Icy Day

Good morning to you! What a beautiful rainy and icy day! The rain is everywhere; the ice is mostly in the driveway. My poor little Joseph had trouble walking down the driveway to the bus. I put my crocs on and was on my way down, carefully, when Amena and Seth appeared to help him. Amena picked him up and carried him the rest of the way down the driveway. What a good sister she is.

My mother arrived safe and sound. She had a little fender bender at the airport in Spokane but once the red tape for that was resolved, she parked, rearranged her flights as she missed the first one, and proceeded. I think travel from that point was pretty unremarkable but in Manchester she couldn’t find her checked suitcase. Joanna went back in with her to find it and I went to park so I could help if need be. It was found before I even found a place to park so I parked anyway and met them inside. I needed to get up and walk around anyway. The drive home was uneventful for the most part. I did take a couple of wrong turns because it was dark and raining but we still made it home before 2:00 this morning.

She and Joanna are still abed. I had to get up to get boys up and dressed and fed so I might die at some point today even though I really don’t know when it might happen because there is much to do today. I get to print legal papers out and take them to Gardner to be notarized this morning. At 12:30 is Joseph’s class Christmas party and I’ll go in for that. We’ll leave straight from there to go to his appointment with Julia which is at 2:00 and we might be a little late unless we leave the school by about 1:15. Actually, we could make it from home at 1:15 so we wouldn’t really have to leave the school until about 1:20 and still be good. Anyway, I have phlebotomy tonight even though we’re all done with testing and everything. I guess we have to have a certain number of classes and we need tonight to do that. So, we’ll talk about the final and answer any questions like where and what time is the orientation meeting on January 3^rd that we’re supposed to go to for clinicals which start on the 7^th.

Yesterday morning Joseph had his final dentist appointment until his six month check up in a few months. I went in with him like I’d been doing but this time I didn’t go sit in the waiting room. He wasn’t given the option of Novocain this time and started crying and squirming when the dentist started drilling. That wasn’t acceptable. The dentist and I both told him his other option was the needle which he didn’t like so he needed to stop. He did and it really wasn’t that bad. I wonder if my being there made a difference.

Before we left, Joseph was having a hard time (which may have contributed to his hard time at the dentist as well) because he couldn’t find any shoes other than his Sunday shoes. I made him wear snow boots because it was so icy outside. I really wanted to leave before 7:30 because we need to leave then on a good day to get there a couple of minutes early. Well, we didn’t make it. The Jetta was covered with ice and I had to scrape before we could leave. Paul had put the wipers up so they wouldn’t get frozen to the windshield and they didn’t but they were covered with ice; about a quarter of an inch in every direction. That was fun. The roads weren’t bad once we got off of Pitcherville so we made fairly good time but were late.

There was a two-hour delay so by the time we got home, Joseph was able to eat breakfast and brush teeth before the bus came. The kids all went out in time for the bus but it didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come. My mother called to tell me about her little accident and I went outside to take pictures of the ice on everything and I heard voices that sounded much like Amena, Cedric, Seth and Joseph. The bus hadn’t come and it was 10:00. I seems that a car had gone off the road and the bus had to wait in order to get by which isn’t surprising because there are some places our bus goes that it would not be able to turn around and backing up would be useless because it would be so far. Wow. What a morning.

Then I had my last English class at 11:00. For the first fifteen minutes we had to talk about the shootings in Connecticut which had to turn to a discussion on gun control. It appears that in Japan people are allowed to own guns but must account for every round of ammunition they buy. One person thought this might be a good solution. Not for me. It isn’t anyone’s business what I might do with any ammunition I have as long as I’m not using it to shoot innocent people (in my opinion, someone breaking into my house threatening my family is not innocent—just saying). I got chuckles when I said that in England people are not allowed to own guns and you wouldn’t catch me living there because of it and then I voiced my opinion that if someone breaks into my house, I want to be able to protect my family. I think we need to be more like Sweden where the government issues fire arms and then teaches people how to use them. It’s all about responsibility—we need to develop some. Also, better mental health services would be advisable as well because most of the people who do these things could have been helped if such services had either been available or been utilized. While interesting, I really could have done without because it had nothing to do with the subject matter of class. We did go on to have a couple of good presentations on Claude McKay which generated some good discussion.

After class I came home and remembered that I needed to take my accounting final so I did that. I made some mistakes but still got an A so I’m happy about that. I should have gone over the math because I would have caught my mistakes had I done that but it took more than two hours to complete and I foolishly didn’t want to take the time. Silly me. All I could think of was being done. Now, other than phlebotomy tonight, I am. Big sigh of relief.

And now I must go. I need to shower and print papers out and get to the bank for notarizing. If I have time I will download some pictures of ice later today and do a separate post with them. This one will be just a lot of words.

I hope you all have an amazingly wonderful day!

 

PS I forgot to mention that Joanna passed her driving test--yay!!! Third time's a charm!