It's snowing. Not enough to make me worried about the drive tomorrow or the next speech meet, but enough to make it finally feel more like the Colorado autumns I'm used to and less like this 4-season freak show of the past two months. I mean, 60-degree weather and pretty leaves that fall of their own accord and not because they get two feet of wet snow dumped on them right after they change? Crazy.
The snow did make a pretty pattern on my tire today:
Despite the odd weather, this time of year feels familiar. Speech is well on it's way and turning routine. I put out the occasional fire, encourage the kids to stick to their pieces rather than dump them for new ones just because they're bored, and manage signup after signup for meet after meet.
The last meet was more eventful than I'd like. I expected a bit of craziness - it was Halloween after all. I firmly squashed their hopes for Trick or Treating at the hotel and offered a compromise - everyone bring some candy and we'll pool it all to share. We wound up with a bag of candy that was slightly larger than 1/3 of a freshman:
It turned out that the booster club at the high school to which we were traveling was hosting a haunt that weekend, so after we checked into the hotel I took all but four of the kids back out again (the wimps stayed behind with my assistant coach). I don't frequent haunts myself, but I did go through with the kids, much to their relief - I brought up the rear of the middle group, and the freshman girl in front of me repeated this pattern throughout the haunt:
1) Shriek when something springs out,
2) Bury face in hoodie of the friend in front of her,
3) Call out "Waterhouse, are you still there? Waterhouse!",
4) Hear my reassurances that I was in fact still there,
5) Calm down enough to peek out from hoodie just in time for next something to spring out,
6) Repeat.
The craziness of the weekend turned a bit much when one of my students had a medical emergency during the meet that necessitated a visit from the paramedics. She's fine, but it took me a few more days to recover from the meet than usual.
There's been a bit of fun between work - Fara and I went to see Colorado Ballet's popular production of "Dracula" (or is it "Dracula!"). It was glitzy and over-the-top and quite fun. The fellow playing Dracula had wonderful control and the dance between him and Jonathan in Act II was one of my favorite partnerings I've seen in a while.
My Advanced Drama class and I enjoyed a matinee of "Lord of the Flies". It was a really good production of a book I really don't like. To my delight, they liked it far better than the production of "Molly Brown" we saw earlier in the month. The meatier material, the better production values, being in the round, a stronger script - all excellent reasons for their preferences. Of course, the named-except-for-briefs-and-war-paint muscular 20-year-old boys with British accents running through the aisles and flexing next to them helped as well.
We announced the musical around the same time as all of that excitement - "Joseph and the Amazing Techicolor Dreamcoat." To make December less insane, Jesse, Rachel, and I decided to move up auditions. Believe it or not, they're next week. I'm excited to get that project full underway, and I'm looking forward to collaborating with Rachel and Jesse again. I always get excited about the days when Rachel comes to my school.
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