The week in review

Monday:

Work filled with rescheduled meetings from last Wednesday, meetings which had been cancelled because of the "snow" (which turned out to be rain).  Today is a heptathlon of talking talking talking.  So much so that I get home to discover I never had time to drink my thermos of tea.


Tuesday:

Dentist: "do you wear a mouth guard?"
Me: "Yes"
Dentist: "Shame you can't wear it during the day, huh?  You have two new cavities, and they're almost certainly from cracking your teeth by grinding them."

Later Tuesday, the children's piano teacher quits.  I love(d) the children's piano teacher, a young man trained in percussion and piano and a number of other instruments.  Clara wanted to practice during the week in order to please him.  Winton thought he was funny and laughed for his whole lesson.  How can anyone compare?  I am extraordinarily blue about this.


Wednesday:

Clara falls at school and cracks her head against a concrete wall, badly enough to need to hang out with the nurse for an hour, but not badly enough to be sent home.

At around the same time someone cleaves my head in two with an axe . . . or close enough.  That's what it felt like.  I spend the afternoon crying in bed at home (with garbage pail in case of vomit), missing an important department meeting I am supposed to chair.  All while Husband rushes home from DC to collect our children from their schools.


Thursday:

It tastes like I've eaten a lead pencil, but my head is spacious and light.

I try to talk about Bakhtin and find I can't put more than 3 words in a row.  There's a lot of gesturing.

The plumbers come to begin ripping out and replacing all of our second floor pipes.  They find a bottle in the walls that once held a brand of beer I've never heard of before (Wiemann's).

In the evening Husband's car pulls up in front of the house sounding like an 18-wheeler truck (muffler problems?)


Friday:

The problems I avoided by not being at Wednesday's department meeting burgeon in my email in-box, like cracker crumbs bloating in water.

Winton shrieks "Paddywhacker!" incessantly.  He claims the word was in a book about St. Patrick's day at school (what book?  A dictionary of ethnic slurs?  Of homophobic jargon?)

I wish I had worn looser pants: that lead pencil I feel like I ate yesterday wants to come back up.

I get home to find the plumbers just packing up, re-piping done BUT somehow dislodging all manner of galvanized crap has clogged up our shower/tub faucet.  Solution?  Send me out to buy one  . . . with the children.  We spend 20 minutes browsing things that don't seem quite right, buy $80 of plumbing stuff, get half way home and think maybe we need an actual spout as well, go back to the hardware store, pile out of car, buy spout ($17) and hurry home to be told none of all of the stuff in the (disintegrating) plastic bag is what the plumber meant by "faucet".  They will buy their own.  They will be back, maybe Monday.  Or Tuesday.  In the meantime: no bathtub (that's OK.  Week 3 and I'm pretty used to no bathtub).