Last Thursday was CVCA’s parent-teacher conference day. They always feed the teachers (and quite well), so I went along with Meredith so I could eat with her. I know I don’t stick around for conferences, but I like eating supper with my wife. It was lasagna and garlic bread and chocolate cake. I got to chat with CVCA’s hockey coach about hockey, since I had seen some hockey because of the Olympics. It was interesting.
Anyway, I went home and Mer went to her classroom. As usual, Mer ended up with no conferences (she stays in close contact with students and parents if the student starts to get behind), so she came home around 6:15 or so. And since he was bachin’ it for the week, our friend Craig came over shortly thereafter (he had a 6:15 conference).
Craig is always much fun to be around – he is wacky and he is witty, and he had come over to try out the bean-based card game that Ellen had given Mer this past January. He picked it up very quickly, and, not unlike Shannon, was soon trying to find the weaknesses in the game. Most of his ideas were covered in the rule book, but he did come up with the very cool idea of trading like beans for like beans, just to get them to the front of your hand where they can be planted. It worked pretty well. In fact, it worked so well that Craig won, and I lost. I seem to lose this game a lot. I tend to spend extravagantly to get the beans I want, and that does not help my cause a whole lot (although the score was 19-15-14, so Mer only beat me by 1 gold coin).
We then munched on some Handel’s mint chocolate chip Handel pops (soooo good) and chatted. Craig was amused flipping through my copy of Cake Wrecks (a book showing cakes gone badly wrong). Not shockingly, Craig had been to the web site many times, but there were some book-only cakes that he found amusing. It was a pleasant evening, despite my losing, and Craig headed home into a snowy evening around 10:00. Mer and I did stay up for another hour or so to watch some Olympic coverage. For two people not really into sports too much, we are both Olympic junkies.
Friday dawned very snowy, and it was only 30 minutes after we got up before the call came in that we had a snow day. Mer directly headed back to bed, where she got some much-needed sleep, and slept until about 10:00. She then spent most of the day grading her stack of term papers, at least until evening when I got home – then we ate and watched Olympics.
Staff is expected to report on snow days, as long as it is safe to do so. Since I live about an eight-minute walk from CVCA, it is hard to argue that I had to stay home. I was pretty happy to go in, though. I had a new internet server (firewall) to bring online, and I cannot work on things like that while people are around using the internet heavily. It took me 6.5 hours of my 8-hour day, but I did get it online, and that made me quite happy. Around 3:00, I headed home to shovel, and then to eat and sit on the couch watching incredibly buff athletes perform while announcers trashed their performances when they made a slight slip. I usually feel for the athletes. It’s the Winter Olympics – let it snow!