Effective immediately, there is going to be a large and angry Viking armed with several sharp and spiky implements of bodily destruction guarding the door to my classroom. If you happen to need or want anything from me, that’s fine; you just have to get by Sven. His name will be Sven; I just decided that. I may feed him some LSD from time to time, too; don’t worry about that. Norsemen don’t get addicted to things.

This is honest truth: I don’t mind helping people in my building with things. It’s part of my damn job. But holy shit. I got nothing at all done yesterday, and with two work days left until the school year starts (after which point, as every teacher knows, nothing organizational will get done until December) I am seriously running up against the limits of how much any sensible human being can get done in the time I have left, and I have much much more to do this year than I ordinarily would at the beginning of the school year. I’ve said it before, many times: the week before school starts is my busiest week of the year, and this week has been substantially worse than usual in terms of how much I’ve had to do and how few hours I’ve had to do it in. The crowning moment of yesterday’s ridiculousness came when my former assistant principal called me from his new job to ask me something about a spreadsheet I’d created for him to keep track of disciplinary issues. While I was answering his questions for him (which quickly devolved into me saying “email it to me; I’ll fix it and send it back, because that will be quicker”) my current assistant principal came into my room… to ask me about the exact same spreadsheet.

And, again, because 1) it’s true and 2) I know my co-workers read this: I don’t mind. I really truly honestly and totally am happy to help people when they need help from me. But I also don’t want my kids skinning me and dancing on my corpse next week because I didn’t manage to get ready for the new school year properly, and I’m down to two days to get about four days of work done. Thus: my new friend Sven.

He’ll be answering the phone and handling my email, too, by the way.

(For real, though: I was in my classroom for about 2 1/2 hours today, because I was on Daddy Duty this morning and couldn’t get in before early afternoon, and then had to cut out before I wanted to because it’s Friday and the building was closing a bit earlier than usual. In that two and a half hours I got about six hours of work done, and still looked around before I left my room and could only see shit that I still had left to do. And, unfortunately, money that I had to spend, too. Christ, the last few weeks have been expensive.)

UPDATE: About fifteen minutes ago I took advantage of it being slow time at OtherJob, opened up Wunderlist on the iPad, and started putting together a to-do list for Monday and Tuesday. It is currently at 38 items, and that is not because I went crazy breaking things up into subtasks. Fifteen. Minutes. Ago. I’m sure it will increase in size by at least 50% by the end of the night.

SECOND UPDATE: Item #39? “Write lesson plans.” Oh, right, I have to do that too.