Confessions of a 20-Something School Teacher

T-minus 3 days until I have to go back and work for the next 180 (luckily not 180 days straight). Oh where or where has my “summer “ gone? And I do use the term “summer” very loosely considering a) summer is technically longer than 2 months, and 2) normally summer’s end means cooler temps and that is certainly not the case in my neck of the woods (or armpit/crotch of the U.S- as AZ has been aptly named). Furthermore, summer usually means more time, which equates to more blog posts, also not the case this go ‘round. Since our last meeting here, I have been able to check a few things off my list, but a few still remain. James graduated, we took a trip to Durango with our BFF’s; conquered another year of girls camp, Shua (the brother formally known as Joshua, or Josh to family) completed his mission and returned home safe and sound, got my teeth cleaned, had a pap smear (you know, the annual summer events) spent a week with the Jensen family at Imperial Beach, attended a funeral for our dear friend Lana, painted and did a little more sprucing around the house. Although, there seems to be a strong link between sprucing and chaos- sprucing inevitably leads to more sprucing. I have come to the conclusion that we are excellent at starting the spruce, and terrible at the follow through. Every project in our house is somewhere between 95-99% completed. Every. Single. One.

As I mentally prepare to blog and actually put phalange to keyboard, a rush of anxiety and stress overwhelms my brain. Where to I begin? How do I play catch-up? Or is it Ketchup? Hmmm….Do I cut my losses and post about the present? Do I pick up from where I left off? Do I tie up my loose ends, or start anew? Does it really even matter? I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who actually reads these. P.S- am I the only one who rereads their own posts? Boy, do I sound self-absorbed.

By nature, I am a fairly very organized person- by marriage I am not. In my efforts to create a sensible congruent post accented with a few pictures I went to locate some photos. Naturally, I went to our external hard drive- opened “my pictures”- opened the “2011” folder and searched for the desired folders, which are labeled by month, year, followed by the event name. Much to my dismay, my 2011 folder was missing a huge chunk of the year. I also noticed a few new folders on our desktop “stuff from new camera” ,“more pics” and unavoidably, an “other” folder. I start to hyperventilate. Not only are pictures stored in these obscure folders strewn about the cyber world , we also have some on our external hard drive AND on James’ laptop, not to mention presumably the memory cards for BOTH digital cameras and our camcorder. It’s almost too much for me to take. An hour later James found me rocking back and forth in the corner of our closet humming nursery rhymes. As I got up to make my way back to finish a task I have to step over our unpacked luggage from our last trip, past our unfinished baseboards in our bathroom, our untextured and unpainted wall patch from our flood (over a year ago), beyond our broken entertainment console and into our office area, where I have to play leap frog as to avoid screws, open cans of wood stain and our unfinished coffee table; by design I avoid our piles of laundered and unlaundered clothing that have now seemed to merge and are forming a coup against me. Wow, I am a hot mess. That’s my conclusion- I am one hot mess. I think part of the reason I haven’t blogged is directly coupled with the fact my “hot mess” meter is through the roof, I don’t even know where to begin, so I don’t.

So, what have I even accomplished over the last two months? I did spend the better part of last night trying to sort through the massive digital picture confusion, but not without a few casualties. I organized and emptied every picture I could locate on every digital device we have into their proper place, but I can’t seem to find pictures of James’s graduation and party, as well as a shower I threw for a friend, and unavoidably any event that was flanked by the two. I have also sustained a successful workout regime that will inevitably fall apart once school starts again, but that is entirely beside the point. We did finish the actual painting part of our living room, hallway and office area, however there are still outlets missing outlet covers and we did suffer one casualty with our coffee table turned media console. James is currently working on building a more suitable replacement. I also broke out my sewing machine (that frankly intimidates me) sewed a few simple projects and then broke my needle. In addition, I joined pinterest and facebook. And before I jinx it, I hope I can say I finished another blog post. I apologize for the lack of pictures, I know there was some promised picture hype, but I just didn't like they way they were, or rather, weren't organized.