When left to my own devices

It's Friday and A is gone for the weekend. I think he took any motivation I had with him. I had big plans of cleaning and studying before I picked Kidzilla up from school. Then we were going to head to the mall, pick up some dinner at the BBQ at the end of the street (just so I can get a big "I told you so" when I picked up some unknown bacteria sickness from eating food cooked in a trailer from A) and watching a movie. A left, I made it as far as cleaning and then... nothing. Our place is less than 500 sq. feet, it doesn't take a lot to clean it. I read fiction instead of the 2 two chapters of textbook I was supposed to read. I ate chocolate bars instead of fruit. I lounged it up. And now Kidzilla has been playing on his DS for like 2 hours straight while I read some more and now, blog. I guess life really does fall apart without our beloved PIC.

Last Saturday I sucked it up and took the boys to a football game. In the pouring rain. And just to prove how hard core I am, I sat there, in the rain, wearing trash bags as a poncho and lap cover, not complaining, the whole time. And it wasn't that bad. We ended up winning by a hair in the final 2 minutes of the game. A few bad photos of me, just to prove we were there. First is me and frightened Kidzilla with our mascot Chief Oceola. Second is me and A during a break in the rain (note the non-flying pilot facial hair growth).
This week we had the ordeal of changing Kidzilla due to our massive differences in opinion with the school administration. Sorry if I believe that parents should have access to the teachers, kids should have recess AT LEAST once a day and there is more to education that test scores. So we enrolled him in a local charter school. And promptly had to drop $100 on uniforms. He starts Monday and gets to ride a school bus. Fingers crossed that this will work.

Off to bribe Kidzilla into not reporting my laziness with some new gizmo from Target. At least it will get me out of the house.

Coming Along

I'm two weeks into school.

Boy have things changed since I was last in school (in 2000). Every single syllabus had a comment in it about please turn off your cell phone in class. I thought I was cool to have a pager that was alpha-numeric back in 2000. Teachers request that one use their laptop only for notetaking and not for surfing the web or instant messaging during class (or looking at porn...). I thought I was hot stuff to actually have an email account in 1995 when I started at OSU. Every teacher does powerpoint presentations and you can download them ahead of time and take notes directly on them. I think I had one teacher who used powerpoint, and it had a plain black background. Everyone else used the overhead machine. We have this all encompassing website that we can log into to communicate with our classmates and teacher, get our assignments and other information from the teacher and submit our work in their "drop box". I guess group meetings and office hours are a thing of the past.

I'm making it through. I ended up dropping one class because it was just too much. Admittedly it was the class that required a 20 page individually written paper... As long as I can keep up with the reading (2-3 chapters PER class PER week, chapters averaging 50 pages each). I'd forgotten just how boring textbooks can be. I feel like I need a nice shot of espresso to stay away during each chapter. I ended up in the research class that doesn't actually require you to do a research project. Honestly, I'm kinda bummed about that.

Kidzilla is settling in to school pretty well. A is in charge of school relations. He attended orientation and does the morning and afternoon routines. A also taught Kidzilla to ride a two wheeler (yesterday) and now we hear requests to go bike riding several times a day. A needs some friends so he's out with someone not me. We're working on that.

Today we celebrated Labor Day by going for a 3 mile hike (I'm currently regretting ignoring the "use bug spray" advice). Now I'm blogging to the soundtrack of the FSU-Miami game. It's only the 2nd quarter and I'm already tired of hearing the "Tomahawk Chop" business over and over AND OVER. I promised I would suck it up and take the boys to a game, but I'm not really looking forward to it. I wish we could just go for the opening festivities and the halftime field show (I'm such a band geek). The evening before home games the spear is lit on the statue outside our stadium so we took Kidzilla and got a picture.


To throw something aviation related in this post- I'm still interested in doing a research project about divorce rates for pilots and whether they really are higher than average. And as an offshoot of my last post about pilots and depression, a study about how many pilots who go out on disability ultimately lose their license due to depression about their condition/situation instead of due to their actual disability. If I could just get someone to foot the bill...