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Click to viewIf you can remember this movie you are officially old and awesome. So why the random insertion of a Prince of Egypt clip?
This song has been stuck in my head ever since I went to the meeting for the Art Museum Sale. Hogod. What did I get myself into?
(Is it funny that I'm using "god" in vain immediately after posting a clip from an animation about moses? Maybe it's just me.)
It's funny that this song of all things is the one stuck in my head because it's so horrifically viscous. Meanwhile all the people at the meeting were incredibly sweet, helpful and encouraging. But yeah, it's...it was overwhelming. There'll be 115 vendors, all students of the museum, and the sale gets incredibly busy. Apparently people rarely if ever go home nowadays without having sold at least one piece. When I asked in private about pricing one of the coordinators told me, "People generally come expecting not to spend more than a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars," and I expected her to be done.
Then she finished her sentence. "On one piece." I gaped, and she added that there *are* some people who come and drop five or six-hundred on one thing but not as a general rule, and I explained to her that I was stunned not by the low but by the fact that I'd never even attempted to sell anything for that much money. Then she told me that last year a woman came through and asked to contact a few artists about putting their work in her gallery.
It's insane. How did I get myself into this? I don't think I'm at this level...
I announced the sale to the corps today at Unity Rally, and I'm calling Jodi tomorrow about the placement of the table they're giving me, so we'll see what happens. Whooboy.
So today was a relaxing service day, or at least for me, because my small group was repainting the sign at a Boys and Girls club in North Little Rock; other projects at that particular site included a mural and painting pavement games and a basketball court on the blacktop. I was the only one willing to get up on the top step of the ladder to paint, so I stayed there all day. Jason came back from the other Boys and Girls club later to help, thankfully, because I couldn't have gotten it finished by myself, and Angela, Elana, Vantina and Jhantel all did some painting on the lower half at some point (Angela, you still owe me a conversation :D;; ) but no one would touch the top half and, for most of the service day, that was all me. The rest of the groups at our site seemed to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off for the latter part of the day because there were some...complications? With the basketball court: no one really knew exactly how to do it. And then, it was hard to tell who the PCs were sometimes, and we had these hilarious boys from the club telling them what to do, and that the line was too far away. At one point Imron was painting the backboard of one of the hoops and one of the boys just...climbed right up the ladder and grabbed him XD;;
This one boy -- he was probably in the 4th-5th range -- he was outside looking around and he heaved this sigh. So I heaved one back. ...so he heaved one back and threw his shoulders forward into it. And after that every time we caught each other's attention one of us would start doing that and we'd just go back and forth. We barely talked and I don't know his name but we made this bizarre connection and he hung around for awhile. It was great. And this one girl renamed me. She just walked right up to me inside and asked my name and I asked hers, and I told her it was a pretty name.
"Do you want my name?"
"Well I think it might make my mom sad since she gave me this one."
"You're [can't figure out how to spell her name for my life] now."
"...ok! I'll have to get a new name tag."
Kids are awesome. When they aren't being horrific preteen/tween brats. Actually, I'm going to see if for my LACY (Life After City Year) job shadowing I can shadow a high school teacher in one of the worse high schools. I'm curious. Would I be able to handle that age group?
I have such a gigantic headache right now. While we were in the action tank we had two ladders stacked across the seats and one of them slid off and hit me in the head. It wasn't a biggie, I've taken harder, but haha, ow. The freesia incense probably isn't helping even though it was a good idea when I started it...
Anyway. Yes. High school age group. When I get back to NY I want to do City Year NYC and work with the high schools. I can start my education classes part-time while I do it, but I want to do this before I choose a definite track -- Elementary Education and Secondary Education are two entirely different degrees -- so that I don't waste even MORE time and money on courses that are going to be more-or-less useless in the long-run in terms of degree. Of course, very few classes are ever useless. Knowledge is never...well, sometimes yeah, but never worthless so, I'm totally glad I took that Linguistics 101 course I may never use again, because I loved the stuff I learned. :D
I know I was going to talk about something specific but I can't remember what it was so...you're out of luck.
So Halloween. Oh man. I never did sew that tunic. I took it with me but Wednesday was just so hectic -- it was actually less so than Tuesday and ran a lot smoother for the most part, and a lot of things have been learned through trial and error.
For one, I need to check snacks before I start separating them by team/grade, because we don't always have enough allotted. When I counted them up I was four short, but when we actually handed them out I had two extra, which was good since two kids' bags exploded when they tried to open them. Cheddar chex mix individual bags...you know how chip bags can be. And the only reason I even HAD one of those was because one of the kids said they didn't want it and the other said they couldn't have it because they were lactose-intolerant.
I did figure out how to be a little more fluid with allergies and such, though I still don't know what to do about snack allergies since we don't have alternative snacks. I have half a mind to see if we can't get something just-in-case in-kinded from Sam's Club or whatever the bulk club is down here, for when, for example, we have butterfinger granola bars and two peanut allergies (*coughTuesdaycough*).
When I was support for Suni's 1st-2nd grade reading group...hee, it was great. I ended up getting one of those big read-aloud copies of a book called Fly Fly Witchy that's sung to the tune of "She'll be Coming Round the Mountain" and we did a my-turn your-turn sing-along read-aloud.
Which was great except that a handful of kids got bored. And it wasn't a lack-of-attention-span bored -- add a little dancing or change it up a bit and those are settled. But these poor kids -- Earnest, Jahswayla and a girl I didn't know, maybe another one or two, I'm wondering if Kaia was one of them, they just didn't like it. They didn't want to do it. They were well-behaved and just sat there looking miserable. So we're going to try splitting it up between Suni and I next time, with a read-aloud/sing-along-type-thing for one group and something a little less structured and more fluid for anyone who doesn't want to do the former that day.
Trial and error. Next week is There Was an Old Lady and maybe coloring. The copy of that book they have in the reading room is just awesome -- each page has a hole in it in increasing size so you can read everything she ate in order. There was this great little plush too, where you could actually put small plush animals in her mouth to show her eating it, but the little animals all went missing. Wtf?
I apparently love handing out snacks to a huge group of kids. It's scary. For all I know I'll be running a Boys and Girls club someday instead of teaching. But I wonder if that would be so terrible, because places like that -- today was the first time I saw one -- they really do seem to make a difference in kids' lives. We need some more of those (if there are any at all to begin with) on Long Island, I think. Maybe that'll be my pet project when I get back.
So Ainsley and I had the duty of watching the kids that had to wait/call for rides, which put us at the school until five-thirty. And there was no way I was getting that costume bit done. So Ainsley changed at the school into this awesome Hippie-Indian-Cowgirl-Flapper ensemble (yeah, describing it does NO good, you have to see it -- I wonder if there are pictures?) and on the way to the office I stopped off at a Dollar General and bought a white sheet set. I just put my costume together in the parking lot on the hood of my car, and Brendan pulled up with Jerrica, Lawrence, Rashika and Jessica W. just in time for Lawrence to help me put my poster board cut-out wings on the back of my glorified touga with double-sided tape. I went to the Museum of Discovery, where I was helping a volunteer/Museum staff member dressed like Alice in Wonderland welcome kids and parents, stamping cards, and advising her, Rachel(or Alice), on what she could and couldn't technically get away with eating out of the candy cauldrons with her braces. I'm really glad she didn't like Milky Way all too much because I'd totally forgotten those had caramel in them.
Lawrence and Carmen were manning (womaning? personing?) the table that had the animals -- mice, a black widow spider, a rose tarantula, a certain kind of bird whose name I forgot, a hissing cockroach, a corn snake named Dottie and, at one point, a hedgehog. Hedgehogs are so adorable. And I didn't know they hiccuped when they curled into a ball as a defense mechanism! I felt so terrible when she picked him up to show us because the poor guy kept hiccuping, but it was so cute I couldn't not laugh. He was so big I thought he was a porcupine -- I thought hedgehogs were tiny! I asked the girl who worked there and was point for the animals about letting the tarantula put two legs on my hand, which they do for visitors, because I thought maybe it would help me get over the whole spider issue. She apologized and said she wanted taking her out anymore tonight. I thanked her.
I did hold Dottie though. She slithered all over my arms and just generally hung out. Her tongue tickled like all heck, and she was just so awesome. I can't see why anyone wouldn't like her -- but then people can't see why I can't do spiders SO.
The best part, though, was seeing all the kids. It was almost better than trick or treating just as the kids are putting all their candy away and climbing up to bed when the parents open the door and ask if you aren't too old to be doing this. They were all so adorable. Omigosh. And there was this one boy dressed as Harry Potter and his mother had very obviously knit him his very own scarf and vest. So I gasped and went, "Are you Harry Potter?" He nodded sheepishly. "I'm a huge fan!" He smiled and ran off and his mother was just ecstatic. He just wanted to see Dottie xD
Random awesomeness: Kristyn and I seem to be getting along the way I see and envy her and Brendan doing, and it's awesome. We've taken to random late excursions for groceries, and we'll actually have conversations now. Yay!
I got bean sprouts and red grapes and that made me a very happy person. I would be a happier person if Randall fixed our friggin stove. Seriously. I'm getting really cheesed off.
Ok so, the to-do list for the weekend...I already cleaned out the fridge (I am really glad I know not to open milk before checking the date, because we had some in the back there that expired in mid-October) and took out all the trash. Tomorrow I need to buy a new laundry basket and some detergent and do a load or two, then I'm having lunch back at the Islamic Community Center with some City Year folks because the people there are just amazing and the food is good down-home cooking. I need to pay the phone/'net bill and while I'm at it ask about incoming long-distance calls for Kristyn, and...there was something else. Art. Duh. I need to sort through and produce a little more in a similar style, and check out the costs of mats and how much easier and cheaper it might be to just do the poster thing and package them with plastic wrap between cardboard and plexi glass.
Gas. I need gas too. OH CRAP I forgot to go to FedEx today, I need to call to make sure they didn't send my package back, and it's in a moment like this that it's hard not to just let out a stream of curses BUT, I am trying ever-so-hard to break myself of the habit. Sometimes.
While working on a ladder above a bunch of kids I had this old parody of a classic Sunday school song stuck in my head. ""Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so, 'less of course you're bi or gay, play it straight and you're ok. Then Jesus loves me, then Jesus loves me, then Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so." I was working on the second verse to keep from singing the first one out loud, and it came out pretty darn good, but I can't remember it now. Shame.
Ok so. Michael Brown. He talked to me. And shook my hand. Yesterday, I mean. And he gave us all his email address in case we had "ideas that float" to send along, and believe me I'm working on some. He changed his flight here to a 5 am on November 1st so he could still go trick-or-treating with his kids, and he knows what goes on at each of his sites. He has an intimate relationship with the whole thing. He hasn't lost touch. That amazes me. And until I find either a video or a transcript of his wonderful talk, I'm not saying anything more about his visit because I need to be able to show you. If that makes any sense.