Gratitude To The Second Power

Lately my dog has taken to waking me up at 3:30 or so in the morning. This morning I was able to sleep in to 5::15 am. That alone should be a gratitude moment.

I began the day with a Starbucks Green Tea Latte and some oatmeal. I was able to get some sweeps entered as well as promote my blog before I had to head out the door.

Today should be listed as a bad day. Not a horrible day but a day with bad news that was doubled. It began with finding out that the server was done. The school's Internet servers had all gone down because an upstairs water fountain had busted and water had run down into the building taking the server out of commission. This meant that the kids did not have access to the Internet which means that they couldn't do their scheduled assignment in most of the classes. Thank goodness I had a Plan B.

I am looking upon this as a gratitude moment because I was prepared with a relevant Plan B and not some word search.

Perhaps I could have looked upon the fact that there were Otis Spunkmeyer cookies on a huge tray in the front office. I took a bunch to distribute to my department coworkers as well as some for my Sixth Period. I used the cookies to help get them to participate in today's activity about Business Organizations.

Maybe I should look upon the fact that the Internet wasn't working because I was actually able to discover a whole source of projects for use in Entrepreneurial Ventures that I never used before.

I had gone to the Georgia Real Workshop about five years ago and they had lots of great projects to use in my classroom. I thought I had been accessing all of them and already used some of the best ones already. Little did I know there was this whole other section and when I found it I was thrilled. So I would say that I was grateful that I found that section. Can you believe that section has been there that long and I never realized it?

By the end of the day I was anxious to leave but I knew I had a parent conference. This was going to be a good one because the boy was making an A in my class so I figured my time would be quick.

I was just getting ready to head down the hall when I talked to Ms. N. She asked where I was going and I told her that I was headed over to see the parent. She asked if I would be seeing any other parents. I asked why and that's when she told me that we had to stay until 5:30PM. That blind-sided me. She said this was the parent-teacher conference night.

Great. Just great. That threw me. I could have got upset but I tried to focus on the positive. I decided to go out to the car and retrieve a book I was reading.

While I certainly would have loved to work on lesson plans, I was grateful for the chance to read a book. The book I was reading is about Fark which is a really great site for stupid news junkies like myself. I wish I'd known about it a long time ago. I read about four chapters while I waited for parents to come to my classroom. I had a grand total of two. Yippee!!!

Finally, when I got home from work I discovered a FedEx package that contained my glasses. I had sent off the frames to have new lenses put in them for a review. The lenses were supposed to be lightweight and believe me they were.

Here is my chance though to show how stupid I can truly be. You see I noticed that there was those blue dots on the lenses that optometrists put on for measurement purposes. I was so anxious to see how they felt and see how they turned out I didn't try wiping them clean. Instead I plunked them right on and picked up an envelope from the table to read the return address.

The lenses seemed really fuzzy and I removed it to rub my eyes and then replaced them back on my face. I thought to myself, these glasses really need to be cleaned because this is bad. I took them back off to clean them and that's when I noticed that there was a thin coat of plastic on the lenses t protect the lenses. When I removed the plastic of course the glasses turned out to be just fine. So I'm really grateful to have another pair of glasses.

So in spite of all the bad things that happened I still found some things to be grateful for.