Have Myself a Merry Little Christmas

Well, I got all my OUT OF STATE Christmas shopping done this morning. Can I just comment that:

1. My husband should have done this a week or two ago, and is going to be gently kicked in the ankle.
2. My sister-in-law needs to put up some items on her Amazon wish list.
3. Next year I'm doing this in October.
4. My coworkers rock--I got two bottles of wine from coworkers yesterday.
5. Secret Santas are exhausting. Not so much the shopping, but the creeping around, and putting things on chairs.
6. The disdvantage to being a Jew in an intermarried family (daughter of and wife in), is that you end up making turkey, mailing packages, stressing out, and at the end of it all, you don't even have a Savior.
7. But to be fair, my in-laws sent me an adorable Chanukah music box, so we're all in this together...

But who cares? I'm on vacation! For two weeks!

And it's needed. This last week took the cake, the cake plate, the serving knife, and the tablecloth underneath it all.

One of my coworkers had not been happy with the school from the beginning. Like the gal who left five weeks into the year, she was having personality conflicts with the directors, and in general, I think, had a vision for the school that she could not get the rest of us signed on to, which she took badly. I missed most of the worst of the craziness, having no authority to help or harm, but it was apparently bad.

So she decided that at the end of the semester she would leave the school, which seemed reasonable enough. The end of the semester is around MLKs birthday--about three weeks after we get back from break.

Unfortunately, however, early this week she got into a fight with the directors about misinformation she was feeding the kids, and quit on the spot.

It's been an interesting week. The most lasting legacy she seems to have given us (which is a pity, she was a good teacher), is that she told all the kids that they were not earning enough credits at our school to transfer out, or graduate on time. This is not the heck true, but a lot of the kids were, justifiably, pretty worried.

Yochanan has FINALLY decided to change schools, and is just being poisonous right now. He and another kid are just convinced we have the worst school in all the world, and they are not mincing words. I try to be cool about this, but after a while it gets truly abrasive.

I need a vacation. Even though a lot of it is going to be spent getting ready for school again.