Hillbilly Mom's Day Off

Today I was absent from my classroom. Which does not mean I was absent from school. I was commanded to report to Basementia for a little curriculum alignment task. Lower Basementia, to be exact. Across the hall from my old room, which is now the ISS room.

ScienceBuddy and I were to report to the refurbished library at 8:15, which we did. We then cooled our heels catching up on recent happenings, resisted the urge to read the book Heredity (which was proudly displayed on a special shelf, the cover pic of Dolly the sheep smiling futilely at prospective middle-school readers), and mused over the absence of Hawaii from the mural of the world stuck to a 12' x 10' section of wall.

Really. Who expects a middle school kid to check out a book on heredity, even with a famous cloned sheep as the hook to lure him in? Even my own nerdish child would never had dreamed of checking out a book on heredity. Or sheep.

Hawaii is still a mystery. There was a rectangular box saying that Hawaii would be found at 20 degrees north and 150 degrees west, with an arrow pointing off the right border of the map. Funny thing, Alaska was showing up above that portion of the map. So I went to look at the left margin, where up above there was another Alaska. Nope. No Hawaii. The coordinates would have placed Hawaii somewhere on the Central America isthmus. That ain't right, people. Someone has stolen the Hawaiian Islands from Basementia! I'm thinking that we got a great big discount on that map, or that the volunteers who stuck it to the wall thought nobody would notice if they cut a few corners.

Anyhoo, getting back to our curriculum task...We had it done by 11:00, even though we didn't start until 9:15 when our leader showed up to explain what he expected. We got lunch delivered, if by delivered you understand that ScienceBuddy called it in and drove to pick it up. There we were, enjoying a brought-in lunch, which teachers seldom get ON TIME with ENOUGH TIME TO EAT IT in a SOOTHING ENVIRONMENT, when in walked the ISS contingent. Uh huh. Just when you're cutting into your grilled chicken sandwich with tomato and pickle, removed from the bun because HELLO bun on top of tomato and pickle slices in a foam container with hot chicken turns into a steam sponge, in traipses 8-10 young lads incarcerated for various offenses, instructed by the loud librarian to sit AT THE TABLES, not the comfy chairs, because they don't deserve them. The tables. Which is where a teacher doing curriculum spiffing tends to sit to eat the brought-in lunch. That's like flying your wife to a fancy restaurant on Air Force One, only to have the entire GITMO guest book file into the restaurant and sit down next to you and watch you eat.

I can't catch a break.