unpacking – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

The last couple of weeks, as you’re well aware, I’ve been renovating my bathroom. It’s been exhausting. All home renovation is exhausting; I’m not trying to claim uniqueness, but it’s been a goddamn tiring couple of weeks.

I went back to school today. You may remember this picture:

Every single one of those boxes, including the ones offscreen and the large pile of 60-some-odd smaller ones you can see in the distance just to the upper-right of the center of the image, has been dealt with. I know where every box but three belongs; considering there’s a couple hundred of them that’s not a bad day. I don’t think I’m going in tomorrow because administration is going to be at a meeting all day and I’m going to need a crapton of help to deal with this:

That shit ain’t a one-man job, that’s an assembly line waiting to happen, especially since I need to take over the library to distribute everything. Honestly, if I can get three or four people as backup it won’t be nearly as bad as it looks.

He said.

Now, the fun thing is, about twelve of those boxes in that top picture are for me, since I went ahead and ordered myself some supplies (note: legal, encouraged) with the remaining money that we had to burn through at the end of the year. I have to admit it: sorting through math manipulatives today, I missed teaching just a little bit, just for a little while.

Then I remembered that the lion’s share of leftover boxes are going to be used for the Cardboard Challenge at the beginning of the school year and that feeling went away, because holy shit do I want nothing to do with the Cardboard Challenge, along with any number of other things about working at a school that are not actual teaching.

It would be nice if someone from one of the jobs I applied for over the summer would call me back. Or at least it would be nice to log into one of the application sites and see that someone else had been hired. Because right now it feels like I just tossed those resumes and cover letters into a furnace and pretended that I was submitting them.

Sigh.

That picture doesn’t suck nearly as much at regular resolution; apparently the technology to make it clickable just doesn’t exist yet, or something. I call bullshit; Xanga could handle it so WordPress ought to be able to. JUST DISAPPOINT ME AGAIN, WEBSITE, THAT’S OKAY, I DON’T MIND.

(OH, OKAY, I FIXED IT.)

I was all proud of myself this morning; I’d gotten the bright idea to hook my Bluetooth keyboard (which I carry around for when I want to write on my iPad) to my phone– since my phone actually has connectivity in my new classroom, I’d be able to use it to write and upload a post. Well, I wrote a post, and I uploaded a post… it just didn’t post a post. There was even a notification put up on Facebook that said post existed, only it didn’t. It stayed live in my phone for a while, then deleted itself for no clear reason and then the link on Facebook and Twitter went to nowhere.

Woo?

Anyway: I spent the whole day moving stuff from the old classroom into the new one and making vague, half-assed attempts to get the new one beaten into shape, none of which actually worked out very damn well. I’ve come up with a whole lot more reasons to spend more money but precious little that actually seems to count as completed work. I’d be more annoyed by it but it isn’t actually August yet and I’m under no real pressure to have my classroom ready for a while. I should be out of the old one this week; that’s just being polite to whoever inherits it from me– but I don’t need to be done with the new one for weeks yet.

It’s that damn alcove that’s driving me insane. I’ve got a couple of tables in there right now, but I don’t especially like them. I think I’m going to find some cork rolls and see if I can find some way to get that attached to the cinderblocks (god, my KINGDOM for a damn classroom with bloody drywall in it!) behind it, which will make that space more usable. Also driving me insane: the barely-visible computers on the right side of the image, which are blocking my bulletin boards, although I think I have a sneaky way to make those not a problem anymore that doesn’t involve accidentally leaving them outside.

Also fun: the realization this afternoon that there is literally no place in the building that is farther from my current classroom than the one I was in last year. There are classrooms that are farther apart, but I couldn’t have moved farther away from where I was than this room. I probably walked for an hour today just in trekking back and forth between the two rooms.

Now to talk myself out of buying a laser printer. I don’t know where the hell the computer in this room prints to, but I sure as hell know it’s too damn far away.