Snow Angels

Texas makes me laugh. All week long they have been forecasting snow in Austin. On Tuesday, they announced that we would probably get several inches that might even accumulate. Wednesday had the news teams showing people stockpiling cases of water, soup, and space heaters, and giving advice on how to prevent their pipes from freezing. On Thursday, the news stations brought in driving schools to show viewers how to avoid crashing in the "severe weather". After all their hype, I almost started to believe that the snow would be something to worry about.

I should have known better. My students spent most of the morning asking when it was going to start, and several times I pulled up the radar to show them the storm system getting closer. (Most of my students had only seen snow once in their lives, at the most.) Finally, after lunch, the long-awaited storm made its way to Teravista Elementary in Round Rock, TX. We let nearly the entire school outside to play in the snow. Some of them even tried to make snow angels (which instead turned into "tear up the grass and mix in some mud to make it better" angels). The entire storm system lasted no more than 30 minutes.

Tonight on the local news they literally spent the entire half hour (minus the several-minute segment about the Big 12 championship game) talking about the huge snowfall. Really, people? We need to send all of these Texans up north for about a week to experience a couple of lake-effect snows. Then they'll understand.

This is my car last year around this time in the driveway in Holland, Michigan. Pretty much the same as our Texas snow today, right? HA.

The Birth

Honesty usually works for me. I'm going to be honest. I have no idea why I decided to start this. I was spending my usual Monday night of TV and doing nothing productive after an action-packed day of teaching. After stumbling across a few blogs, I realized that I wanted to jump on the cool kids' bandwagon. This is the birth of my blog. Like I said, cool people write blogs. I want to be cool.

I work at an elementary school. One of the more stressful moments of my day is the 15 minutes where I help with kindergarten lunch. Nothing says ambiance quite like cafeteria food (which yes, by the way, they do still serve mystery meat -- they just don't call it that) and 200 screaming 6-year olds begging for ketchup. I spend those 15 minutes scuttling around the lunchroom, opening juice boxes and encouraging two students NOT to attempt a conversation by speaking through the ears of another student back and forth through the inside of his head. (No joke. That happened last week.)

Today I was a little off my game. Everywhere I walked, something broke and/or fell. Putting my water bottle on the table? Missed the edge by a good foot. Turning around to walk? Crashed into a bookcase. Lunch was no different. Little girl asks me to open her container of cocktail weenies? Cocktail weenies fly everywhere and, as fate would have it, fall to the floor. So what did I do? I gathered the cocktail weenies, ran to the staff bathroom, and washed them off. (A disapproving mother looked on.) She'll be fine. I mean, we're dealing with the swine flu. A little cafeteria dirt? Meh.