Saturday Night

I've had two tall screwdrivers, and have been watching an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD--one of the ones with Mike. I'm not sure I have any with Joel. I've been wanting a drink a lot this week, but have refrained, figuring it wouldn't be a good precedent. But since I have to go back to work on Monday, I thought I would indulge tonight after I got the boy to bed.

Yesterday, I tried to go through some old pictures and stuff from the funeral, but I wasn't ready. This week Tom and I rearranged the living room, and I think we've hit the magic configuration. I've been coloring and playing with CJ a lot, and generally just enjoying him (which is hard to do when he's having an ornery day, but the cuteness makes up for the stubbornness eventually). I've been catching up on Top Chef and Mythbusters and doing lots of word puzzles to keep my mind occupied. I have all these puzzle magazines lying around so I'm trying to finish them off. Some of them have been kicking around since I lived in Tucson and worked second shift and graveyard relief--that was ten years ago, for those keeping track.

Why, yes, I am just a big old nerd.

I talked with Mom last night and she's mulling over the idea of early retirement. Apparently she can buy some service time, enough to meet her 240 months required (she's only about 4 years short in actual service time). She doesn't like her new teacher, a guy right out of college that doesn't seem to understand that she's been working with these kids for almost 20 years, can feed a child and change his diaper, and made most of the contacts to form the community programs and jobs these kids participate in on a daily basis. He's a micromanager to the extreme--so much so that if he were my boss, I would have already told him to bite me, and followed it up with an email containing full, detailed illustrations.

Mom has more patience than me.

Anyway, she would like to go ahead and leave, draw her pension with her benefits paid, and either work at the hospital doing what she does, or freelance--she sometimes works with her kids over the summers and the parents pay her for her time, and at least one family has said they would love it if she could do it full time. I told her not to do anything out of spite, but if the financial aspect allows her make her bills, follow her heart. I think it hurts her now that Wilma has retired and many of her peers are rather new--they view their jobs as just jobs, while Mom has always felt it as more of a calling.

That's about it for now. It's 11 on Saturday night and I'm an old, big dork who's up way past her bedtime.