Run Away! Run Away!

No quote tonight. Look out...

I'm sad and tired tonight. It may be hormonal, or it may be because I was up WAY too late last night grading essays. I don't know.

I found out today that I may have to start taking allergy shots. Apparently, I'm allergic to most of the great outdoors and a good bit of the inside, too. Ugh. I hate needles. There is no good shot. Something about the thought of that sliver of metal sliding into my skin makes me shiver. Even the thought of it just now raised the hairs on the back of my neck. You'd think a "big girl" like me could grow up about that, but although I've come a long way from screaming and crying over it, I still have to fight it every time I get a shot.

The allergy shot thing wasn't the biggest deal today. It just kind of topped off a long, odd day. We were without air conditioning for the most part today. My classroom hovered around 80 degrees all day. The brilliant head of maintenance sent an email telling us the heat was "all in our minds" and to leave him the heck alone, basically. Of course, he was safely off campus. Otherwise, I might have had to have tracked him down and smacked him around.

All day, whether because of the heat or the massive paper stack weighing me down like a millstone round the neck, I've been in full-fledged run away mode. I have postcards and pictures from places I've been on my speakers' stand on my desk, and I sometimes daydream between trying to wrangle my students through the subtleties of subject-verb agreement.

Today, I was wishing I was in Ireland. It was even more pronounced because I've set my computer desktop at school to a picture of a place we went on our trip. I'd like to just have time to take a book, sit on a hill, and get all this crap off my back. I would like to be safely anonymous and go back through some of the places I went on the trip without a big group to be responsible for. I'd like to see a couple of the people I met on the trip and just sit and talk with them some.

I guess I'll have to settle for a stuffed baked potato, some cheesecake (none of which I had to cook), and a Fred Astaire movie. It's not hardly Ireland in any degree, but maybe I can rest a little in the world of overly-happy vintage Hollywood.