Contracts Are In

Contracts came today. When I walked into the faculty room the long sheaves of paper poked out of the teacher boxes like pale yellow jonquils in the red Georgia clay. I pulled mine from my box and stared at the Notary Stamp. It’s now official I will be back for yet another year.

Last year I was biting at the bit to leave so I could find some place closer to home. Home being Acworth, my Barbie Dreamhouse home. I had been so frustrated that I couldn’t seem to get a position in another school despite the fact that they seemed to be throwing new schools up like concert flyers on telephone poles. One school seemed larger and grander than the next and certainly they needed more teachers.

Now of course I’m lucky I didn’t get a job at one of those schools. I’ve lost that home. I would have lost my seniority. It was truly a blessing in disguise but I didn’t realize it then.

Now that Darryl’s lost his job I find a certain peace knowing that for at least this next year I have a job. It will be my eighth year at RHS, the longest I have ever stayed at one job before. When I was younger I changed jobs sometimes twice a year. I would work at this restaurant or that retail store chasing nickel an hour raises. Even when I became a secretary I might stay at a location for two years before I was ready to move on to greener pastures.

Now I’m looking at my eighth year in a single school. This means that at the end of that year I will have seen two sets of students who started out with me in the ninth grade. It’s an interesting perspective. You watch them shuffle in uncertainly that first day of their Freshman year. By the time their Senior year rolls around you’ve watched them get their license, attend their prom, and then finally you wonder if that’s really the same kid you knew for years ago as they walk across the stage to receive their diploma.

There’s another wrinkle in the phone call story from earlier this week. One of my students had walked in just as the phone was ringing and said, “I just have this feeling that phone call is for me.” Yes I’m certain he did. The student at the other end of the phone told me that another teacher was busy right that second and asked him to call me to send my student down to his classroom. Since that teacher was the swimming coach, I thought it might make sense that he might ask a student to call because he was supervising kids in the pool. I sent the young man down to the teacher’s classroom.

Two days later I ran into the coach. “How long did you keep G because he never returned to class?” “What? I didn’t send for him.” The teacher replied. “REALLY?”

The trap slammed shut. I wrote the student up but the difficult question was, who was the student who called? Wouldn’t you know his classmates had heard I had figured out the deception and asked me if I had written up P also. P is not my student. I didn’t even know that P had called me. “Yes. Of course I wrote him up. That was crazy that he would call and think I wouldn’t check on it.” Two of my students laughed and said “Yeah that really was stupid that P would do that.” SCORE!!!!!!!!!!! So I wrote him up also delivering the referral to the Assistant principal personally. I’m certain P feels that his friend G snitched. I don't think I will go out of my way to correct this perception.

Today is also candy day. Every week until the end of September, Mars is giving away a candy bar. I won one last week. I hope I win one again this week. I posted it on ThriftyMaven but I wonder how much traffic it will get.

Here are the blog contests I entered today:

Prize: $50 Red Lobster gift card.

Prize: Pair of eyeglasses from EyeBuyDirect.com [excludes designer frames and sunglasses].

Prize: $25 Build-a-Bear Workshop Bear Bucks gift card.

Prize: HomeFree Treats Organic Cookies sampler pack.

Prize: One-year supply of all small & mighty detergent, The Apprentice Complete Season 1 DVD, autographed photograph of Donald Trump and You're Fired! promotional items (ARV $160).

Prize: 8-day/7-night trip for two to a JetBlue Getaways destination city of winner's choice (ARV $3,296).

Prize: Flip Ultra Series II Camcorder (ARV $149.99).

Did I Win?

Still no official word about the Stove Top Stuffing sweepstakes. There is something I want to say but can't say. I do know that this is the link for the WINNERS' LIST: For the names of the winners available after June 5, 2009, please visit www.BlogHer.com/winners-special-offers.

Contracts Are In

Contracts came today. When I walked into the faculty room the long sheaves of paper poked out of the teacher boxes like pale yellow jonquils in the red Georgia clay. I pulled mine from my box and stared at the Notary Stamp. It’s now official I will be back for yet another year.

Last year I was biting at the bit to leave so I could find some place closer to home. Home being Acworth, my Barbie Dreamhouse home. I had been so frustrated that I couldn’t seem to get a position in another school despite the fact that they seemed to be throwing new schools up like concert flyers on telephone poles. One school seemed larger and grander than the next and certainly they needed more teachers.

Now of course I’m lucky I didn’t get a job at one of those schools. I’ve lost that home. I would have lost my seniority. It was truly a blessing in disguise but I didn’t realize it then.

Now that Darryl’s lost his job I find a certain peace knowing that for at least this next year I have a job. It will be my eighth year at RHS, the longest I have ever stayed at one job before. When I was younger I changed jobs sometimes twice a year. I would work at this restaurant or that retail store chasing nickel an hour raises. Even when I became a secretary I might stay at a location for two years before I was ready to move on to greener pastures.

Now I’m looking at my eighth year in a single school. This means that at the end of that year I will have seen two sets of students who started out with me in the ninth grade. It’s an interesting perspective. You watch them shuffle in uncertainly that first day of their Freshman year. By the time their Senior year rolls around you’ve watched them get their license, attend their prom, and then finally you wonder if that’s really the same kid you knew for years ago as they walk across the stage to receive their diploma.

There’s another wrinkle in the phone call story from earlier this week. One of my students had walked in just as the phone was ringing and said, “I just have this feeling that phone call is for me.” Yes I’m certain he did. The student at the other end of the phone told me that another teacher was busy right that second and asked him to call me to send my student down to his classroom. Since that teacher was the swimming coach, I thought it might make sense that he might ask a student to call because he was supervising kids in the pool. I sent the young man down to the teacher’s classroom.

Two days later I ran into the coach. “How long did you keep G because he never returned to class?” “What? I didn’t send for him.” The teacher replied. “REALLY?”

The trap slammed shut. I wrote the student up but the difficult question was, who was the student who called? Wouldn’t you know his classmates had heard I had figured out the deception and asked me if I had written up P also. P is not my student. I didn’t even know that P had called me. “Yes. Of course I wrote him up. That was crazy that he would call and think I wouldn’t check on it.” Two of my students laughed and said “Yeah that really was stupid that P would do that.” SCORE!!!!!!!!!!! So I wrote him up also delivering the referral to the Assistant principal personally. I’m certain P feels that his friend G snitched. I don't think I will go out of my way to correct this perception.

Today is also candy day. Every week until the end of September, Mars is giving away a candy bar. I won one last week. I hope I win one again this week. I posted it on ThriftyMaven but I wonder how much traffic it will get.

Here are the blog contests I entered today:

Prize: $50 Red Lobster gift card.

Prize: Pair of eyeglasses from EyeBuyDirect.com [excludes designer frames and sunglasses].

Prize: $25 Build-a-Bear Workshop Bear Bucks gift card.

Prize: HomeFree Treats Organic Cookies sampler pack.

Prize: One-year supply of all small & mighty detergent, The Apprentice Complete Season 1 DVD, autographed photograph of Donald Trump and You're Fired! promotional items (ARV $160).

Prize: 8-day/7-night trip for two to a JetBlue Getaways destination city of winner's choice (ARV $3,296).

Prize: Flip Ultra Series II Camcorder (ARV $149.99).

Chasing The Prize

Seems to me that I’m always chasing the prize. Very seldom can I say that I’m ahead of the curve. After all I didn’t invent the Ipod. I was not the founder of FedEx. Runway models do not wear my latest designs and my picture has never appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer. Last time I checked my name still doesn’t appear on the Presidential ballot, but perhaps that will one day it will.

This is not to say that I didn’t have dreams nor that I was never able to accomplish anything. As a little girl I was certain that one day I would be a teacher. I could close my eyes and seem myself at the head of the classroom, students listening in rapt attention as I taught them history or discussed great novels with them. I dreamed of being a mother and a wife. I guess I could check these off my list too.

The problem seems to be that I never seem to do these things in the right order and they never occur the way they did in my childhood daydreams. I seem to possess an innate ability to thwart progress and circumvent my dreams. If I had been the lead character in the short story the lady and the tiger, the tiger would inevitably always be my first choice.

One of my college professors once said that I had tenacity. Perhaps she is correct. If not for tenacity I would never have survived my numerous poor choices. It would have been far better for me to have been born with a better degree of foresight than dogged determination. Such a gift would translate into far less bumping and bruising.

It seems to be the same way with my blog ThriftyMaven. Every day people are beginning to sign up, even when I’m not having a contest. I get so excited to see the number of subscribers as they rise. I feel like dancing around the room when I see that I now have over 1,000 comments on ThriftyMaven. Then, moments later, I feel crestfallen to see the daily hits have gone done to almost 300 visitors. Funny, because two months ago, I would have been dancing around the room if 300 people came to view ThriftyMaven in a week.

Now I’m chasing money. Money to make up for the loss of my husband’s income but secretly hoping to win a trip to the BlogHer conference. I want to learn how to make enough money on my blog to earn a second income but I know I would be jumping up and down for joy if I won the $500 gift card. If I won the trip I could learn from women who are actually doing that. If I won the trip I could tour the Kraft Kitchens. Now granted, I LOVE to cook, but as a Business Teacher this would be a big deal. There are so many things I would ask and even more information I could carry back to my students.

The problem is not the recipe, it was a finalist. The problem is, that now I am part of a dreaded voting contest. These contest force me to go out with hat in hand begging and pleading people to take time out of their busy day to log on to a website to help someone they hardly know to win something that they won’t share in at all. It is in fact a very selfish thing to do and I don’t know why I continue to get myself caught up in these sort of contests? The chances of me winning such a contest seem as elusive as catching the wind in a paper cup.

Now comes the pathetic groveling, begging, pleading mess that is vote getting. I decided to see if Twitter would net me any votes and amazingly enough, someone actually tweeted me back saying that they did just that. I begged co-workers. I ran around with sheets of paper with directions on how to vote begging and pleading for them to vote for me. “What do I get said one of the aides?” “What do you want?” I asked. From there it’s on to OLS to beg and plead with the people from my local sweep club. A few of them are in the same position as I am and I feel guilty asking. Why should I ask for their help to win something that they could probably use just as much or even more? If I win does that make me a bad person?

Further into OLS I go. Now I go to the vote request area of OLS. Please vote for me I ask. My husband lost his job. We could really use this. I say this knowing that across the country is in the same boat as I am. There are people on OLS who are in an even worse position than I am. Is it really right for me to ask them to vote for me? What is fair in this situation? I wondered the same thing as I posted in my vote request in Sweepsheet. I offered to vote for anyone who voted for me.

In ThriftyMaven I post a HUGE Baking and Pleading Blog post asking for people to please vote for me. I provide a copy of my recipe and beg anyone landing on my site to please vote for me. Do they even read it? Do they even acknowledge it? I wonder. Then it’s over to my New Day New Page site. I totally didn’t understand how to set up a blog originally with gmail. I honestly thought that there was a site that was set up for me and that each page I wrote was part of the same blog. Silly me. Essentially there exists out in cyberspace 18 different blogs that I have created and most of them only have one post. Oh my! Now, since I like the title New Day New Page I keep this blog and yet the ip address is the title of a post I did along time ago for a contest. Crazy huh? Plead, beg, grovel, appeal, beseech, entreat, implore, petition, pray, I do it all hoping that someone will vote and I even hope they will vote more than once.

Next, I head over to Kirtsy. You don’t know KiRTSY? It is a place to find things. News. Ideas. Information. Products. Coolness, and more and more and more. It’s much like Digg which is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. You or someone who reads your blog and finds something interesting on it can post it in a category People looking for something on perhaps food will take a look at that category, see your post and head there to check it out. I thought about throwing it up on Digg but didn’t want to press my luck.

As you can see, my tactic for this, and really for most everything in my life seems to be the same. Throw enough mud at the wall and hope something will stick. Keep trying and if this doesn’t work, well maybe that will. It’s a wonder that the Darwin Theory hasn’t caught up with me yet.

Then I fret, anguish, brood, and stew. If only I had more friends. If only I had a better personality that would win more friends. Maybe if I had more presence on the net. What if? Why can’t? There are a million ways to dissect my dilemma and they all come back to me being unworthy at some level. I feel like Charlie Brown fishing a rock out of his trick or treat bag while his friends delight in finding candy.

Tonight I sit in the final PTSO meeting of the year. It is our Awards night. Our seniors have earned over $3.3 million in scholarships. My heart swells with pride as some of my babies receive awards from classroom excellence and achievement.

I applaud and smile as I listen to scholarship amounts as they are announced. One young man earned more than my own home is worth in scholarships. How I wanted that for myself when I was young. An unstable family life had me bouncing from place to place desperate to just fit in and stay under the radar. I didn’t’ stand out so much as I survived high school.

This is where my story comes full circle. I did eventually get the scholarships I would have liked to have received in high school. They came eight years after I graduated. I opened a couple of thick envelopes to discover that I had received them and although no one applauded me at an assembly in school I felt a pride that was all my own. The applause for outstanding achievement came later as I was received an award for being an outstanding graduate at age 27 rather than at age 17. Was it indeed ten years too late as my Dad sometimes said or was it just in time for me? When I marched to receive my degree, graduating Magna Cum Laude two years later it was while my two sons sat in the audience.

The Byrds had a song years ago called “Turn, Turn, Turn.” I thought of that tonight as I watched my students. To everything there is a season. Perhaps this will be my season to win this contest. Maybe the season will come when Darryl gets a new job and I don’t want a grocery gift card so badly that I will have to beg everyone to vote for me. There’s a time for every purpose under Heaven.