Monday Madness -- T minus 2 days

Oh Monday. How I both welcomed you and feared you.

Today was our first day back at school -- just the teachers. The students don't start school until Wednesday. And what a doozie it was.

I got up at 6:00 (no amount of preparation the night before can prepare you to get up when it's still dark) and was out of the house by 6:15. Got to school at 6:30, excited to get a little planning and editing and printing done for the first few days. You know, enjoy my nice hot Chai latte, listen to a little music, chill in my air conditioned classroom.

Alas, twas not to be. I was barely inside the door of my classroom with the lights on when I noticed a lovely writhing black entity on the wall of my classroom. Ants! Pouring out of the ceiling tiles and down into my classroom. Onto my front table. Onto my file box. Onto my white board. Under the chalk rail and across my classroom to my desk. Once they hit the carpet, they're IMPOSSIBLE to see, so all day I was killing ants on my desk. Having battled ants all summer at my house, I was in no mood to just leave them there and deal with them later. I can't. I feel too violated with ants around. So I rather unceremoniously just dumped the box I was carrying on the floor and grabbed my bottle of Fantastik and went to work killing and cleaning. Just. Ew. The walls of my classroom are textured juuuuust enough that the ants just smeared all over them. And when I lifted up the ceiling tiles, I discovered they were up in the rafters of my room. Just plain disgusting. All day I battled them. I cleaned up the majority of them, and for the rest of the morning, they were scattered, confused, all over the front wall, but by the end of the day, they apparently figured out they were no longer welcome and there were only a few little stragglers left. I'm sure it's the heat -- the ants were all over campus -- but seriously? I was in my classroom every day last week and except for a few random ones inside my door that I promptly cleaned up with my Fantastik, there were no where near the number that were there to greet me this morning. Why, ants? Why this morning?

So I pretty much got nothing accomplished before our staff breakfast and staff meeting today. :/ And I'm most productive first thing in the morning, too, so that was the biggest irritation.

THen staff breakfast, which is always lovely, then a staff meeting that felt interminable, except I don't think it was really any longer than usual. Although I am at a loss as to what our meeting tomorrow will be about, if we've already covered so much stuff today. Hopefully not too much of the happy hoopla ... I'm not a fan of hoopla when I have classroom prep to be doing.

After the meeting, I did some more cleaning up of ants, some emailing, some technology stuff, delivered most of my Survival Kits to my English teachers (though I ended up getting waaaay too hot and sweaty to finish this project... I'll do the rest tomorrow).

I then met a former student who is off to college next week for lunch. It was lovely. I'm oddly jealous of all my former kiddos going off to college this year. FOr some reason, this year is harder than it's been in the past. I miss college every day; perhaps that's one of the reasons I love being a high school teacher so much: being near kids with boundless opportunity.

Then I went BACK to school (mind you, this was at about 4:00 pm) and was there until about 6:00 ... but was pretty productive during this time. Printed out almost everything I need for the first few days of school, labeled them with copy numbers and instructions for myself. I dug out my diagnostic tests. I feel pretty set to do a ton of photocopying tomorrow morning.

Hopefully the ants will not have come back. They are most unwelcome.