And I woke up with a couple posts in my head. At least I got a solid four hours sleep.
Today will be the seventh, if I’m counting right, snow or cold weather day that the Duluth Public Schools have closed. For me this has caused some aggravating delays getting to a dozen projects of personal interest. Yesterday, for instance Claudia and I woke up with two little boys who otherwise would have been at their own homes. The night before I had dropped off my daughter’s car, which had been refusing to start in the morning, at a garage where the battery could be replaced so that she could get to work on her own. Because the boys are delightful and because I made up my mind in recent years that family comes first in my “retirement” years this has not caused me any particular grief. It just means that at times other projects, like putting the world back together, are pushed to the backburner. As I type this my office looks like a tornado hit it. I’ve got stacks of papers everywhere that need filing so that when their time comes for my attention I’ll be able to find them without creating new stacks of paper.
To the left is the bill for my Mother’s care that I have to check out. I finally got to it a month late only to find her insurer required me to send them my power of attorney documentation. That had been filed away a couple years ago so I had to stop and locate that to scan and turn into pdf’s for transmittal. By the time I got to it, after other weather related interruptions, it was probably too late in the day for the person I sent it to to call me back as I had requested. So there it sits part of the damn clutter. I just sighed heavily thinking about it. That tells you all you need to know about all the other clutter keeping it company on every level surface within reach of my keyboard.
I did get one thing done yesterday. I spoke to a school administrator for a couple of hours. The cold weather slowed him up and I had to wait for half an hour at a local restaurant to commence a long overdue conversation. I’d forewarned Supt. Gronseth the week before that I would do this and it was his turn to sigh at my inquisitiveness. There are some protocols that he’d like to enforce about going through him to get to his subordinates that I appreciate. As Mr. Gronseth said most School Board members have no idea how much the idea how terrified staff are at being grilled by a school board member. We are a little like those proverbial elephants flattening the grass. One of my long term subbing jobs thirty years ago happened because an Albrook School Board member had it in for the popular and competent science teacher that was untenured. The science teacher got the axe and the kids got a history teacher to teach their math and science for a couple months. When I was offered the job for the rest of the year I declined despite the paycheck. It wasn’t fair to the kids. Perhaps the students eventually got someone who was properly trained, perhaps they didn’t. If not it was thanks to the ass who got elected to reign terror on the Superintendent.
I’m not very dedicated to terrorism. I simply wanted to reestablish a good working relationship with someone I once got along with famously before the Red Plans imposition and yet do so with candor not overlooking our having been on opposite sides of the recent elephant fight. I think I succeeded.
