My dad offered this morning, after he was the last one up at 7:20am, that I might be the next generation of Mrs Kravtiz. You know Mrs Kravtiz, the lovely busybody from the Bewitched series who was always looking out her window and spying on the neighbors?
I think the difference between Mrs Kravitz and me might be the part where after looking out the window, I marched myself down the street to check things out.
It’s the first day of Thanksgiving vacation, and Lord knows I’ve earned it! I mean who hasn’t? I don’t care what you do, if you have days off coming up, whether it’s one or (cough, cough) three + a weekend, you need them! So at 6:40am, when I was rudely awaked by a terrible noise, I was, shall we say, annoyed. At first I thought my sound machine or heater was malfunctioning. And then, as I normally do, I instantly decided it must be my Dad or Tucker (little cat with big feet). I heard my mom start the coffee maker and wandered upstairs. She had also been blown out of bed. And then we heard the sound again! I bolted out the front door in my PJs, and stood on my tippy toes to see over the hedge. Definitely machinery. Have I mentioned it’s before 7am? Is their power out? Is there some sort of an emergency?
As you know, my mom is a lovely person, and was just going to make coffee, and move on with the day. Me? I threw a raincoat on over my pajamas, jammed my feet into my rain boots (yellow ankle boots if you want the imagery) and stalked on down the street.
I can’t imagine there is one of you here that doesn’t know that I don’t do mornings. I function better on an amount of sleep I don’t get during the week, and am better an hour or so after I’ve had coffee. But…I tend to bolt out of bed, get ready in 12-15 minutes and get coffee on the way to school. My students are very well versed in the importance of caffeine; my camp name is Coffee Bean. I say this all for you to understand that I was undercaffeinated and up waaaaaaaay earlier than I wanted to be.
Even with my house on the other side of the street, I found a large semi with something tied down at the back. It was still dusk, so I wasn’t quite sure what it was. Semi was running, but empty. Chug, chug, chug. And then I heard another loud sound I recognized from my slumber, and turned to see a forklift coming down the road that runs parallel to ours. Even sleep and caffeine deprived, I was able to put the pieces together. After he dumped his load and was heading back to the truck, he saw me and tried to give me a wide berth by moving to the other side of the road. I imagine he sighed when I flagged him down.
I don’t know how the conversation started, but the middle section went like this:
Me: It’s before 7 o’clock.
Man driving forklift: So?
“So?” Um, WHAT? Deep breath in, deep breath out. He’s not a 5th grader, he’s not a 5th grader, he’s not a 5th grader. “But why does he sound like a 5th grader?” the tiny voice in my head asked.
Teacher and parent people, the “so” is just mind numbing isn’t it? We both know what we’re talking about, so the rebuttal of “so?” just tells me how uninterested in this conversation you are, which really just ramps up my interest in explaining it.
So?
“Well, sir, this is a neighborhood, and many of us were sleeping. I’m a 5th grade teacher on vacation. Yesterday I put out three canisters of glitter. Blue, green, and multi. It’s all multi now. When I flossed last night, as piece of red popped out from between my teeth. It’s literally e v e r y w h e r e. My students made parade animals out of balloons for a STEM challenge. Approximately 43 of them popped, so I’m a little jumpy. We had a turkey trot, but it was pouring rain, so the kids couldn’t walk up to the track. Roughly 600 students were running and screaming past my window (which, yes, I’m thankful to have). After recess I was informed that one of my students was stuck on the tire swing and couldn’t get off. His strategy was to lick the other student who was pushing said tire swing. That was A LOT to unpack. To top it off, I ended my day at Safeway, where I had a mini panic attack about the mount of germs flying around and gave myself a sponge bath with the hand sanitizer at check-out. So….I was hoping for just a smidge more sleep today.”
He got off his forklift, gave a deep bow in the middle of the street, and produced two QFC sprinkle donuts and a cranberry mimosa.
Just kidding. There were definitely no donuts and mimosas (but this is a great strategy if your job is delivering pre-dawn sod!), but I also didn’t unload on this poor man. I did say the first part, about it being a neighborhood, and he gave me a snarky response back about the amount of deliveries he had and blah, blah, blah. Maybe I’ll look up the city code later, maybe I’ll let it go. For now, I think I’m going to crawl back in bed, and try and get some more sleep. I have ear plugs in now though, because construction has ramped up across the street on one of two new houses. I am hoping for their sake that they don’t turn their music on loud. I have an earbud speech locked and loaded!
Moral of the story, don’t mess with Mrs Kravitz, especially if she is a teacher on break.
PS The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade STEM challenge was SUPER fun, even though we did lose a couple balloons along the way. ;) Teacher people, there are tons of resources and projects - check it out for next year!
https://www.macys.com/social/parade/
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