Damn, it's late.

This is what happens when one of your cats decides to toss up a hairball and then contribute something else from his rear end to the mess - all on your bedcovers. Since it is one chilly night, I am currently waiting for said covers to be fully dried. In the meantime, I am going to keep myself warm by the creative fires fueled by my commitment to post every day this month.

Okay, maybe they're creative embers. Whatever.

Wanna talk creativity? I went to that PTO meeting mentioned in my last post, armed with the two passages in the school's charter that refer directly to half-days of "professional development", the knowledge obtained through the school office that the charter is more or less written in stone until it comes up for renewal in five years, the fact that the only changes that can be made to the charter before that renewal must go through the school's management board and through the state board for approval, and more than a touch of indignation. I ended up with a nice lesson in how the PTO passes the buck, and how the school has created a nice loophole for itself in implementing a plan that leaves working parents with egg on their faces and their kids out of school for one full weekday a month.

Apparently, if you schedule in "banked time"(i.e., extra minutes per school day of instruction, which adds up over an entire school year) to cover professional development stuff and more in the first place, you can justify more professional development through a "calendar change", and your request will have the green light at all levels. PTO board officers passed the real questions and protests parents had on to the management board of the school, which happens to be having a meeting this coming Saturday...one that I can't make.

If I could clone myself, I would. I've got a big test toward teaching certification coming up EARLY Saturday morning, and then my husband and I are rehearsing and then performing with our synagogue choir and members of Mobile, Alabama, synagogue and community choruses that afternoon and evening. I'm hoping that a lawyering single mom and another teaching mom, who have lodged newsgroup protests along with me over this full day of teaching teachers, will be able to help take up the slack, and I've already emailed them about it.

Instead, I will be singing Jewish choral music with people from out of state, some of whom have thought that all New Orleanians have been living off of power by generators and have had to boil our water before using it all this time since Katrina hit. I will be taking a test patterned along the lines of the SAT and the GRE named the Praxis, and I will be hoping like hell the whole time I'm taking it that it doesn't explode on me like the Klingon-controlled planet of the same name in Star Trek VI.

Never a dull moment, y'all. Keep me in your prayers.