Piece of Crap

So, I need to vent and I am going to use the internet as my sounding board. If you are a happy, optimistic person, just skip this post.

This may seem like a dumb story, but I am going to write it anyways so I can hopefully get it off my chest and move on with my day. Most of you know that I am teaching at a middle school right now. Well, it is not the classiest of middle schools and coming from a nice high school to this school there have been a couple of things that I have been trying to get used to. Now, if you are a teacher you know that copies are like the saving grace of your teaching. If you can't get copies made, then you are up a creek for your lesson that day. On Tuesday morning I dropped off copies to be made for my classes this morning (that is 23 hours notice---not too shabby). Strangely when I drop my copies off the copy lady is not there and she has not done my other copies needed for that day. Fine, we all slip up so I just adjusted my lesson. After school she is still not there so I go ask somebody in the office if she is on vacation or something. Nobody seems to know. This morning at eight she is still not here (supposed to get here at 7:30) and I need my copies in half an hour or I don't have a lesson. So I go back to the office to try and see if there is any way I can do them or something. So the office is trying to find someone to take care of them for me. Ten minutes later I rush back downstairs to tell them not to stress out about it because I can wing a review game or something, just because I felt bad about stressing people out. Well, I go downstairs and lo and behold, there is the copy lady. I start to explain
what happened and apologize if I have stressed her out or something. What is her response? A lecture about "how dare I stress out the whole office to get my precious copies done! Now she is going to be in trouble because someone else had to do her job for her!" She starts telling me how now she may not even have a job next year and how that is my fault.

Well, sorry. I am so sorry that you decided not to come to work yesterday and be over half an hour late today. Remind me again how that is my fault. I was so mad because she was talking to me like I was some stupid child. I have felt like crap all day. It just makes me so mad that I am the bad guy because she couldn't do her job. People are crap.

The bane of my existence

At Church on Sunday, they handed out this anonymous survey to get a better feel for what the needs of the ward are. One of the questions asked what the biggest problem in your marriage was. (There was some debate as to whether this was an appropriate survey...seems like interview material to me) Anyways, as we were driving home from Church I asked Chris what he put down. He said "That I buy ugly furniture." I think he hit the nail on the head. The latest acquisition:
I have no comment, and I really don't want to talk about it. I guess it accents our equally hideous couch, shown next to it. I keep trying to tell myself it is only temporary, and that someday we will have enough money for real furniture, and then I remember that we are both teachers.

I had better learn how to reupholster.

Spring Break

So I am on my first day of Spring Break, and wouldn't you know that this is what it looks like outside.
In case you can't tell, that is snow on my car and the grass. Well, at least I don't really have to leave the house since I am on vacay... :)

I have been productive today though. I have already done two loads of laundry, a ton of dishes, planted my herb garden, and gone to Home Depot to get all the seeds we will need for our real garden in the backyard. It is going to be awesome!



In other news, we re-decorated our house. Really, we just switched the rooms we had the office and the living room in. I thought it would be weird to walk in the front door into the office, but it is growing on me. Plus, our new living room is much bigger which I like.
Here are some pictures.

My own personal wailing wall

I am not trying to be disrepectful of other religions, but I honestly do wail everytime I walk out into my front room and am confronted with this:When my wall should look much more like this, with paint, no holes, and nice things hung on it.

In the fall, there was a leak upstairs in our house. We didn't catch the leak until water had been dripping down inside of our walls for a couple days...or longer. Our landlord came over and told us it wasn't a big deal and that we should just let it dry out before we hung anything on the wall. Well, a couple of months later I started noticing all these cracks in the wall behind where we had a big mirror hung. Being the idiot that I am, I didn't think too much of it besides that I was glad the mirror was hiding the cracks. A couple of weeks go by, and we come home from church one Sunday to find that our mirror has fallen off the wall, and that the top layer of wall (really like ten layers of paint) has separated itself from the wall and is npw peeling off. My favorite moment of this experience was when Chris called our landlord to explain the problem and our landlord asked if we could just nail the wall back together. Is there some sort of IQ test you have to take to become a landlord, or is it just a free-for-all for everyone involved? I wonder.

So now we have peeled away most of the top layer of wall and are still waiting for our landlord to come re-drywall. All I can say is, I have really bad luck with leaks and landlords. At least this time I don't have to sleep in the living room for two months though.

Also, my car wouldn't start this morning. Boo hoo.

Chris' new love

Chris has recently become obsessed with chess. I guess he has started playing it recently with the kids at work and it is something he can beat them at, so he has kind of latched onto that. I refuse to play with him, because the idea of playing chess and strategizing during my free time makes my head hurt. So instead, he has conned my family into playing with him. Much to his chagrin, however, he has been beaten in every encounter with an Abbott. Mwahh haha! So now I tell him that I won't play with him because I am merciful.


Chris y mi madre.

"Bobby Fisher, where is he...I don't know, I don't know."