School's Out For Summer!

Today is officially the first day of summer break. It is amazing. I woke up at 9:00, I'm sitting in bed, drinking some coffee, made a few phone calls. I LOVE IT. Really - being a teacher is the way to go. You work your behind off for 10 months and then get 2 to relax. And if you're really smart, you spread your paychecks over 12 months so it's almost like getting paid for doing nothing. :-)

Friday was our last day of kindergarten and it was a little sad and very chaotic. A few kids cried and said they didn't want to go to first grade which made my heart happy. And then I looked at the preschoolers and realized I have to do this ALL OVER AGAIN. I have to retrain all these little monkeys. I definitely need the break that's for sure! Because of all the snow days the City Schools lost all professional work days. So after I shipped the kids off at 1:00 for an early dismissal I had TWO AND A HALF HOURS to get my room ready for summer cleaning and hand in my keys. I'm sure I'll be back later this week or next to start doing some odds and ends but I was one tired girl when I left.

I got home to find that my classroom had been featured as the "Workspace of the Week" on one of my favorite blogs - Unclutterer. Unclutterer is all about simplifying and organizing your life. I have dreamed of being the Workspace of the Week and ta-da - I won! Of course, I took all comments very personally but that's just how I work. You can see the post here.

If you visit the Flickr photo pool for Unclutterer it shows the before and after shots that I took when organizing my room. I was pretty proud of being featured.

Saturday was a pretty ordinary day. CGH and I went over to the new house to check things out. It is REALLY coming together. Our pre-settlement walkthrough is this Wednesday morning and then we close on the 22nd. I can't believe it. WE CLOSE ONE WEEK FROM TOMORROW. Insane. I'm so excited.

Our air conditioning went out and since it is 95 degrees with 85% humidity down here we were ROASTING in our house. It was hard to sleep and CGH tried everything he could think of but we had no cool air. We called the emergency HVAC man and he came out to take a look. Turns out that a mouse crawled into our outside unit and shorted it. The man said the mouse was not in good shape. Come to think of it... I wonder where he put that mouse? Either way, we're fixed and have our AC back.

And then... yesterday. I ran a bunch of errands (which all proved unsuccessful) and then went to Suzie's to hang with her and Grey. I get a random call from my neighbor across the street. "Hi Kristi, it's Allyson - I wanted to let you know that your mailbox is on fire." WHAT?!?! Seriously, we're out of this house in TWO WEEKS and some lit our mailbox on fire??? So I go racing home (Suzie lives in our neighborhood) and find this disaster...

Luckily a man down the road smelled the smoke and came running up with a bucket of water. This triggered my neighbor across the street and he saw the flames shooting out of the mailbox. So he went and got a hose and tried to get it to reach (which it did not) so he had to go find another hose. Finally they extinguished the flames. Allyson called 911.

Directly after I pulled up fire rescue came. And then the ladder truck. And then the county cops. And then we had to wait on the fire marshall. They think it was just a bunch of neighborhood kids playing a prank but boy, they don't mess around with the mail. You've got a federal offense paired with arson. Lovely.