Friday five point five

 1. We are on a two hour delay this morning! It could turn into a full day off but I´m not holding my breath and I´m being thankful for the delay. We were under a winter weather advisory and originally supposed to get much more than we got. By later in the day yesterday, the forecast had been revised and we weren´t supposed to get as much. It looks like we got an inch and a half of snow so a two hour delay is generous. There was or is (haven´t checked the forecast) a chance of snow this morning. If it comes within the next two hours, maybe they´ll call the day off but I doubt it. 

2. One odd thing about the past two weekends is that we´d been out of town the Thursday and Friday before and returned home on Saturday. The past two Sundays we´ve been home all day (besides going to church) doing catch up tasks at home (and yes, that included a nap last Sunday as I´d slept poorly the previous few nights). The tasks did not include going to the grocery store and with me working five days a week right now and not wanting to do anything I don´t have to after school means that we´ve been eating meals that have come from food out of freezer and pantry a lot this week. Not necessarily a bad thing to use up items that I pass over when I regularly stock up at the grocery store... We had a pretty old pot roast one evening for dinner (the deep freezer keeps meat fresh for an almost shockingly long time!) that tasted good. I made burrito-chens one night for dinner (in German, adding ¨chen¨ to the end of a word makes the word mean ¨small.¨ There´s no such equivalent in the English language so I borrowed from the German language :)). All I had were small tortillas so I filled them and added a small amount of olive oil to a pan with which to brown the bottoms a little. They turned out cute... and good. 

3. The aforementioned nap on Sunday that I mentioned happened this past Sunday and it turned out to be not a good thing- I slept ZERO hours Sunday into Monday. None, zilch, nada. It was depressing and tiring to be awake, not asleep yet feeling vaguely tired at the same time for HOURS and knowing that I´d have to go a whole school day before I could rest my weary head on the pillow. After school, I did lay down but I could not sleep! I finally crashed around 7:00. I´d been awake for over 36 hours!! Of course I woke up early the next morning because I don´t/can´t sleep too many hours in a row. To keep this post from devolving into a full blown analysis of my odd sleep issues, I won´t say much more about my sleep except to say that I slept well the rest of the week for which I was thankful! (And I won´t mention my odd dream where I almost drove into Lake Erie (it would have been the GPS´s fault a la The Office) which, in my dream, looked more like a Caribbean ocean with aquamarine water and white sand than... what Lake Erie actually looks like. (Though Lake Erie at Presque Isle in Erie, PA did look remarkably like the ocean while the Lake Erie beaches that I see when visiting family in Canada look nothing like the ocean.))

Lake Erie Beach in Canada

Beach in the Caribbean- how/why did my brain conflate the two in my dream??

All right, I said I won´t mention my odd dream about Lake Erie but I actually already did so I´ll just add a couple of more details. In my dream, the road I was driving on ended at Lake Erie so I had to turn either left or right. The road ¨T¨ed and if you kept going straight, you´d drive into the lake. I turned left to head towards Buffalo- (I guess I was headed to Canada via Buffalo?) Buffalo was to my left in the distance in this dream, but soon found myself driving on the beautiful white sand and thinking that I should get off the sand in case a rogue wave  swept me into the lake. That´s it. That was the dream. I never made it to Buffalo/Canada and I never made it off the sand but at least I didn´t get swept away so we´ll call it a wash- no pun intended.

4. It´s the most wonderful time of the year for college students/ interns at colleges and their parents as the semester is winding down and kiddos will be coming home soon. The girls will be coming home soon which means among other things that our bedroom will once again become wrapping paper central. I´d turned Abby´s room into my gift wrapping storage center but I doubt she´ll want that role for her room when she returns. 

5. Speaking of not going to the grocery store often and the girls coming home soon, I CANNOT avoid doing it much longer. I´ll be cooking for five again and it´s much harder to cobble meals out of miscellaneous items in the fridge/pantry/freezer. It really was a lovely break from the grocery store. I haven´t done a full fledged grocery run in weeks! I have been getting some fresh items when I´ve had to go to Sam´s Club for and Donnie has picked up a thing or two for me when he´s gone to Walmart but I haven´t done a normal grocery run in weeks. 

5.5. The week at school went very well (so far- today´s classes will all be shortened due to the delay). I was really nervous about how the subs would do last Thursday and Friday when I was out. While they didn´t leave the best notes for me, they gave me some indication of where they left off so that helped. I didn´t have to cover for other teachers this week during my plan period which meant that I had time to get everything in order for my classes and I could read some, too. I am sure looking forward to the weekend but am grateful for a pretty nice week overall!