told us it wouldn’t look very good, and grudginly took about 5 pictures of her, again making the comment about thinking we got one good one. I know we didn’t get any good ones of her sitting since she was sitting funny and barely smiling in those.

Alright, so I know that we weren’t dream customers because we only came for the free stuff and had no intent of buying anything, but he still should have treated us like we were going to buy a huge photo package. He doesn’t know if I’m going to recommend him to my friends or come back for a family photo.

If you are looking for a photo studio in the twin cities, go to JC Penny’s in the Rosedale Mall. The actual sitting is fast, they let you change outfits 2 or 3 times, they take suggestions from the parents on poses, props, etc, and you can pick/order your pictures on the same day. On top of all that they are completely affordable. You can go to the website and get coupons for $3.99/picture sheet.

Don’t go to Ron Burg Photography.

…I think Lexi caught my cold, so now we have one sick little girl. She can’t really breathe through her nose, and she hasn’t quiet figured out how to breathe through her mouth (which if she wasn’t sick would be kind of cute too watch her try and do). She thinks sneezing is really funny (she always has) and now it’s even funnier because when she sneezes, we duck. She can really get some distance on those things.

Poor kid, hopefully, she’ll be feeling better in a day or so.

Friday morning I woke up with a cold. It was one of those colds they describe on the Nyquil bottle. And since I’m not the type teacher to plan a week or so ahead, I needed to go to work because I had nothing ready for a sub. I went to work hoping that I could work until 11:30 (lunch time) and then have someone cover my room for the rest of the day. Well that plan didn’t happen because 2 other teachers were already out sick. So I worked all day. All day with a fever, a headache, and 17 kindergarteners with absolutely no volume control. When it finally hit 1:00 and it was rest time, I made them all lay down and declared that nobody was getting off their mats until it was absolutely silent in the room. Rest time lasted 50 minutes. It took them that long to be quiet, but it was a nice long break for me. Normally, I only make them lay down for 20 minutes. I came home Friday and went to bed. Couldn’t sleep because I was too hot, then too cold, then too hot. By morning I thought I was feeling better. Got up to change Lexi and half way through changing her I started to black out. I grabbed a half-naked baby off the changing table and sat down in the chair. I called Kevin in to come help me. When he picked up Lexi I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t put a new diaper on her. It was a very strange feeling. Okay, so after that weird little episode, I felt better. I went to dog class, trained with Mazie, and then taught. Not a good plan. Came home and slept the entire afternoon. Woke up, had some dinner and pretty much went back to bed.

Today I feel much better. Hopefully Kevin and Lexi will not get what I had.

We were extremely busy before Christmas vacation so we decided to hold off on the office Christmas Party until after the New Year. Not a big deal. We got the invitation to the party yesterday and instead of it saying “bring a white elephant gift” or “bring a snack to share” it said, “bring a written list of your personal and professsional New Year’s resolutions” and “bring a list of what you have learned in 2005 that will help you grow both personally and professionally in 2006.” Apparently we are all going to sit around and share these lists. First of all, you don’t assign homework for a Christmas party. These are things we should be discussing during the first staff meeting of the year. Second, those types of lists are pretty cheesy and I don’t really know anyone who enjoys sitting around discussing them. Maybe I’ll get lucky and go into labor before the party so I don’t have to go.

Check these out:

Pavlov’s Dog

Gene Codes

Split-Brain

Chicken Farm

Tuberculosis

Lasers

Authors

Peace

Here’s a few more:

I’m Deb. Who are you?

You are Deb and you could drink whole milk if you
wanted.

Which Napoleon Dynamite character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

This isn’t a quiz but it’s worth checking out (you need quick time to run it)

And this one is a tribute to Steph.

I’ve been home sick for 2 days and there’s not much to do.

Look, I’m less of a nerd than I thought:

Here’s my W.Q. (Wierd Quotiant):

And I’m cooler than half the people.