This is going to be a brief update, because as the first day of school draws near (Thursday) work gets more and more intense. Not a bad sort of intense, just very busy and rather desperate.

I have a classroom but still no furniture – no desks or filing cabinets or anything. So I’m at a point where it’s hard to plan. I want to determine classroom procedures, but without knowing, for example, where the sign in and sign out sheet is going to reside, I can’t exactly write that into my class rules. And I can’t organize my student files, which are confidential, until I have somewhere to lock them up and file them. So I’m just twiddling my thumbs waiting for my furniture to come in – oh, and I still don’t have a computer so I’m lugging my laptop up to work and back home, which is its own sort of PITA because I have to work off of flash drives, and my laptop isn’t connected to any of the printers at the school, so I can work on documents in my empty room (sitting on that little sofa), then I have to save them, yank the flash drive out, and go log in to some other computer, open the docs back up again, and print them. All of this shuffling around gets me flustered and I start losing things! Not to mention that for almost a week now the air conditioning has been out on the first floor where my room is, and it gets so sweltering hot during the day that I can’t concentrate. Just your typical buildup to the first days of school. Those of you who’ve taught before probably recognize the insanity.

Overall though I am enjoying planning for the school year without having to think about counseling. I’m nervous, as I’ve mentioned before, but as I make my plans I feel much more in control and “in my element” than I ever did as a counselor. I think it was a wise decision.

Here’s something that was NOT a wise decision, however: the school puts on a special camp for all new students at the beginning of the year (we are a small private school, so new students each year don’t total much over 100) and that camp involves a sleepover at the school. I don’t know why they insist on doing this, as it always seems like such a time-consuming and bad idea to me, but they think it’s awesome, so whatever. Except this time, the woman who runs the camp had a hard time getting volunteer chaperones to sleep up at the school (the Diocese insists there be 1 teacher to every 10 kids for lock-ins) so I told her I’d do it if she couldn’t rustle up enough people, but I emphasized I only wanted to be signed up as a last resort. Well guess what? The last resort was needed, so in an hour or so I am off to the school to SLEEP on an AIR MATTRESS overnight in a GYM with 100 high school students. WHYYYY???

They did say I could show up very late as they literally just need me for the sleepover part, so I’m going to roll in around 10 PM in my pajamas and get the hell out of there first thing in the morning. Then I’ll have to drive home, shower, get dressed for the day, and go right back up there for another day of work. Again I say it, WHYYYYYY????? Well we know why. Because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut that’s why. They do pay $100 for everyone who sleeps over, so there’s that. But still. This is so far outside my comfort zone, it’s not even funny.

I thought my photo for the day would be something like my sleeping bag or me lying on the floor in the gymnasium, but then as I was getting ready I spied Simon chilling out on top of these chests that sit on top of a decorative table in our living room, and well, it was too cute not to be my Day 11 shot. So, here it is, and wish me luck tonight. This is in no way going to be fun, and I probably won’t get a lick of decent sleep.