BUUULLLEEETTTSSS!!!!!

Wow. Those banshee-screaming post titles feel good! :-)

Quiet lil' me here. (Ha!) It's been a while, or so it seems. I've been being a very indecisive blogger. Post something, take it down, lots of ideas, but none of them really coming together into a post, or none of them that I want to talk about here, or something. I think I'm starting to care less about that last one. What the hey. It's my blog. We'll see.

See? Even that isn't terribly coherent. Oh well.

So my apparent lack of with-it-ness this morning means you get bullets. BULLETS! Oh the joy! Oh the glee! Oh the... oh who cares, here goes.

• Iowa. It was SO great to get to see Rachelle and Nathan and their two boys (cutest kids in the whole wide world!). We hung out, played with the kids, ran errands, made meals... well, Rachelle made meals. She wouldn't let me help! She totally pampered me - thanks, chickiepoo! Also, it took me a full 24 hours after leaving to stop swaying when I stood. I kept going, "Oh! Right! I'm not holding a baby anymore. Awww, shoot, I'm not holding a baby anymore!" I want babieeees! Whoah, nelly. Hold your horses there, folks. Not NOW. But definitely one day. Yeah, I can't wait to have kids. As crazy-inducing as they can be, I want a whole minivan full of 'em! Heh. Pictures to come once I can sort through the hundreds that I took. Yes, hundreds.



• Chicago. Yep, I've already talked about it. I'm gonna talk about it some more. First of all, I love that city! I didn't even really see that much of it, but it just left a really good impression. I might try to go back in August. Maybe. And then, of course, there are the one, two, three reasons I went to Chicago in the first place! It's funny, since I've been back at work, everybody's been asking me how the trip went - many with kind of a cautious tone: "So, how did it go with your friends from the internet???" As if, because I met these gals via the web, something MUST have gone wrong or something. No, not everyone asks in that way, but it's amusing when they do. I answer each with a Hillary-enthusiasm-filled, "AWESOME!" or "FANTASTIC!" or "AMAZING!" I think mostly it was just really neat to get the full picture (as full as you can get in a day and a half, anyway) of these ladies. It's one thing to read a stranger's words on the internet, but when you don't know them, you don't know the back stories behind some things (we got a few of those on the weekend!), you can't imagine their tone of voice or their mannerisms (folks who know me often will comment that they can 'hear' me saying the things I'm typing!), and, while sometimes you can get a pretty good guess at what they're like, you really don't know till you meet them. I read these girls' posts slightly differently now that we've spent some time hanging out. And that comment on the pictures from Iowa? Ditto goes here.



• Apparently my wordiness is back. I'm stickin' with the bullets anyway.



• Reunion. What have I gotten myself into? There have been a few rumblings of a grad reunion over the last few months, and two or three people have begun a bit of planning, as far as looking into venues, I think, but I'm not sure if there's been that much that's been done. I wanna go to a reunion, so apparently I took it upon myself to make a facebook group and add as many high school friends as I could to my friends list so we can start to collect contact info for our grad class. The problem is, I do NOT want to organize it. I'll help with contacts, but I'm worried that starting this group, I'll get stuck with a bunch of planning. Eeeep. It's pretty fun to see what people are up to now, though. There's that whole crew of guys from high school who are all still buddies and have all their pics of raging parties and laughing at all the noise violations and cop encounters they've been having .... it's like a time warp! But it's really fun to see who's married, who has kids, who's off doing totally interesting things - a massage therapist in the British Virgin Islands, a mountain guide in the Himalayas, etc. Makes me seem kinda boring. "Well... I went to university. Now I'm a teacher." Maybe I need to put a hiatus on that plan and do some gallivanting of my own! The reunion will be really interesting, I'm looking forward to it (I think!).



• Speaking of teaching... my report cards are due on Monday. Bet ya didn't even know! Last term was T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E! It was the first time I'd done them, and wow, it sent me into a tizzy. First of all, figuring out just what to SAY, and then realizing what I'd done all term was gonna make it really hard to write the reports, and the guesswork and second-guessing myself... it really really brought me down. This term (so far - I still have a long way to go) is like night and day. TOUCH WOOD! I know the kids better, have developed a different system for evaluating, and it just seems easier. Erm, they're still gonna be late, but that's ok. They are not gonna kill me. Yaaay!



• What might kill me, though? These dang lyrics that I can NOT get out of my head. Those are what I've been posting, taking down, posting, taking down. If you read me via a feed reader or caught my site when they were up, well, you saw them. If not, too bad. OK, first of all, music always really impacts me. I love lyrics because of the stories they tell and the emotions they bring up in me. That's probably one of the reasons I like country music, because there's just so many stories and ranges of emotion there (not that there's not in other music, let's not get into an off-topic debate here!). So yeah, music really affects me. And I also remember lyrics fairly well and get songs stuck - and I do mean STUCK - in my head. So I nearly had a fit when I first heard the song last weekend, cause I thought, wow, that totally applies to me. But then, of course, I realized, ok, no song can totally be 100% applicable. There are similarities, or parts of the song that fit, but there's always parts that are like, "Ok, yeah, no, those don't apply." So I looked up the lyrics to calm my crazy-brain. And they ONE HUNDRED PERCENT APPLY. Every single word. And it's depressing. I hate that it brings me down so much.

Heh. And on THAT cheery note, I need to get back to work (ok, ok, I need to GET to work). These reports haven't killed me yet, and I don't intend to let them this time. So that's my little brain dump for the day.

Happy Saturday!