|
"Odds and Ends"
This installment of my column will deal with a plethora of topics as
I don’t have much to say on any one thing. I will start out with a
comment on “What are the Odds?” Maybe these things happen to you, too,
but they are constantly happening to me, so I ask myself, “what are the
odds?” For example, when I get up in the morning, the first thing I do
is step into the shower and get ready for work. When I reach for the
shampoo, invariably I’ll pick up the conditioner as both bottles look
alike. When I reach for the conditioner, I grab the shampoo. If I make
a real attempt to think it over first and reach for the opposite one
that I had originally planned to grab, it is still the wrong one. I
can’t second guess myself. Then comes the grooming. I plug in my blow
dryer and curling iron. The curling iron has a plug that only goes in
one way. I ALWAYS put it in the wrong way first, and then turn it
around. ALWAYS…you’d think I’d look at it and check, but I don’t. I
figure that someday, the odds will be in my favor. So far, they
aren’t. Then there is the windrow. I drive a lot of gravel roads
everyday and the road graders push all the gravel, clumps of dirt and
large debris off to one side of the road while the other side is nice
and smooth. If I have to meet another vehicle on a gravel road, 98% of
the time, I’ll be on the side with the big windrow of gravel. I drive a
car and have to straddle this hump which is bumpy and scrapes the
underside of my car while the other vehicle, usually a pickup which
could easily straddle this with no problem gets the smooth side.
Another odd breaker…I love to bake cookies and love to eat the
finished product even more. However, I don’t think I’ve ever baked a
batch of cookies where I didn’t burn the last batch. I think it’s
because I’ve lost interest in the baking process and have filled my
innards with the goodness of chocolate and sugar and totally forget
these are in the oven. As a matter of fact, cookies aren’t the only
thing I burn. Whenever I try to broil something, it sneaks up on me.
“IT” being the intense heat. I put some buns under the broiler just a
few minutes ago and swore to stick by the oven if it is the last thing I
ever do. Then I glanced at the clock and remembered that something I
was watching on Ebay was ending soon and quickly became absorbed in the
auction scene. Ten minutes later I smelled smoke…”hmmmm…I wonder where
that’s coming from?” I queried myself. I casually sauntered out into
the kitchen only to find black smoke roiling from the oven. The buns
were beyond toasted, they were black and nearly on fire! The horrible,
smoky smell permeated every crevice of my nice, new home…what to do?
Google to the rescue! Evidently, I am not the only idiot that burns
things and the remedy most often suggested was white vinegar. The
instructions said to set bowls of white vinegar around the room and in a
few hours the smell should be gone. I was skeptical, but lo and behold,
by morning the smell really WAS gone! Now on to another topic.
When you get old like me, you’ll spend a lot of time reminiscing.
That’s what I was doing the other day and for some reason I was
recalling my Jr. High days and a certain teacher that we had in the 7th
grade. She was a music teacher and I believe she was fresh out of
college…no experience and no idea on how to handle snotty, bratty kids.
As with all new teachers, the kids in my class had to find out how far
they could push the new teacher. She was a small, petite little gal and
her last name was Raisinen, pronounced “Rise-uh-nun”, but of course,
being the snotty, bratty kids we were, we picked up on the Raisin
portion and ran with it. The smart teacher would have put the kibosh on
any insubordination right away, but poor Miss Raisinen didn’t know how
to prevent our taunts, and we ran with it! We called her “raisin”, made
raisin cracks all day long and so on. In a weak attempt to befriend the
class, she gave us permission to decorate the bulletin board each month
with a new theme. In April it was finally my turn! My good friend and
cohort, Denene, and I came up with a great idea…we went uptown over the
noon hour and purchased a box of raisins, then went into her music room
while she was out and decorated the bulletin board with hundreds of
raisins, sticking pins into them and spelled out some clever title like
“It’s raining raisins” or some such idiocy and laughed and laughed until
we nearly wet our pants. Miss Raisinen did not see the humor in it and
made us take it down, but the damage was done. The nickname stuck. We
made that poor woman’s life a living hell. When it was our class’s turn
for music we would change the words, refuse to sing, sing at the top of
our lungs during a sad song or barely whisper when we were supposed to
be boisterous. One song that comes to mind is the one (can’t remember
the title) that goes “over hill, over dale, we will hit the dusty trail,
as those caissons go rolling along.” At the end of the song comes a
part where the words were “Shout out your numbers loud and strong” and
we always yelled “80, 80, 80” which was our graduation year, yes I’m
old…boy did this piss her off! She’d start over at the beginning and
warn us that we’d better not yell that again, order us to sing the
correct words, and we’d promise, then when we would reach that portion
of the song, of course we yelled it again at the top of our lungs!
Whatever we could think of to upset her, we did it. One of our
favorites, was when we had harassed her beyond her wits, she would
notify the superintendent who would sneak into the classroom before we
got there and hide in the closet. It never failed that someone would
catch on and inform the class about this entrapment. That day we would
be on our best behavior… no backtalk, singing as asked, utter respect
for the teacher. The superintendent would leave after class;
undoubtedly thinking this teacher was a nutcase…there was nothing wrong
with this wonderful class of 7th graders! This all occurred
at a time when teachers could hit students and she certainly did hit…it
became a sport of some of the braver youth to see how far they had to
push her before she resorted to violence. To top it all off, this woman
had bad breath. I can’t remember how we came about this comparison, but
it became known as “army breath” and one member of our class purchased a
bottle of Listerine and set it by her door, knocked and ran off. Do I
feel sorry for this poor teacher? Of course! Now, I do, but at the
time she made the fatal error of letting kids get to her. For any young
person going into the teaching profession, let this be a warning. Never
let them see you sweat! A snotty, bratty kid loves nothing more than
finding out they can harass a teacher…I have often wondered if Miss
Raisinen continued to teach or did she just call it quits and head off
to Africa to work with wild monkeys. (It would have been a step up!)
If, by some odd chance, Miss Raisinen is reading this, please know that
most of us grew up to be semi-responsible adults who love nothing more
than to sing. I hope my brats, er, I mean kids, never acted like
that. Whatever amount the school board was paying her that year, it
wasn’t enough!
My last thought for this column is a simple observation of myself. I
love to watch reality shows such as Survivor and The Biggest Loser,
which happens to be on tonight. I always feel a bit of inspiration as I
watch these hugely overweight people working out, dieting, competing to
lose weight and make some sort of resolution to join them in the quest
for self improvement, then I look down and realize I’ve been eating out
of a container of ice cream throughout the show! I guess I am not the
biggest loser! On that note, I’ll close this installment of my column.
Miss Raisinen, if you’re out there, just know, it was Denene’s idea to
do the raisin bulletin board, not mine!
|
|
