Now, let me say, when I was in sixth grade, they passed out the schedules on the first day of school. You went to either the auditorium, the boy's gym, or the girl's gym, depending on which grade you were in.
Yes, my junior high had two gyms, because it used to be a high school. It had been built back when boys and girls did not have co-ed P.E. classes -- thus, separate gyms. Funny thing is, sometimes girls were allowed to go into the boy's gym for pep rallies, awards days, or other various school functions, but boys were never, ever allowed into the girl's gym, for any reason.
But I digress -- from my digression. Junior high consisted of 6th, 7th, and 8th grades when I went. It used to be 7th, 8th, and 9th grades, and 6th grade was in the elementary school. My old elementary school was shaped somewhat like an H, with 1st through 3rd grades in one wing, and 4th through 6th in the other. The crossbar of the H was where the offices, cafeteria, gym and music room were.
When my school district added kindergarten to the public school system -- which coincidentally, was the year my sister started, my older brother and I having gone to a kindergarten in Cove Baptist Church -- they moved third grade to the "big kids" wing to make room for them. Sixth grade was moved up to the junior high, and 9th to the high school.
The summer between my sixth and seventh grade years, two school districts merged. Ninth and tenth grades were on what we called East Campus, while eleventh and twelfth grades were on West Campus.
Now that you know more than you ever wanted to about my childhood schooling, let me get back to my story. When I was in 6th grade, they handed out the schedules on the first day of school. Within the next year or two -- I don't rightly remember when -- they'd started mailing them to your home before school started. However, I got said schedule, I had it, and it was the first day of 7th grade...I think it was about 4th period. I went into the classroom and noticed I was the first one there. No biggie. I chose a desk, sat down, and waited for my classmates and teacher to arrive.
Time passed... I was thinking everyone else must be running late Really late. Then the bell rang. No one else came into the room. Still I sat, thinking surely people would come soon, even though the period had already started.
Finally, I went to the classroom across the hall and told the teacher there that nobody else had come to my class. She sent me to the office, where they told me they'd changed that teacher's schedule and had also had to change all the student schedules, too. Somehow, mine had gotten overlooked. They made me up a new schedule, and sent me off to my new class. The rest of seventh grade continued without a hitch -- well, without a scheduling hitch that is.
Be that as it may, that event left me so traumatized, I still have nightmares about it 41 years later. That event left me so traumatized, even now, when I schedule a vacation day at work, I keep the request form, get a print out of my vacation schedule from the work computer, mark each day on my calendar, then double check, triple check, and octuple check each day before it arrives.
And I still spend half the day worrying that I got it wrong.
What can I say? It's the INTJ in me.
In the midst of all that worrying, I actually had quite a productive day. It started off pretty chilly, though not cold enough to start a fire, and certainly not cold enough to turn on the heater. But it was chilly enough to make the coffee taste just a wee bit better.
One of the things I've been working on since I moved into this house is cleaning up all the junk the previous owners had tossed over the back fence. I only had this little bit left,
so I made that my main project for today. Once I finally got out there and got started, it didn't take long to get it cleaned up.
When I moved in, there was junk piled from the gate all the way to that half rotten tree stump. It looks so much better now.
And it'll be a whole lot easier to mow.
Out of that pile of junk, I pulled all these tires,
plus all this scrap metal,
plus a bunch of other stuff that was just garbage -- and quickly made its way into the garbage can. I advertised the tires and scrap metal in the local free-bees group. The same guy who didn't come pick it up 6 months ago said he was going to come pick it up. Yeah, I'm not going to hold my breath on that.
Want to hear a funny story? I was picking up one of those tires and I heard James' voice in my head.
"Lift that from the side away from you, just in case there's a snake under there." I pick the tire up, lifting the side away from me, and what do you think I found?
Yep, this bad boy.
And a toad, but that's not nearly as exciting. Big old, beautiful rat snake -- and despite my descriptor above, it's probably a female, judging by the size of her. I apologized for destroying her hiding place, and let her go on her merry way. She quickly found a new nest in the rotten stump nearby, where I left her in peace.
The only other thing I did was to wash my bricks off really well. I kind of actually like this distressed look, but alas, it'll be primed and painted anyway.
I hope to get that done tomorrow or Saturday.
Then it will be on to the next project -- my shutters, which hopefully won't take nearly as long.
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