Sleep Deprivation

Gawd, I feel like sludge.

Sneezy, achy, drippy, snotty, stuffy... what other unwelcome little dwarves are there? Oh, yeah. Sleepy, too.

The spring winds have come early this year, stirring up the fall pollen and making me miserable. Allergy season (season?!) has arrived about six weeks too soon and it's landed squarely on my face.

I wish it was a cold, but I know it's not (cold's don't make the roots of my teeth itch and have my nose running twenty-four seven like a fifty year old hose spigot). ' Cause colds are finite. They have a definite lifespan and then they're over. Could be seven days, might wind up being ten if I rebel and don't go to bed extra-early like my body wants to, but they do end.

Instead, I'm left wondering who was driving all those Mack trucks that ran me over when I wasn't looking.

If my allegy 'script wasn't up to nearly fifty dollars per refill this year, this wouldn't really be an issue. But with Ed out of work and the unemployment office dragging its feet, fifty bucks is a bit too dear to waste more or less pampering myself. I'll live, the body aches'll go away in another day or two (they usually only last a week or so) and my nose will develop The Allergy Callus once it's done cracking and peeling from all the blowing and running.

Sleep, however, might still be rather elusive. My nights consist of a few hours of solid unconsciousness (til the Nyquil wears off) and then a series of short naps (I keep waking up to either blow my nose or stuff a Kleenex up it before something nasty makes it all the way down to the pillow).

I have a point... somewhere. I'm sure I'll meander my way to it, once I remember what it is (with snot-for-brains, this could take a while). Oh, yeah... my sleep-deprived brain and how it keeps scampering off on tangents in those 'tween times when I'm dozing off again with a gull's wing of Kleenex hovering above my lip). Courtesy of the scraps of television I catch while I'm waiting for sleep to visit again.

A few of the ones that have managed to stick in my waking brain (with all that goo in my head, the sticking really isn't a problem, I suppose):

What's with the names of the newer prescription drugs? Lipitor sounds like a Transformer action figure (Halt! I am Lipitor! Hail the Exalted Emperor Lipitor!)

And Zelnorm? Where did they get that from? A dying robot's misfiring brain rambling out throught its voicebox? (Zel... Norm... Zell... Normmmm...man... Norman...) Doesn't strike me as the obvious choice for a gastric muscle relaxant.

What kind of dough is the Pillsbury Doughboy made of? Yeast or quickbread? Looks like yeast to me, all smooth and yeast-puffy. But since he hangs out in all those warm kitchens, shouldn't he be swelled up big as a bowling ball? Who punches him back down to normal when he gets all poofy? Doesn't he ever get moldy? And is he Sourdough by now? After all, his dough's older than I am.

The makers of Ortho-tricyclen really ought to change the theme song on their commercial. It's just tacky. (There she goes... there she goes again... she's a slut again...) Or are they trying to imply that taking their birth control pills will guarantee having sex?


I really need more sleep.

- posted by Stephanie @ 9:36 PM

 
Long-Winded, But I Have A Point

My son’s high school is soooo much better than the middle school he went to last year. (And we all know what I thought of that middle school’s administration after The Sobe Vending Machine Incident...)

A bit of preface:

His classes are much more challenging and fast-paced than before. Lots and lots of copying down notes from the blackboard and from overhead projector sheets.

His handwriting is, and always has been, atrocious.

He gets lost in the note-taking when he looks away from the board to watch what his hand is doing when he’s writing in his notebook. It’s a gift from his ADHD that just keeps on giving.

His typing, however, is spot-on and pretty darn quick. At the suggestion of his guidance counselor, we let him take an inexpensive laptop computer to school to use for note-taking. It worked quite well, and his sense of being inundated with information that he couldn’t take time to understand (and later, when he couldn’t read what he’d written, he still didn’t understand) began to fall away. It was such a success that he began doing most of his in-class assignments on it, as well.

That, however, sucked big rocks, as the ol’ Compaq was so old that it didn’t have USB ports, so hooking up my printer to print out those assignments was impossible. We tried saving them to floppy to transfer to my ‘puter and print, as it had a floppy drive, but the laptop’s floppy drive began to make odd noises and saved the data only when it felt like it. Which was becoming less and less often.

As an early Christmas present, and as a replacement for his aging Dell desktop, we bought him a brand-spankin’ new ECS laptop from Walmart online in October. As stuff goes, it wasn’t cheap (nearly seven hundred bucks), but as laptops go, it was a bargain.

I know it's not the best idea for a kid to have a computer at school. They're expensive. They're breakable. But it really has helped him keep up with the work, and his teachers can now actually read his papers. They've encouraged its use and helped keep an eye on it during class if Mason had to leave to pee. He’s been very responsible with it, keeping it locked to his desk during labs in class, close at hand or under the watchful eyes of friends at a cafeteria table when he couldn’t take it with him into the bathroom or something, but today...

His best friend was in the boy’s bathroom when Mason decided it would be okay to step away for just a minute and throw away his lunch trash.

Bad move.

In that short minute or two, somebody stole it, case and all.

He was frantic. He found a security staffmember in the cafeteria and told him what had happened. Meanwhile, the lunch dismissal bell rang and the crowd in the lunchroom began to disperse. By the time they could access the closed-circuit camera tapes, the next bunch of kids had entered the cafeteria.

Mason called me at work, nearly hysterical. My first thought was, "Oh, holy fuck!" My next thought, and, actually, all the ones that followed, were pretty much the same. I didn’t chew him out, though. I sure wanted to, but what good would it have done? He felt pretty wretched as it was. And neither of us wanted to be the one to call home and tell his dad. We both thought he’d blow a cork.

Still, I made that call. He was in as much of a panic as I was. No anger, just worry and a touch of fear. Three thousand kids, one laptop and case, and a handful of security and administrators to locate it in less than three hours before the kids headed home for the day. I took a long lunchbreak, as the on-site police officer at the school couldn’t fill out a theft report with a minor as the complainant. Ed or I had to do it. Plus, we could assist in searching trash cans and scouring the outside grounds to see if it had been stashed for later pick-up.

We both converged on the school at about the same time; I filled out the report as Ed spoke to the 8th grade principal to find out where things stood. That turned out to be on pretty shaky ground. There were three witnesses that came forward, but, amazingly enough, nobody knew the culprit’s name. They knew his face, had ‘seen him around,’ but didn’t know his name.

Yeah, right.

The images on the tape were too grainy to make out a face from a distance, but they clearly showed a boy in a black hoodie grab the laptop case and shove it up under his jacket and head for the cafeteria door that lead outside.

We asked them to make an announcement of a reward; whoever came up with the name of the thief would get a hundred bucks. That sure seemed to jostle some brain cells and a name was given within minutes. By, at last count, seven people. They'll have to split the C-note as the administration sees fit. I'm not gonna get involved in that. Sorry.

We watched as a boy (heretofore known as The Jock) was removed from his classroom and questioned, his backpack and sports bag searched. Surrounded by three security, one police officer, and two principals, he confessed, but said he’d passed it off to a friend (who shall be called The Dimwitted Cohort), because, and I quote, "I didn’t want to be carrying that thing around for the rest of the day."

The Dimwitted Cohort was hauled from his classroom, and he immediately handed over the laptop case and computer. He claimed that The Jock said he didn’t want to have to keep an eye on ‘his computer’ while he was at practice after school, so The Jock asked him to take it home for him and he’d pick it up later.

The CD/DVD drive no longer works. Probably as a result of being jostled around too much, or maybe even dropped. I’m gonna try to get the manufacturer to fix it as a warranty problem, but if we’re charged for repairs, those two kids (or their parents) are gonna foot the bill. I know they’ll pay.

How do I know? Because those two committed a felony, and were placed under arrest before we left the school. Even if we chose not to press charges, since the laptop was recovered so quickly, it’s out of our hands. The police report’s been made and the culprits were caught red-handed and ‘fessing up to school authorities and the school’s on-site police officer.

How utterly stupid. Not just to make such a bad decision as to steal something, and in a crowded room no less, but to not even try to hide the damn thing. Hell, if it was me and I’d just stolen something of high value and unhidable size, I sure as hell wouldn’t just cart it around with me for the rest of the day like a total doofus. I’d stash the sumbitch and come back for it later. And this is coming from someone who can’t lie without giggling.

There. I feel much better now. Adrenaline overload pretty much gone. And I can’t say enough good things about this high school’s staff. When push came to shove, they were right there, both reassuring us and hunting down The Jock and The Dimwitted Cohort. They also know the difference between real theft and getting two-for-one from a defective vending machine.

- posted by Stephanie @ 10:59 PM

 
No Job Skills Required


Er, hello?
Posted by Hello

Hell, don't even bother to show up. I don't think anybody'll notice.

Hmm... twenty-four hour technical support for your desktop telephone. So... you are to call them, on your phone, if your phone doesn't work, then, right? Or dial them up if you don't know how to dial the phone, perhaps?

Oy vey.

- posted by Stephanie @ 5:50 AM

 
The Persnickety Wordsmith

Bad grammar in action:

Instant Flavored Oatmeal (spotted in the weekly Albertson's ad) - Exactly what does Instant taste like? Is it sweet? Spicy? Or is the flavor just fleeting? (Hey! Did I just almost taste something?)

Real Margarine (in that same Albertson's ad) - Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, here. Margarine is fake butter, right? So this is real fake butter? Is there some fake fake butter out there that this needs to be distinguished from, then?

My boss, speaking to the Pepsi distributor: "So we can't have that much overstock. See, what will happen is, my boss came by the store yesterday and he about went through the roof with all the overstock." So, is (was?) he speaking of a future event, or a past one? Maybe he's got a time machine and has been bouncing around in it. That'll mess up a person when it comes time to determine which tense(s?) to use in a sentence (Did it happen yet? Or was that yesterday...?). Guess that's why he gets the big bucks...

Access to Sav On Church (a sign on a road under construction) - You Catholic, Protestant, Baptist or Sav On? Say Amen, brother! (These are two different establishments; the church is situated behind the drug store.)

Oh, and if by chance, you open a restaurant called Heaven Dragon (Fine Chinese and Cantonese Cuisine), make darn sure that the n in Heaven on your lighted sign always stays lit.... (Seen while enroute to the aforementioned Albertsons this evening, but not to get any of that instant-flavored oatmeal. We just needed plain old milk-flavored milk.)

- posted by Stephanie @ 6:22 PM