How it's going

 Happy Saturday, all! 

Thanks for all the encouraging comments on my last post. I've been wanting to respond to them all individually, but this week has been extremely busy, and I'm just plain worn out! Know that I read and appreciated every single one of them. 

Work has been okay. Except for physically going into the same building each morning, I feel like I have a completely new job. Well, I suppose I do. After five years of being the receptionist, the first point of contact for everyone coming into the school and surrounded by people all day, every day, now I'm tucked away in the back by myself with totally different responsibilities. My new job title is Attendance and Records Clerk. Both of those things (attendance and records) are enough to be a whole job in themselves, but I'm used to having a large workload. At least now I can work all day without interruptions, which should really lower my stress level once I'm fully trained and know what I'm doing. 

No one besides me (and occasionally, the guidance counselors) is even allowed in the room with students' permanent records now. Things had devolved last year into kind of a free-for-all where teachers and other staff just came and went in there whenever they felt like it or needed something from a file. This is a major breach of confidentiality and actually illegal under SC state law! I spent the last two days this week beginning an audit of every single record, and they're an absolute mess. I only got as far as finishing the sixth grade, so it's going to take at least two (maybe three) more days of work to complete the audit. That's not counting the work it will take to resolve the problems I'm noting.  All told, we have about 800 students enrolled this year, so you can imagine what size job I'm talking about.

I'm also newly in charge of record requests. Scanning records and sending them out to other schools via email isn't that hard, but it is time consuming. The same goes with requesting the records for students new to our school. Since it's the beginning of the year, we're inundated with requests right now and I have a huge pile of them to take care of next week. Thank goodness they'll slow down to a trickle after the first few weeks. Or so I'm told.

The students come back on Monday, so in addition to the stuff I've already mentioned, my role as the attendance person will begin. There's a lot of record keeping involved in that, too. Mountains of it, in fact. Some of it I'm already familiar with, but most of it is new to me, too.

It's all kind of a lot.

The first part of the week I felt completely overwhelmed. As busy and stressful as my previous role was, after five years at it at least I knew what I was doing! There's a certain comfort in that. Now everything is new to me, and I have a lot to learn, and it's all stuff that's important to get right. I want to do a good job, and I plan to try hard. If nothing else, I'll gain really valuable skills for transferring to another school (or even the district office) down the road if I decide I want to. The principal has been very nice to me and has had nothing but good and encouraging things to say so far. She asked the head of the records department at the district office to come spend a day training me, and that was really helpful. I'm still wary of trusting her too much, but so far, so good.

So, I survived week one. I've been really tired and I expect that to continue for the next few weeks, but after that everything should settle down. And can you believe it's almost August already?

Tears over toast

It's my last weekend off before returning to work. I plan to spend today and tomorrow at home, reading and puttering around my garden and spending time with Marco, George, and Poppy. All the things I'll be missing next week.

Over breakfast the other morning, my husband and I were talking about problems he's having with one of his more difficult aquarium clients. My return to work has been looming in the back of my mind all week, so I said to him, "If it makes you feel any better, I'm dreading next week" and before he could even respond, to my surprise, my eyes filled with tears.

Yes, all of a sudden, I was crying at breakfast over going back to work. 

Gregg was kind of alarmed. I had to assure him that I was okay, and not nearly as worried and anxious as all that. I'm sure everything is going to be alright. Maybe things will even be better than I expect! One can hope, anyway. 

The return of winter, spring plans

Two weeks of abnormally warm and tropical weather spanning the Christmas holidays have given way to a blustery, cold, wet and somewhat abrupt return to winter. Thunderstorms (in January!) with lots of rain and wind blew through last night, bringing in the change. Happy New Year!

On New Year's Day I finally got around to planting the big bag of daffodil bulbs I found on a clearance rack at Lowe's last month. I knew that a lot of rain was in the immediate forecast, so it seemed like a good time to plant. It is awfully late, though. I think bulbs are best planted in the fall, so they may not bloom for me this year. Or at all. Who knows? They were cheap and there were a lot of them (45) so maybe we'll see a few daffodils. They're planted in clumps around our Crepe Myrtle trees, and they're supposed to be King Alfred types.

In other gardening news, I've come to a sad realization about the garden I'm planning for this year. Last fall we built a large raised bed out of the edging stones left on our property from the last owner. It looks great and I was really looking forward to using it! Well, yesterday we sat down to figure out how many cubic feet of compost and topsoil we would need to fill in the space, and then went online to price said compost and topsoil, and I got a nasty surprise. Even with the best possible deals from landscaping suppliers, it would take upwards of $500 to fill in the space! We still need so many things for our house that I just can't justify spending that kind of money for garden dirt. Sigh. So now I'm rethinking the raised bed thing altogether and may have to settle for a regular ground level garden. Then there's the prospect of having to move all those stones we built the bed with. My back aches just thinking about it!

So that's disappointing, but I remain firm in the conviction that I need a large garden this year. I'll just have to make it happen in a different way for the time being.

Tomorrow, I go back to work. It's been a fantastic break, and I'm a bit sad to see it end, but I'll be glad to get back to normal. "Back to normal" may not be so normal, though, because all of a sudden the new omicron variant of Covid has exploded around here. It's gotten so bad that even without a state mandate, I doubt we'll have enough staff to keep schools open once the holiday exposures really start to show up. I hope I'm wrong about that; time will tell.