Pay attention to me, I'm fascinating!

My pal P.V., who is a "Dance Friend", teaches thirty classes/rehearsals/private lessons a week at our dance studio. She has recently been unwell, and consequently unable to teach. This created A Situation. A situation that called for substitute teachers.

On Friday afternoon I got a call from the studio director. "Would you be able to teach P.V.'s Intro to Tap class tomorrow morning?"

"Why, yes," I replied. "Yes, I would."

There followed a flurry of texts back and forth with P.V. getting me the skinny on the kids and what they were working on and appropriate music and so on. There were going to be four of them, and they were keen to do things for themselves, like running the warm up. Okay, cool. You just turn that around and make them teach you how to do it, because "I'm new to your class and I don't know it!" (Which was a bold-faced lie. The tap warm up P.V. uses is exactly the same for all classes, ever, it just gets more complex as technique improves. But the kids were six and didn't know that.) P.V. had a handy list of steps they knew, so I basically had a pre-planned lesson. The biggest concern was the fact that the kids would be coming directly from their Intro to Jazz class, and let's face it, back-to-back 45-minute classes is A Lot when you're small. I was warned that they would either be cranky or crazy.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm grateful that they were crazy. Cranky would have been a lot more difficult to deal with. Crazy at least means that no one cries.

So we did our flaps and our shuffles and our cramp rolls and our punches and our regular and reverse rolls and added hopping and stepping and kept our heels up and talked about clean sounds and for the most part they were engaged. There were only four of them, and going across the floor looked something like me as the mama duck with a bunch of ducklings that had decided to form up like an honor guard instead of follow in a line like Robert McCloskey would have had them do. (Side note--small-small humans have no concept of personal space, like, AT ALL. I think this must not develop until they become medium-small humans.)

The had A Lot To Say, and I don't think they stopped giggling EVER, but in their defense, I was only compelled to bring out "Pay attention to me, I'm fascinating!*" once toward the end of class when they were clearly done with dancing and wanted to discuss whatever Important Six Year Old Business they happened to have, thank you very much.

All in all, we had a reasonably good time. They got a class, I got to dust off my teacher skills, all was right with the world.

And then I went home and had to take a NAP, because holy cats, small humans are EXHAUSTING.

 

*Seriously. Try this sometime. It works on grown-ups, too. Everyone expects "Shh!" and "Listen up!" and "Quiet Coyote" or whatever it is they do in school now. Just like the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects you to use that same volume to state that you are fascinating and therefore everyone should be listening to you. I stole this tactic from one of the MFA students at UC Irvine who taught one of my speech classes or something. It has served me well.

Typical.

For those of you who may have missed this tidbit, I do payroll for a living. I work for a company that specializes in payroll, and I have a client base of about 200 companies for which I do some semblance of payroll processing. This can range from simply checking it over when they've submitted it through one of our software systems to doing everything for them from start to finish. Now, most of you will know that every year around this time, your payroll department issues your annual W2 for the previous year so that you can file your taxes. (For those of you outside the US, I'm sure you have something similar.) As you can imagine, this is an incredibly busy time for payroll. Last Saturday, we all schlepped into the office to pack up the W2s for our ~1,100 clients. Clients that range from one employee to several hundred. For six hours we stuffed envelopes and weighed packages and stuck on postage labels and recorded tracking numbers

That's a lot of paper, kids.

We were lucky it didn't take longer. What with all this COVID nonsense, we had fewer W2s for 2021 than we would usually, but we were still down a couple of team members because we've had exposures and people catching The Dread Disease just like every other place of employ has recently. Thankfully, all of our exposures so far have been outside the office, and we are well aware that we're lucky in that. Our Implementation department stepped up and came in to give us a hand, and we are eternally grateful. It would have been far longer than six hours if it hadn't been for them.

Saturday afternoon saw our conference room full of mail bins stacked to the brim with packages of W2s ready to be collected. On Monday, a delightful fellow from the US Postal Service came and took all the bins away for mailing.

We breathed a collective sigh of relief. W2 packing is not for the faint of heart.

Fast forward to Wednesday. The doorbell rings, announcing that someone has come in. My desk is closest to the door, so I get up to see who it is. It's a mail carrier.

"Oh. Hello," I said.

"Hello," he replied. "I understand you have some boxes to be collected?"

"Not today, no. We did, but they were collected on Monday."

"Monday was a holiday," he said, understandably confused, as Monday had been a federal holiday which technically meant no mail service.

"Yes, and the pickup was scheduled for Tuesday, but we had a special agreement with the Postmaster, and they sent someone to pick them up on Monday."

"Oh." He looks at the paper in his hand. "You see, I have a slip here, dated for today, with a scheduled pickup of yesterday...and they came and got them on Monday?"

"They did, yes."

And then this sweet little old man, probably about three weeks away from retirement and looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren, delivered the most wonderfully accurate and telling statement regarding the organizational aptitude of the United States Postal Service that I have ever heard uttered from an employee of that organization. Staring at the pickup slip in his hand, he shook his head, sighed, and said,

"Typical Post Office."

Okay...OW.

I'm writing this on a Monday evening. An evening when, all things going to plan, I would be dancing. I am not dancing. Obviously. I am sitting on my sofa and typing. And why am I sitting on my sofa and typing?

Because I left my stepladder in a stupid place.

You're all smart humans. You can put two and two together and make five. Yes, I did a dumb thing. In an effort to remind myself to swap out the old smoke detector base for the one that fits the new smoke detector, I left the stepladder underneath the spot on the ceiling where the smoke detector lives. Now, in the daytime, this wouldn't be a dumb thing. When the lights are off, however...

Yeah. At dark o'clock last Friday night, the rattos were causing a ruckus, so I went out to investigate. Normally I don't, but this was the usual ruckus, it was the "something hurts" ruckus, so it warranted further investigation. Of course, when I got to the cage and switched on the light, there were three little faces staring at me, saying, "...what? We're not doing anything!" Eyes were rolled. Lights were switched off. The trek back to bed was begun.

And then I tripped on the stepladder, got tangled in the frame, and went arse over tea kettle onto the kitchen floor.

I'm really very lucky I didn't clonk my noggin on the way down, all things considered. Once I stopped tumbling there was a moment of stunned silence, followed by a string of, "Ow. Fuck. Ow. Okay, ow. Fucking ow. Fuck. Ow. Can I move my...? Yup. Okay. Ow," and other variations of same. I managed to disentangle myself from the offending piece of furniture and stand up, at which point I hobbled to the bathroom to inspect the damage. 

It wasn't pretty. One giant bruise with a patch of skin scraped off on my left foot, same on my right ankle and right knee, and a nice big batch of bruising at the back of my right thigh. All of it straight out the gate. Cue more hobbling, and putting myself on ice.

Anyway, fast forward a few days. The bruises are just lovely. All multicolored and still very much unpleasant. And considering their placement, probably not a good thing to be dancing on, because they'd be bang in the line of really uncomfortable places in shoes. The one on my left foot isn't exactly in a great place for non-dancing shoes either, all things considered. 

So, here I sit. Bruised.

Don't leave your stepladders in the middle of the hall and have a wander 'round in the dark, kids. It makes you turn funny colors.

It's so SHINY!

I want to say that the last time I had a paper planner was probably in...2011? So about ten years ago. At some point, it ceased to be a necessity. I mean, why cart that thing around when you can just put things into your phone and have done with it? Or, I suppose, into Google Calendar, which is what I used for a few years before I finally caved and got a smart phone, but that's beside the point.

The last few years have seen a resurgence in the popularity of the paper planner. Whole sections at Michaels are devoted to them and their accompanying stickers and tabs and sections and dividers and inserts and all manner of paraphernalia. Now, I love papercraft, but for some reason the thought of the whole lah-di-dah customizable planner never really appealed.

HOWEVER.

I accidentally came across something a little more 'me' last week. I was watching a YouTube video by an artist I enjoy, and they had been sent a complementary copy of a different YouTuber's 2022 planner. My friends, it was a thing of beauty, and had me clicking 'Add To Cart' faster than could possibly have been healthy. The bit that excited me the most was that it was the perfect balance of fun and functional. It had all the components of a traditional planner, plus all the self-help-y, feel-good-y, hippie-dippy nonsense like goal setting and self reflection prompts, plus it's all COLOR-IN-ABLE!!! It's a giant useful coloring book! Two birds, and all that.

I'm hoping that's enough novelty value to keep me current with it. If you subscribe to all that astrology hoo-hah you'll understand when I say that I frequently succumb to that very Aries trait of starting things off with enthusiasm and then leaving them to gather dust after about six minutes when some other shiny thing catches my eye. I've decided to challenge myself to a limited color palette each month, because if I gave myself full reign over my endless collection of art supplies I'd be overwhelmed--completely spoiled for choice. (Well, apart from the fact that I can't use alcohol markers in it because of the bleed-through, which is a bit upsetting because I prefer alcohol to water-based markers. They just blend so much more nicely. And they don't dry all streaky. Oh well.) We'll see how it works out for January. I've chosen five bold colors for the majority of the motifs--it's a bunch of doodles of books this month--and then filled in as necessary with a few other neutral colors to fill in the inevitable extra space. I'm thinking a group of neutrals will always be necessary...kind of like that show that used to be on Food Network called Five Ingredient Fix or something. You were always allowed olive oil, salt, and pepper, and they didn't count towards the five ingredients in the recipe. Or something. The lady who presented it had huge eyes and distracting teeth, I remember that much. 

In any case, I've got a new toy to play with, and it might make me a better human...or something. Or maybe it'll at least make it so that if I don't do things like drink water and do my daily meditation I feel doubly guilty. 

And then I color in around my failure and decide I don't really care.