happy friday

Snappy title, I know. I’m a little distracted, hard as that is to imagine. New Person J is stuffing envelopes, and although she is usually as quiet and considerate an office mate as one could have, unfortunately when she is doing something mindless like stuffing envelopes she has a tendency to start chatting. Oh, well, I’ll just do this instead of all the work I need to do that requires concentration. I think I deserve a break. Hey – I’ll take one!

Yesterday I made a visit to the Girly Doctor. That was lots of fun. I mean, even more fun that the usual fun, which is of course no fun at all. My appointment was at 2:00. I walked in to a waiting room packed full of babies, toddlers, mothers who looked about 14, and grandmothers who were, ummm, about my age. I tried unsuccessfully to tune out the din of screaming, crying, wailing, and ceaseless baby-talk. I’d made the mistake of assuming there would be something to read, and didn’t bring anything with me. Well, there WAS lots to read, if you wanted to read about pregnancy or parenting or small children. Or could wrestle the one golf magazine away from the one guy in the waiting room. People were changing babies on the sofa, toddlers were slinging blocks at everyone, babies were spitting up their lunch, much was made over a woman finding a laundry basket for $6 at WalMart. I wondered whether it was possible that I’d died without realizing it and gotten sent to hell.

At 3:00 they called me in.  And told me that the doctor had an emergency and wouldn’t be back till 3:30. I could wait. I could reschedule. Or….I could leave and come back! I ran screaming strolled out for tea and a newspaper and came back at 3:30. And the waiting room was even more packed than before, but at least I got called in for the second time fairly quickly. The exam didn’t take long at all. And the doctor, a very nice man who says "thank you" so often that it starts getting a little odd, tells me I’m in wonderful health and everything looks just fine and my blood pressure is good and my iron is great and my weight is fine! He tells me my weight is fine every time I’m there. I guess it does look good compared to his usual patients who are, oh, eight months pregnant. But whatever! I’m fine with hearing it, true or not. And that’s over for another year or five.

So it’s the usual madness here. Suddenly I’ve got people coming out of the woodwork who were here 20 years ago and want to come back. The dean brought a guy in a few minutes ago, who had been a student here back in the 80s and wanted to see if we had his files. Well, first of all – no, we don’t keep files from 25 years ago. And secondly, he wasn’t even an education major when he WAS here, so his files were never here in the first place – they were in Arts and Sciences. He just wants to be an education major NOW. After he dropped out in the 80s. He’s decided he might like to be a teacher, and he’d love to start school on Monday when summer session cranks up. And he had scary eyes that were looking in two different directions at one time. We finally got him pointed in the direction of Admissions.

I’ve also had a series of ongoing calls from another guy who was ALSO here in the late 80s. He graduated in the late 80s and came back to get certified to teach in the early 90s. He got all the way to student teaching, and dropped out. In 1991. So now he wants to know if he can just student teach again and get his license. Never mind that it’s been 16 years and a few requirements have changed since then. And REALLY never mind that upon doing some digging, I found that he’d been an education major as an undergraduate and took most of the classes then, but suddenly changed majors at the last minute. And he barely had the minimum GPA. So it looks like there was probably some problem way back then but who knows what it was, because we don’t keep files for that long. Actually I called Arts and Sciences about him and they destroy everything after ten years. Which really isn’t very long, since people come out of the woodwork 25 years later on a regular basis. And he keeps calling me and being very snippy even though at this point the Associate Dean is looking at his "situation" and it’s out of my hands. And, best of all, he sounds just like Forest Gump. A snippy Forest Gump.

I think my favorite, though, was the call I got yesterday. This woman graduated in 1981 in Elementary Education. And she’d paid her fee and turned everything in, but she never got her license. Could I tell her why she didn’t get it? TWENTY SIX YEARS AGO??? Oh, let me just run over to the Magic Crystal File Cabinet and check!

I actually did laugh at that one. And I will give her points for being good natured about it and admitting that she probably should have looked into this, oh, twenty six years ago. At least 25 years ago. Now she’s wanting to get a teaching job and surprisingly the lack of a teaching license is a problem. But she applied for it! She just never got it!

Well, I’m going to end with some pictures that will give the impression that we’re actually expereincing spring here. In reality, it’s 54 degrees out there. BRRRRRR.

 Rhododendrons blooming in Blowing Rock! Actually, this is ALL stuff blooming in Blowing Rock. Boone has a very unwalkable downtown thanks to all the traffic and chaos.

And these are the domestic ones, which bloom a month or so earlier than the wild ones. Which we have tons of around here.

And the pretty little park in the evening.