Sunday Night

Well, the house is clean. Book club is over and my obligation is done for another year--I get all nervous about hosting even though I've been coming for just under 4 years and I know these women and whatnot. I just fear I'm forgetting something, always. But I think I did ok this time. The book, Floatplane Notebooks, is one of my very favorites, which was intriguing because Julie hated it. It's intriguing because one of my other very favorites, One Hundred Years of Solitude, she also hated. I don't think she liked Nine Stories, either. I guess I should continue the trend through the years. Maybe I'll pick The Woman Warrior next fall. Dandelion Wine. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Eh. Maybe I'll just, second grade teacher Mary Jane style, clutch them to my chest and run out of the room.

Huh?

Mary Jane taught with me my last two years of teaching. She was second grade; I was middle school math. She was totally old school. I rewrote the math curriculum. At some point, in my standard no-roots purging attitude, I mentioned that I wanted to clean out the faculty lounge, which was a pit. This was met with eagerness from other new teachers and other upper school teachers, and met with silent moping by Mary Jane. On the day I started, during my break, with help from a couple of other volunteers, she ran into the lounge, grabbed up all this pastel bulletin board border rolls, clutched them to her chest, and ran from the room. She's one of the archetypes in my head, I guess, for running away and avoiding confrontation but still keeping things I love.

Julie, who is reading this right now: I don't mean any of this.

Anyway, the house is clean and the kids are asleep and Mike? Where's Mike? He's at a dork bachelor party. You know the standard bachelor party, with strippers and blackjack and cigars and pub crawls? Well, toss all that out the window. Start the party at one in the afternoon. And play Axis and Allies. Or maybe some dungeons and dragons. Dorks. But clean dorks, I might add. I won't have to hose him down when he gets home. Still, though, it's after eleven. That's way too late on a Sunday night to be out playing Axis and Allies.

Fully in the swing of things now. Two weeks of school under the belt. I have, as Ann put it this morning, my September pants on. I'm rolling from here to Christmas, nonstop. Oh. There is this whole baby thing. No--I stick with the rolling. This baby had just better get used to it early. We're busy here.