Coolness!

My mother rescued me from the children yesterday. We were all nearly at the point of using claws (and in Care’s case, teeth) to disembowel each other. The heat the last few days has been overwhelming and much as I loved the use of a friend’s ancient air conditioner, it was more an exercise in futility than a provider of cool air.

Even after he installed a new breaker specifically for the machine, it was shutting down and throwing that one too. It’s very own breaker, with nothing else on it! Digression time….

The plan for yesterday had been to load into my mother’s car, head into the city, enjoy the air conditioned vehicle and hit up Ducky’s after her appointment. Then while she was on her way over here, the youngest brother (NERD!) called her to tell her the appointment had been cancelled, so…there was no need to go to the city. No Ducky’s. *whimper* So, she takes me out for coffee because I’ve been fighting with the girls all morning (all twenty minutes of it, since we’d slept in)…then suggests she takes the girls away for the day.

YAY!

Dressed in their bathing suits and shorts, armed with towels and flip-flops, the girls left the house and left me to printing resumes and checking the job banks (and editing…lots of editing!). In peace. In quiet. In the heat.

They showed up home last night, around 8-ish or so. The other brother (not-so-dumb) carried in a large box, and proceeded to tear the packing from around the old ir conditioner. Inside the big box (which said air conditioner, but my mother is mean when it comes to re-packing things…a trait I share, actually!) was actually a brand new air conditioner! A small one, but this is a small house and so long as the kitchen and living room are cool, I think it’s good.

I left it running all last night. Although it is 32*C right now, in the house it’s only about 22. This is a good thing, it’s NORMAL in here again. So, like my recently found doppelganger (actually, she found me, but I’d been to her blog before at some point..I think maybe last winter or something…) I’ll be doing housework today.

In the coolness…

Thanks Mom!

And just when you thought it was safe…

So, I haven’t been able to make this post for a while. Partly because my insides still hurt from the incident, and partly because the computer was taken over by a supposedly not-malicious but extremely frickin’ nasty virus. S’gone now, and s’good.

Provincials were slightly better than heartbreaking. It was hard to watch the girls play as badly as they did, until that last game. Our weekend was shadowed by the accident Rhia had on Friday night, in the pool at the hotel.

After having spent an hour sliding down the slide without incident in the afternoon, the evening pool experience left my darlin’ without her front teeth. As she was going around the first turn of the spiral, the water pressure flipped her over, and on her stomach, she somehow caught her teeth in a space between the pieces of pipe (a space that is NOT supposed to be there, might I add). Her two front teeth were ripped right out of her gums, roots and all. They were her permanent teeth.

I’m trying to keep anything vile out of this post, because I have a contact in to a lawyer. Rhia has been hurt before, but nothing prior was as permanent as the loss of her adult teeth. It was bad, and I want to have it out with the damn hotel. If nothing else, they could have apologized, but there hasn’t even been that. We were treated like ‘served her right’ was something they were thinking. If they were, I can’t wait to be able to think ‘served them right’ when this is all over with.

The damage to her mouth is PERMANENT. Remember that, after you read the rest of this.

Some of the girls looked for the teeth in the pool. One was found (thank you Channy!) in time to be put back into her gums, but the other wasn’t found until the next day. Why? Because the twit at the desk kicked the girls out of the pool. KICKED THEM OUT, even though HE WAS TOLD WHAT THEY WERE DOING!

Am I mad? Yes, but it is a quiet, cold rage. I’m letting it build slowly, so that I can have my go, if the legal system won’t do it. And you all know how I feel about the legal system….

Oh, hey – before I forget, congrats to the Miami Midgets, who won the provincial bronze medal for their division!

And note to those with skin tag moles – OW OW OW OW OW! I just ripped one off my shoulder. The thing felt like a bruise after being irritated by the strap of the cooler bag we carry baseball water in. Bled like crazy. Now if I could get up the nerve to do the one on my neck……….

SNAPPED! Don’t push me…repeat and all that.

All it takes is one bad teacher to ruin the lives of many bright and cheery kids.

While my Care is not a cheery child and is bordering on stereotypical goth without the clothes, she is a smart kid. The light bulb is at least a 120 watt. At least, it was until the most recent Prairie Rose S.D. mistake darkened the hallways of the school. In every class except those four, my kid had damn good marks. My kid is now crushed. I’m talking CRUSHED. She tried damn frickin’ hard to keep up with that…creature’s…teaching methods. And it wasn’t just my kid, so what follows here is mostly conjecture. But I do know she really started picking on Care after I went to the parent-teacher night.

The woman holds a grudge, obviously. Just because I didn’t cow-tow to her when I went to take adult upgrading, just because Care is not the shiny happy student 24-7, just because I live a non-christian life – is that any reason to push her psychotic beliefs and attitudes on my kid? Granted, it wasn’t just my kid. She assigned homework to 12 year olds like she was assigning to the graduate class. Lots of work, very, very little explanation. And if you missed a day or two because of illness or whatever (this includes the storms we had) she plowed on anyway, and did NOT help when asked (and I know my kid and others asked). She refused to explain new material, or to go back and help those kids that she’d already ground into the floor under her sensible shoes.

Care is passing the grade because I say she’s passing and if the school board doesn’t like it – they know where I live. In fact, I know where most of them live, so perhaps a little quid pro quo is in order. They didn’t bother telling me whether or not she’s actually heading into grade 8 next year, I’ll just continue to assume.

Every other teacher gave Care great marks and good comments. Except this one bitch that needs to have her attitude adjusted.

I’m trying not to share my loathing of that woman with Care. I’m trying to give her some hope that maybe next year the sow will be gone and she can just start all over again with another, better, teacher. And if by some chance that woman is going to be teaching something at the grade 8 level, I will have Care either switched to another class, or that one she’ll spend in the library learning by correspondance.

Out of the five other parents I’ve talked to, all have the same opinions of the woman. She should have stayed at the Adult Ed. school teaching ESL. Maybe those folks like being treated like shit under her heel but we don’t….and we won’t put up with it.

And just in case Ms. M. K. does find this – before you deign to edit my kid’s writing, you fucking well better watch yours. Using a run on to tell her not to use a run on makes you look stupider than you already do.