One Weekend of Rest

Finally -- something that I've been dying for -- a day to sleep in.

The last few weeks have killed me. It's not just work, but it's other things (not to put the blame on), like a bachelor party and a wedding.

Katie's gone for the weekend -- she's back in Mad-Town for the college's homecoming. Whoop-dee-doo. Basically, all of my friends have graduated and are long gone, even though there are a few folks to manage to come back to Mad-Town for a good time. Those days are long-gone for me -- I'm content with my situation in life.

Also, that means that Katie is gone for the entire weekend, as she left yesterday with some of her "new friends" that she's met at school. It ended up being that I slept like ass last night -- losing the extra body heat to keep me warm. I froze my ass off last night as the tempuratures are slowly starting to creep down during the overnights, as I was too lazy and too tired to get up out of bed to find some warmer layers to cover myelf.

Teaching's stressful. I've already gotten the reputation at school of being a "great teacher, plus a fun guy" -- so I've got that going for me. Good press gets around, even the prinicpal says that she's heard good things. But the prinicpal's been on my case about getting licensed -- in fact, I sent the stuff a long time ago, but due to some mix-up in how much I was supposed to actually pay the fee for the application process, it got sent back -- to South Dakota. I've finally gotten that all sorted out -- getting things signed by the ol' college, putting in more money for the application process, etc. Yeah, just a big ol' pain in the ass.

The problem of being a "fun guy" is that the students usually take advantage of that. Sure, I'm new, I'm the rookie -- and getting me off-task is pretty easy. I've even been labeled a "pushover", meaning that I usually let the students get away with a few things, like missed assignments (I'll give them the next day, but without full credit). I've soft of dug myself into a hole, which is pretty hard to get out of. I'm lowering the boom ever so slightly now -- meaning that if they don't do what they're expected of, they'll get no credit.

It all comes in time, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Interesting day at school today, though. The middle school sponsored a hat day in which students and staff could pay a dollar to wear a hat. On top of that, the staff can also wear jeans, just as long as you wear a "school-spirited" shirt. So, I wore a school's football shirt and my black Vikings hat.

You should have seen the looks on my student's faces as they saw me. They all thought I was the new guy in school -- yep, all 5'6" of me. I don't know what the hell I was doing -- but they sure didn't see me as their teacher. "Oh, shit..." I thought to myself. This was going to be a long day.

In fact, I was invited to some my students' homes to play poker. I'm not sure if they were serious or not, but I declined.

Football practice was a joke. The other coach had to take off early today to go back to his home town, so it was all me. Yesterday, we had a film day on our lousy game on Tuesday. We had our meeting, let our concerns all out on the line. That was pretty successful. But when it came to a Friday practice, I decided to make it an optional one. BIG MISTAKE.

One of the players said that they should just run all day; that was fine by me. We didn't practice on Wednesday due to a meeting, Thursday was film day -- so you'd figure that everybody should have showed up on Friday. Out of the 25-some players we've got, about half showed up. I got excuse after excuse from the players that showed up trying to explain to me why the others weren't there. It got to the point that I just told them all to shut up -- they were just excuses; they didn't want to be at practice. Some "team" I've got.

But now, I'm hangin' back, drinking some beer, taking it easy. I'm bored out of my mind of things to do. I could start grading some homework, since my students are on my case about that -- but that can wait until LATE Sunday ... haha.

I guess all I can do is see if Ryan Newman can win two in a row in the Chase (at Dover this week) and pray for a Vikings victory over the Saints.