The Week in Review

Beware: this is going to be a long post as I try to explain this week….this crazy whirlwind of a wind. Bear with me.

Monday

It was a testing week in the great state of Texas so, as a music teacher, I was told that, instead of having normal classes, it would be my job to help the pe teacher keep the kids not testing quiet. Yay me. Anyway, the principal suggested watching a movie which, although boring, is easy. FYI-watching Air Bud for five hours straight is NOT fun in the least.

During my lunchtime, I decided to go see the school nurse whom I’d never met because I’d been dealing with a boil on the back of my neck and wanted to know what she thought….gross, I know. She said it looked to her like a staph infection and suggested I go to the doctor. Now, I’m not usually one to rush to the doctor but, after a friend recently had severe issues with a staph infection, I wasn’t going to take any chances. I called my brother to ask him if he thought I should try to get in to the doctor that day and he suggested sending a pic to his girlfriend, Mandi, who is a nurse. Sent her a gnarly pic and she agreed that it looked like Staph and suggested I go to the doctor.

Two more hours of watching Air Bud later, I left school early to make it to the doctor by 4. As soon as he saw the boil, he agreed that I indeed had a staph infection and he had the lovely task of cutting open the back of my neck and digging around. Turns out, I had a sweat gland that got infected and created a cyst the size of a grape which then got infected with Staph. He cut it all out of there and put me on antibiotics. He sent me on my way with a bandaid and bill.

After eating dinner and getting the prescription filled, I went right to bed. That biz was exhausting.

Tuesday

I woke up to find my bandage that the doctor had put on all nice and blood-soaked. Since I live alone (and apparently had NO bandaids in my entire house), I had to drive across town to my mother’s house for her to re-bandage. That shirt will never recover.

At school, another day of testing meant another long day of Air Bud. Don’t worry; the kids only watching it one time each. It was the teachers that were stuck in “Groundhog Day” movie land.

Later, I found out that my super-awesome Beefer got a cool new job so we went out to celebrate at Papasitos. Yum!

Wednesday

Ah, I love Wednesdays. I don’t get a conference time (though I do get a long lunch but that doesn’t count in my book) on Mondays or Tuesdays so I get a longer planning time on Wednesdays.

After-school, I wanted to get my craft on so I took this suitcase I had bought at a church garage sale for $3 and decided to repurpose it into a ribbon shelf. I’ve grown tired of my awesome ribbon tower because it takes up way too much space even though it is quite handy. It also is way unattractive.

The first thing I did was break it in half. Easier said than done.

Then, I decoupaged it with wrapping paper and mod podge. 1st Mistake: I should have painted it first (but I didn’t want to go to the store and buy more black paint and didn’t think to use the leftover spray paint from the wardrobe repurpose.)

Not my best work but this thing was a booger to cover.

Again, I should have painted it first.

Because I wanted to use this for ribbon storage, I bought several dowel rods and a knife for cutting heavy duty materials (that’s what the package said) to put inside it. My goal was to have the dowel rods be like tension rods (this is why I’m not a builder.)

I cut the dowel rods to the exact specifications needed which was way more difficult that easy because the knife that said it was for use with heavy duty materials was useless and I ended up having to use it like a miniature saw.

Using the dowel rods as a tension rods worked…….until I put ribbon on them. Then, the were way to heavy and couldn’t hold themselves (and the ribbon) up no matter how much “tension” there was.

My next idea was to build shelves. I had read on another blog about someone using cardboard to make shelves. Well, I didn’t have any cardboard but I did have some notebooks so I cut the cardboard out of those (what a waste), painted them black and inserted them into the suitcase.

This is what the finished product looked like:

Not too bad…..

Thursday

Nothing to report really. Though I did go to Michaels and use my giftcard (from Beef’s) to buy the Everyday Pop-Up Cards Cartridge for $34.99!! I haven’t opened it yet. We shall see about that one.

Friday

Normal classes in the morning though I had to make a not-fun errand during my lunch break. Those of us affected by the Reduction in Force (be glad if you don’t know what’s going on with the state of education in Texas right now) were given the choice to resign my Friday (yesterday) or be proposed for termination on Monday (coming up) at the school board meeting. I chose to resign because the word sounds better and I don’t want the word “termination” to affect future employment.

Just handing my letter of resignation to the Human Resources guy (in front of the superintendent who called me by name and wished me well….dang him for being so nice) made me tear up. I totally lost it once I got into the car.

Because I feed my emotions (with actual food), I ate an entire pizza….yes and entire pizza. I don’t care what anyone thinks. It made me feel better in the moment.

That afternoon, we were scheduled to have a performance from an African Drumming Group and I was asked to set up the microphones. When I got back to school and went up on stage, I was surprised to see giant African men asleep on the stage and one was right in front of the door to the closet all the sound equipment is in. Needless to say, I did get the mics out until later.

Before the performance, one of the 2nd grade teachers who is also an awesome friend (she brought me a sonic dr. pepper the day we had our first meeting with the superintendent) made the announcement that I had been voted Teacher of the Year for our School. Wow! Such an honor to be chosen by the teachers at my campus as Teacher of the Year. I feel so blessed and validated.

My self-esteem and self-worth had really taken a hit lately when it was decided that not only would I lose my job (because of not having enough years in the district to qualify for a term contract) but that my entire program was going to be cut because it was not required by the state. It’s a hard pill to swallow when you’re told (in not so many words) that what you’re doing isn’t seen as valued just because the state hasn’t mandated it.

Anyway, the staff on my campus made me feel so valued and appreciated. I could help but cry again but these were tears of joy and blessing.

After-school, I decided to get back to work in my craft room putting the finishing touches on the ribbon holder suitcase (the finished picture was taken Friday….it didn’t have ribbon in it while it dried for two days).

I also decided to do some reorganizing of the ribbon that is not on spools but too long to be in the scrap jars.

I had this jewelry box that was garage sale treasure. The first thing I did was take off that gross yellow fake-glass crap. There were two shelves with it but they sat right on top of one another. I wanted some extra space between shelves (especially since I knew I wasn’t going to use the top).

I used some of those same dowel rods (that didn’t make it to the ribbon suitcase) to prop underneath and hot-glued them to keep the top drawer in place.

I put my new little organizer (doesn’t it look dainty) next to my new tool-box from Walmart where I now house buttons, brads, and anything else small. I had everything in little jars but it took up way too much space.

Saturday

I woke up (crazy early) and went to go check to see how my new shelf (the suitcase) made it through the night. Oh dear! I should have taken a picture because there was ribbon EVERYWHERE! The floor, the shelf, the table……Ah!

Apparently three out of four cardboard shelves caved from the weight of the ribbon (who knew ribbon was so heavy) and so all the ribbon simply rolled off. The easy fix for the moment (because I was so frustrated that this repurpose job that looked so simple in great in my mind was becoming this huge ugly failure) was to take out the cardboard shelves….okay, I was pretty irked so I ripped is probably a better word…..ripped out the shelves.

So now my ribbon is simply sitting stacked inside the suitcase looking like crap until I figure out what to do with it. I sense the suitcase may be destined for the trash or in a pile marked CRAFT FAILURES but we shall see. I was way too tired to do anything about it today.

After that, I needed some retail therapy and, lucky me, it was GARAGE SALE SATURDAY! However, after going to 7…got that 7!…garage sales, I only got one thing (it’s way less fun to garage sale without Beefer and yes garage sale can be used as a verb). Here’s what I got:

Not bad for 25c! Don’t know what I’ll do with it yet but we shall see.

This was such an exhausting week that I took a much-needed nap and then hung out with Beefer the rest of the afternoon. We met up with Roommate and Roommate’s Mom (Note: former college roommate….her name is Roommate….jk, it’s Jalissa but you wouldn’t know who I was talking about if I just said Jalissa.) and shopped and had ice cream.

Which brings us to now…this moment…and the fact that so far I’ve typed almost 2000 words and wonder if anyone will read down this far in the post. If you do, God Bless you for appeasing me and my need to tell the world about my exhausting week.

Note on the Staph: feeling much better and you can hardly tell where the boil or slice and dice was. Nice!

Have a wonderful rest of the weekend and thank you for reading. I hope I didn’t lose any readers with this crazy long post.

Cara