Ah, where did the summer go? If you can believe it, I had to go dig out my flannel jacket because it's 57 degrees outside, and since we live in an ancient house with no central air, we've had the windows open all summer. Temperature inside now? 63 degrees.
Tomorrow school starts. I will be walking my little ones to their school with their back packs laden with crayons, paper, pencils, and of course, facial tissue, hand wipes, and paper towels. Hasn't the list of school supplies become more hygienic since we were in school? I dreamed last night that I was wearing footed pajamas while the former principal of the school talked to me. All the while I'm trying to crouch down so my younger daughter won't see me and get distracted from her studies. By some craziness, I've found myself on something called the SBDM. Although from its letters you might guess a deviant sexual activity, it is actually a committee made up of three teachers and two parents which wield a lot of power in any one school. Because the principal of my kids' school went on to better places (in his mind at least), the SBDM will be interviewing and hiring the new principal for the school. Thursday I go for a three hour training so that I can know all the ins and outs of interviewing candidates for the elementary principal position. It is a great honor to have the say in this. And a great pain in the rear.
I consider myself a glass half empty kind of person. I work every day on not lamenting how much water has already disappeared from the vessel. I consciously decide (or get reminded by circumstances, God, and my husband) not to dread future events, but to see them as opportunities to deepen my fiction-writing repertoire and not to get embittered by current events but rise above the yuckiness of it (as husband told me yesterday several times "Let it go" when I came home to find a punk kid who had drunk my diet cokes and violated my poor computer by putting his dj scuzzy jazzy crap on it-GGGGRRRR!) oh, right, letting it go, watching the flowing water under the bridge, reading the archived microfiche of ancient history, hearing the guy from Allie McBeal declaring "BYGONES, PEOPLE, BYGONES!"
So, maybe I'm on the SBDM to lighten the mood by making jokes of sexual bondage dominant masochistic participants interviewing perspectives for the principal position at an elementary school. Maybe I'm on this site-based (still can't tell you what DM stands for and it seems rather awkward to ask NOW) council because I have a good working knowledge of Robert's Rules of Order and have some professional experience on working via committees. And just think , maybe this new principal who I get a say in choosing will remember and be beholden to me because of the awesome job he or she will have so that when my kid gets called in to the office for behavioral problems, the principal will be more lenient or firm-whatever is needed-because of the child's mother. And I can always work the experience into my latest fiction masterpiece.
How's that for perceiving the glass half full?
Best Selling Romance Author Jennifer Johnson
