Day Off Blues

I know that having every-other day off work should be cause to rejoice, and most days it is. Today, however, I am feeling a bit of the blues. I great deal of my days off in the past have been spent creating lesson plans, grading papers, and other non-day-off activities. I decided that this semester I would be better at leaving work at work and actually doing my own thing on days I'm not getting paid.

So, although I do have lessons to plan and tests to write, I decided that today I really would do nothing related to school. Instead, I would start/finish the projects I have been waiting to do at home. It was going okay until I sat down at the computer to check my email. Out of habit, I opened one window for my personal email and one for my school email. Of course, there was nothing new in my personal account, but my school email had lots of new things. By the time I got to email number three I knew I should have even left school email out of my day.
The week after Senior Ball I found out that three tables had flown out of the truck and broken when they were delivering the tables back to the Jr. High we had borrowed them from. To make my life even harder, the kids just set the tables up, mentioned something briefly to a lunch lady, and no one told me until days later. I have been trying to do clean up of the mess and figure out how to pay for the broken tables (which is no small task as anyone who has purchased things with education money knows). Today I finally got an email back from the Jr. High principal who was of course less-than-pleased, which I totally understand. He went on, though, about all of these things that happened during past years, which I had nothing to do with. Now he wants me to not only solve the problem that the kids this year created, but also do something about the things that happened years ago. Ugh.

So, I closed the email and that is when my once sunny day turned blue. Suddenly the laundry pile seemed to have tripled in size, the snow was no longer white and pretty, but a messy obstacle to keep me from leaving the house, the books and dvds that need to be boxed up were everywhere, I wanted a hot bath, but we don't have a tub, the list goes on and on.

How will I beat the blues? Well, I am venting my frustration here, then I am going to start the laundry, take a long hot shower, drink hot chocolate, and watch a movie I love while I box up books and dvds. Most of all, I am going to try to stop thinking about school and everything related to it!