November 24: I finally met Max’s little one, Conrad. He gurgles in a way that makes him sound like he is purring all the time. He kept spitting out his pacifier and shoving my fingers into his mouth so that he could bite me with the two tiny and sharp teeth growing out of his lower jaw.
November 25: We picked up Wiggins and he immediately fell asleep in his dog bed in the back seat. When he woke up, dad wet over his responsibilities in the household, which include chasing Nora so much that she loses five pounds within the next two weeks.
November 26: For some reason, they decided to paint the hallways today instead of over Thanksgiving break, when the school was empty for an entire week. They forgot to put up signs warning people of the wet paint, and all day, we found students trying to wash light blue paint off their uniforms and out of their hair.
November 27: Buster is gone. While I am glad that I got to see her again, it doesn’t feel like I got to say a real goodbye. She wasn’t acting like herself for long at Thanksgiving and I wish that I had known that the summer Oregon trip was the last time I would really be with her.
November 28: It is, of course, the day I managed to have entirely indoor plans that the storm decided to take a break. It was damp, but rain-free the entire day.
November 29: Joanna informed me that if she asked to go to the bathroom today, I would need to excuse her immediately. She started her period last night. She’s ten. She even opened up her backpack to show me where she had stashed two week’s worth of pads. Janessa, also ten, shook her head slowly and said, “She’s growing up so fast.”
November 30: We got the results back from our Beacon Initiative evaluation. We did not score highly in “engagement” because we don’t utilize many interdependent skills in our lessons. The tool guide suggested that I establish a class treasurer. Problem solved.
much love,
hedgie
Friday, November 30, 2018
Friday, November 23, 2018
two types of alcoholic slushies
November 17: We had dinner at The Local Peasant, which had not one, but two types of alcoholic slushies. I drank both. I’ve never been happier.
November 18: The cabin sits on a series cinderblock stilts about a foot above the ground. Addie has been crawling under it all day. She can move pretty fast even when she was hunched over to fit. It was terrifying, watching her scramble towards me like a gigantic spider.
November 19: The Inn of the Seventh Ray is rumored to be Aimee Semple McPherson’s summer hideout. The creek that ran by the patio was completely dried out and they brought out portable heaters for everyone sitting outside. One was turned on too high and was quickly turned into a flamethrower.
November 20: The new Google site is the airplane hangar where The Spruce Goose was built. They were instructed to leave the original architecture alone, so the Google construction starts about five feet away from the walls. There was set of stairs blocked off from the main floor with a sign that describes them as historic stairs. They sit in the dark and lead to nowhere.
November 21: Heidi and Kate threw a surprise anniversary/Nick’s 30th birthday party for us. Heidi printed and laminated even more photos of us. How can she do these so fast?
November 22: Buster isn’t doing too well. She has an aggressive stomach cancer and there isn’t much anyone can do about it. She has spent the last week pooping nothing but blood. She constantly shivers and when I pet her, I can feel her tiny bones through her fur.
November 23: Dad had been desperately trying to find a new cold case to solve now that The Golden State Killer has been caught. He recruited Austin to help over text.
“Do you want to help me solve a crime?”
“Sure.”
“What skills will you be able to bring to our team?”
“I can pole vault.”
much love,
hedgie
November 18: The cabin sits on a series cinderblock stilts about a foot above the ground. Addie has been crawling under it all day. She can move pretty fast even when she was hunched over to fit. It was terrifying, watching her scramble towards me like a gigantic spider.
November 19: The Inn of the Seventh Ray is rumored to be Aimee Semple McPherson’s summer hideout. The creek that ran by the patio was completely dried out and they brought out portable heaters for everyone sitting outside. One was turned on too high and was quickly turned into a flamethrower.
November 20: The new Google site is the airplane hangar where The Spruce Goose was built. They were instructed to leave the original architecture alone, so the Google construction starts about five feet away from the walls. There was set of stairs blocked off from the main floor with a sign that describes them as historic stairs. They sit in the dark and lead to nowhere.
November 21: Heidi and Kate threw a surprise anniversary/Nick’s 30th birthday party for us. Heidi printed and laminated even more photos of us. How can she do these so fast?
November 22: Buster isn’t doing too well. She has an aggressive stomach cancer and there isn’t much anyone can do about it. She has spent the last week pooping nothing but blood. She constantly shivers and when I pet her, I can feel her tiny bones through her fur.
November 23: Dad had been desperately trying to find a new cold case to solve now that The Golden State Killer has been caught. He recruited Austin to help over text.
“Do you want to help me solve a crime?”
“Sure.”
“What skills will you be able to bring to our team?”
“I can pole vault.”
much love,
hedgie
Friday, November 16, 2018
equivalent of smoking two cigarettes
November 9: A nearby town is on fire, and it has sent plumes of ash into the sky. It is tinging everything with a red brown glow, making it look like golden hour before lunch time.
November 10: Nick sheared George and even trimmed his bangs. But he cut the bangs unevenly, so that it looks like he did them diagonally. It make George look like an emo kid.
November 11: Today, I hit 53,756 words for my novel. It is now officially the longest thing I have ever written.
November 12: Somewhere in Richmond, there is a beer waiting for me, courtesy of Ryan.
Armistice Brewing Company
November 13: The air quality is still at code red, so we had indoor recess all day again. It looks like it will continue this way all week. The kids are quickly becoming agitated and sickly. Yet, I still see hoards of people smoking as if they aren’t getting enough of that already.
November 14: We are teaching the Kindness Course again in program. I wanted to center my lessons around bullying because I knew my kids were having a lot of problems with that. The issue was that I was having a lot of trouble finding activities about bullying that they couldn’t bully each other during. They proved me right. We made poster about putting a stop to bullying. We decorated cutouts of our hands, signed it, and taped it on. They took the paper hands, folded down all the fingers but the middle one, and flipped each other off.
November 15: Due to the air quality, being outside for an hour is the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes. But the school districts are holding off on canceling school because they are afraid of losing government funding next year. Melissa joked about taking pictures of our kids all holding cigarettes with the caption “they might as well be”. When it was announced that school would be cancelled on Friday, Melissa wrote it on a piece of paper and slid it to me, knowing that saying it out loud in front of the children would spark pandemonium.
November 16: The school felt almost haunted all week. The front yard, normally filled with screaming children, was quiet and empty. The front gate screeched opened and slammed shut with a heavy thud. Everything was grey and obscured by smoke.
much love,
hedgie
November 10: Nick sheared George and even trimmed his bangs. But he cut the bangs unevenly, so that it looks like he did them diagonally. It make George look like an emo kid.
November 11: Today, I hit 53,756 words for my novel. It is now officially the longest thing I have ever written.
November 12: Somewhere in Richmond, there is a beer waiting for me, courtesy of Ryan.
Armistice Brewing Company
November 13: The air quality is still at code red, so we had indoor recess all day again. It looks like it will continue this way all week. The kids are quickly becoming agitated and sickly. Yet, I still see hoards of people smoking as if they aren’t getting enough of that already.
November 14: We are teaching the Kindness Course again in program. I wanted to center my lessons around bullying because I knew my kids were having a lot of problems with that. The issue was that I was having a lot of trouble finding activities about bullying that they couldn’t bully each other during. They proved me right. We made poster about putting a stop to bullying. We decorated cutouts of our hands, signed it, and taped it on. They took the paper hands, folded down all the fingers but the middle one, and flipped each other off.
November 15: Due to the air quality, being outside for an hour is the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes. But the school districts are holding off on canceling school because they are afraid of losing government funding next year. Melissa joked about taking pictures of our kids all holding cigarettes with the caption “they might as well be”. When it was announced that school would be cancelled on Friday, Melissa wrote it on a piece of paper and slid it to me, knowing that saying it out loud in front of the children would spark pandemonium.
November 16: The school felt almost haunted all week. The front yard, normally filled with screaming children, was quiet and empty. The front gate screeched opened and slammed shut with a heavy thud. Everything was grey and obscured by smoke.
much love,
hedgie
Thursday, November 8, 2018
we're awful
November 1: The streets are littered with unwrapped pieces of candy. It makes it hard to walk Addie because she lunges for every piece she finds and she has yet to make the connection between eating things out of the gutter and her getting bouts of diarrhea.
November 2: Our counselor has been dividing her time between two offices. She is in San Francisco two days a week and in the East Bay the rest of the time. She’s going to be switching to the East Bay full time and we have to decide what we want to do now. I know it would be really difficult to add a commute to therapy, but I’m really hesitant to leave something I know is working and gambling on something else we know nothing about. It’s like going to a restaurant with your favorite meal and then ordering something else just to see what the rest of their food is like.
November 3: I’m already a few hundred words behind on NaNoWriMo. In order to catch up, I need to write over 2,200 words today. It doesn’t help that Nick keeps coming into the room to show me things, like the onion we got in our Hello Fresh box this week that he thinks is huge.
November 4: I lay down on the couch, the muscles in my legs and back still twitching from walking home from lunch. It was like they were all still pumped up from being outside and were whispering excitedly to each other.
November 5:
November 7: Janessa looked at me curiously at recess today. “Miss. Heather, do you want to have kids someday?”
“Yes, I do.”
She looked very confused by my answer. “Why?” She asked. “We’re awful.”
November 8: I labeled a dozen ziplock bags for each of my knitting class students so that they would have a place to store their projects when class ended. They had been with the kids for about five minutes before Briana opened hers up and spit in it.
much love,
hedgie
November 2: Our counselor has been dividing her time between two offices. She is in San Francisco two days a week and in the East Bay the rest of the time. She’s going to be switching to the East Bay full time and we have to decide what we want to do now. I know it would be really difficult to add a commute to therapy, but I’m really hesitant to leave something I know is working and gambling on something else we know nothing about. It’s like going to a restaurant with your favorite meal and then ordering something else just to see what the rest of their food is like.
November 3: I’m already a few hundred words behind on NaNoWriMo. In order to catch up, I need to write over 2,200 words today. It doesn’t help that Nick keeps coming into the room to show me things, like the onion we got in our Hello Fresh box this week that he thinks is huge.
November 4: I lay down on the couch, the muscles in my legs and back still twitching from walking home from lunch. It was like they were all still pumped up from being outside and were whispering excitedly to each other.
November 5:
Ana poked unhappily at her salad with her fork after finishing her the first, disappointing bite. “It tastes like grass,” she said, making a face. “That’s because it is grass,” Jen said. “What did you expect?”
Or
She didn’t like the way he talked about how good things were when she was on Zoloft. He would point out how they rarely fought and how they had sex all the time. They were happier than they had been for a long time. He didn’t give her any credit for how hard she worked to get there. It was like he was telling her that all his favorite things about her was the medication.
November 6: Nick and I cast our votes after work. Now, I get to spend the rest of the night anxiously refreshing my webpage to watch the seats of the House and Senate get filled.November 7: Janessa looked at me curiously at recess today. “Miss. Heather, do you want to have kids someday?”
“Yes, I do.”
She looked very confused by my answer. “Why?” She asked. “We’re awful.”
November 8: I labeled a dozen ziplock bags for each of my knitting class students so that they would have a place to store their projects when class ended. They had been with the kids for about five minutes before Briana opened hers up and spit in it.
much love,
hedgie
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