Time And Tide

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose. Lyndon B.Johnson

Monday, May 03, 2004

I had got permission to start painting this weekend because the people that we're buying the house from have not finished getting everything out yet and they need more time. There was too much stuff to work around though and since it is all being divided among the people named in the sisters' will, I didn't feel comfortable moving it. They have been emptying the house for two years already. I don't want to mess them up and make the process take any longer than it must. We did get nails and screws out of the walls and as soon as I get my van back (hubby's car is in the shop with a busted radiator) I'll go and start prepping the walls for paint. It was a nice day there even though we didn't get much work done. And we got that required walk in the woods in. I wonder if any of us will ever stay inside once we move. It seems to me that we will all most likely be in the woods somewhere most of the time.
We found new tracks in the barn. This time there were the usual deer and coon tracks, and we didn't find any prints of the big cat but a little cat had been there, and my uncle identified what he thought might be coyote. Wow! We have those here? Cool beans. It's not that I want any of us or ours to be eaten by something wild, but I do desperately want to live in a place where the wild hasn't been destroyed and this, to me, is exciting. All we need now is a bear and we'll be good to go.

On the way to the farm, Leirin told me about a dream she had Saturday night. She said "I dreamed I sold my toothbrush on ebay and the guy that bought it died because he didn't wash it out and I had cleaned it with bleach and didn't rinse it out good enough. The ebay police came looking for me and it was scary."
Wild. I wonder where she gets that imagination from?
Oh, and she got a hundred bucks for that used and seriously ragged toothbrush too.

Emily woke up with a high temperature this morning and she is home from school again. Right now she is on the couch under a pile of covers freezing in spite of the fact that her skin feels like it's actively burning. Poor baby. She is scheduled for a CAT scan on her sinuses in a couple of weeks. I hope they don't manage to kill her in the meantime.
As luck would have it, the kids are scheduled to start PACT testing at school tomorrow. PACT tests are a big, BIG deal here. The schools start weeks full of practice testing. The kids get bombarded with test taking tips and tricks. They get test taking lessons in class, they get them on the local news. During one interview a teacher said something like...We spend the week prior preparing the kids for the test...show them how to rule out wrong answers because usually two are obvious, and once you have those out of there, you've got a 50/50 chance for a correct answer. It just sounded stupid.
Like they aren't teaching them to know the right answer to begin with. It's all about the test. All about the money schools will get from better scores on the tests. So anyway, according to district policy, children have to be free of fever for a full twenty four hours without receiving any medication to control temperature, before they can return to school. This means, Emily has an automatic day out of school tomorrow, no matter what she feels like. But the PACT tests start tomorrow, and I wonder what they expect me to do. Of course she HAS to be there. They're taking THE TEST. But in accordance with their own policy, she can't be, and you know they still expect me to provide a doctor's excuse for following their rule. We don't need to see a doctor, Emily is already under the care of a specialist. We've already been once last week and he told me there is nothing more we can do until we get the CAT scan and form a treatment plan. But the school still expects me to spend 130 bucks on a note so they will stop threatening to fail a straight A student or charge me with promoting truancy. It's insane.

I'm going to give the specialist a call later on and just ask for a note, but I swear if they insist on an appointment to get it, the school is just going to have to do without it. I'm not going to be fall guy in what amounts to a get rich quick scheme. I can't afford it.
So today we're stuck at home without a car and I'll be spending time packing up and clearing out what I can here. If I can shift boxes well enough, I might even manage a smattering of cleaning here and there. We'll see. First, I must finish the pot of coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. Coffee is good.

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