Week of Weird

By all accounts, the past few days have been odd and unusual to say the least. Unfortunately, this series of odd, unusual, and unrelated events is culminating into a ridiculously odd manic Monday for me, in which I feel like I’m doing a whole lot, and not accomplishing much of anything. I suppose if I really wanted to be accurate, the strange events began a couple of Wednesdays ago, when the Washington Metropolitan area was shut down by snow. I use the term snow loosely in this instance because while I was assaulted with big ugly flakes at my home, my job received rain. I pinpoint this particular Wednesday because the school’s closing kept my students from turning in their rough drafts (apparently it kept them from doing them too, but I digress). Since this was an accelerated class that was due to end the following Wednesday, the weather screwed up all the deadlines. And since it was an accelerated class, there was NO wiggle room. So my students ended up having to turn in two essays and take a final exam on the same night. To their credit, they accepted their fate without too much grumbling.

Fast forward to the following Wednesday. Almost everyone took the exam, and most people turned in papers. Usually on exam night, I stay until the bitter end to give students the last possible minute to turn in their papers. On this particular night, I neglected to do so, and as Murphy’s Law would have it, this is the night a student slipped a paper under the classroom door. Thursday, I go to the OB/GYN for my checkup (which is a blog in and of itself), return home and just take a nap until it was time to go get my son. Friday, I end up talking to my sister-in-law for the better part of TWO HOURS during the course of the day, but other than preparing to visit my niece in Atlanta and helping her with her senior class trip, nothing else adventurous happened.

Then comes Saturday. It’s starts off normally enough; I drag my tired tail out of bed to get ready for my Saturday morning class. Strangely enough, I had all my materials ready. The elevator was out, so I had to truck it up the stairs to the third floor (which is actually six flights of twelve stairs). Luckily, I had time to catch my breath before anyone arrived. Everything’s goes fine in class, in spite of the fact that there is no internet connectivity for my class, which usually happens at least once a semester. I even manage to get a lot of grading done for the lit. class. I finish my office hours, gather my stuff, and go downstairs. I’m getting in my car when I realize that I do not have my purse, so I end up climbing three flights again to go back into my part-time office to retrieve it.

Having settled in my car again, I make three calls, all to besties. I find that it's easier to converse with people on the commute home. My third call to my youngest godson’s mother went something like this:
Her: You still going? You want to meet at my house at 3?
Me: Huh? I was just calling to see how you were.
Her: We’re supposed to be meeting for a play date today. You know--going to the Children's Museum. Only we’re not going there anymore. We’re going to the National Aquarium and everyone’s meeting at my house.
Me: Oh, okay. For real, I had forgotten that we were supposed to do anything. I’ll try to get there by 3. [It was 1:50 at this point.]
Her: Okay, my cousins and one of my cousin’s friends are coming and [our other friend] is coming too. So we have a larger play date.
Me: So what’s the address to the museum?
Her: Oh, I don’t know where it is, but you can just follow us when you get here.

I get home and my son is taking a nap. In defense of his father, since I didn’t know we were going anywhere, he didn’t know we were going anywhere, so our son didn’t have his hair cut, nor was he bathed our dressed to go out. I ended up leaving my home at 3:10 and naturally, no one waited for me. Luckily, I did get a text with the address and made it there on my own. For those of you who don’t have a clue, parking is a nightmare downtown. Whenever I go on excursions like this, I prefer the Metro Park ‘n’ Ride. While I got there in record time, using Google Maps GPS because I have this phobia and habit of getting lost in DC, I spent at least a half an hour looking for a parking spot because I refused to pay the $13-15 for the parking garages. My perseverance and block stalking paid off because I ended up getting a parking space right in front of the Federal Triangle Metro station, which admittedly was two blocks away, but there is a shortcut by walking through the Ronald Reagan Building (if you don’t mind going through a security checkpoint).

The entire time I talked to first one, then the other of my two girlfriends, both of whom I met at Olive Garden. We often go to karaoke together as well. One was doing the same thing as me, and stalking around for a parking space, while the other (whose idea it was in the first place) was lost…with a GPS! She ended up in northeast DC instead of northwest and had to backtrack. I had gotten out of my car and was walking DC with my young son, making our way to the Aquarium. It was overcast, and of course plop! Down comes a fat raindrop, followed by another, and another, so that by the time we see the Aquarium sign, there is a small steady rain falling. When we’re about 20 yards away, I get another phone call: “The museum is closing.” Wow, so no one managed to actually get the museum’s hours before making the plan? As I’m on the phone now debating on how quickly we can get inside, I see my friend’s cousins and think that I am joining a class field trip. I see three adults, and 7? 8? 12? kids in tow. They had arrived first to the disappointing news, and had the same idea as me to head into the Reagan building. Mind you, none of us had umbrellas. As we’re cramming our way in to get dry, my girlfriends suggest we drive to Applebees on the other side of DC to go eat with what I’m gathering is a small army of people under twelve. By this time, I and the major herd had made it into the lobby and we were all in full protest mode about driving to Applebees when DC offered so much variety. But in the interest of saving money and not wasting food, I suggested we at least venture to somewhere nicer in Alexandria where we could have a nice dine-in option. Hops was the followed suggestion and we made our way over there.

In spite of the fact that we actually didn’t do anything but go out to eat with a bunch of kids (all total, we sat at a table for 22), we did have a good time. Hops has great food for kids and adults at a very reasonable price, so everyone walked away satisfied.

And that was Saturday. On Sunday, my mother-in-law called me to borrow some Vanilla. This was a good thing because I wanted her to come over and watch Ayden later that evening so that I could go dry some clothes. Our dryer is on the fritz and manages to toss clothes around without actually drying them. We’ve called and gotten it serviced once at the cost of $100 and we weren’t trying to continue to invest in making another service call just yet. Since my husband is finishing his last class for his Masters’, he had gone to work, so he couldn’t watch Ayden. Turns out that just yet turned into ever because my husband called and said we’re buying a washer dryer today. I did convince him that we only needed the dryer right away and that the washing machine was fine for right now. I’d been investigating dryers the week before and already had one saved, so online I went and placed the order. It’s going to be delivered Tuesday. In the meantime, my hubby came home around 7pm and took two bags for himself and one for me, just to get us through the week.

Also that day, I attempted to finish grading my papers for the lit. class and just turn in the grades. The problem with that is that I had students who had missing work. Besides that one student with the missing research paper, I had at least four others who had missing assignments. Two I had to fail because on top of missing papers, they missed a good portion of the course by either not showing up or showing up extremely late or leaving extremely early, so they were missing participation and quiz grades. The other two attended every class and really put effort in, even though they knew the workload was more than expected. One had taken literature the prior semester. The other had taken me for two prior semesters. I find that I am incredibly sympathetic toward those I feel are trying, perhaps even to my detriment. Because here I am today, patiently waiting for three students to send me what I need not to fail them. One student was at work and called me back; one student has her phone going straight to voicemail and didn’t respond to my message yesterday; and the student who slipped her paper under my door has yet to respond. As to not hold the other students up, I went ahead and put their grades in, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to hear from both my department secretary and Admissions and Records about my missing grades because technically, I only have a 48-hour window before I have to turn in final grades.

Other events of that day: I decided to cook lasagna for dinner, and I spilled a quarter of a bowl of cheese on the floor, to which my son said mess, and helped me clean up by eating leftover shreds from the kitchen floor. I guess it was a good thing I’d spilled the cheese because as I was blending it—a mix of cheddar, Parmesan, mozzarella and romano—I was wondering what I was going to do with the leftover. Moot point once I spilled it.

But by far, the most interesting incident happened at around 5am this morning. I managed to get locked in my own bathroom! Okay, lemme explain, before (or while) you’re cracking up into gales of laughter. When we bought our house two years ago, the inspector put in the report that the door sticks because of a hinge. When we moved in, for security reasons, we changed all the locks, and for aesthetic reasons, most of the knobs. Somewhere along the line, we forgot to account for the laundry room door, the master bedroom closet door, and the master bathroom doorknob. And we just left them as is. A few months ago, my husband and I noticed that the knob was sticking. And we acknowledged to one another that we were going to have to fix it before it became truly problematic. As you can tell, we did nothing more than repeatedly make that comment, even as the sticking became more frequent. Our solution: not to close the door all the way. This morning at five, our son woke up and in turn, made sure we both knew he was up. So I go to the bathroom, and wisely do not close it all the way. Don’t ask me how I managed to do this, but on my exit of the bathroom, I manage to go back in and somehow close the door completely. Grabbing the knob, I twist once, twice, thrice, seven times to no avail. Lamely, I have to knock on the door and wait for my husband to do the same twists, again to no avail. He then has to go to the hall closet for a screwdriver and disengage the knob. Yet the straight piece that bends in when you close the door (I just Googled it and found out that piece is called a deadlatch) was still stuck. Apparently, the little brass round knobs are not terrible expensive because the deadlatch is constructed mostly of plastic, which my husband had to break in several pieces before he could remove the entire knob. We now have a nice gaping hole in our bathroom door, which will hopefully soon see the proper knob as replacement.

The whole Saturday playdate and this morning’s lock-in incident of course meant that I forgot one very crucial item I needed for tonight, and that is my flash drive that contains my syllabus. The good news is that on Friday, I had photocopied almost all the first day materials I needed for tonight, so the only thing that was missing is my syllabus. Of course, I had not placed an alternate copy on Blackboard and had no backup copy available (note to self: copy some materials to hard drive at work). But again luck was with me as I remembered I had sent a PDF copy of this semester’s Saturday class syllabus to one of our department secretaries for copying. Of course, I couldn’t remember which of the five secretaries I had sent it to, but I was able to sort it by attachment and search the approximate January date. I opened the PDF file, copied the syllabus into a Word file, reformatted for some consistency, and had to leave off the calendar (whew, that sounded like a lot of work!) but in the end, desired result achieved, and I at least have something they can read along with as I lecture. Not a bad recovery if I do say so myself.

Now if only those students would hurry up and get their things in!