Oh my gosh, she totally licked the knife.
I don’t know how I missed it considering that it’s the first thing you see when the video starts, but that may be a clue as to why a career with the CIA would have never worked out for me. I mean, along with the fact that I couldn’t fight my way out of wet paper bag or stop myself from telling people, “I AM TOTALLY A SUPER-COOL SPY JUST LIKE SYDNEY BRISTOW!”
On a different note, I promise I will post pictures of the backhouse at some point, but I really want to wait until I get the door painted because right now it still looks pretty ghetto. Granted, it looks less ghetto than it did a week ago, but it’s ghetto nonetheless. My plan is to get the door painted before the weekend is over. It will be like a little Valentines Day present to myself.
And for those of y’all who are having a hard time sleeping at night for all the wondering about what a backhouse is, you can read a post I wrote about it if you click here. Pour yourself a cup of something with a lot of caffeine because it’s fascinating stuff.
So let me tell y’all what I did yesterday.
I sat in a high school classroom from 9 a.m. until 1:50 p.m. Why? Why would I do that? Because in a fit of enthusiasm, peer pressure and school district loyalty, I signed up to be part of a Strategic Planning Committee on making character a priority in our district.
It’s almost like I forgot everything I know about myself when I volunteered for this assignment, such as the part of my personality that hates meetings and agendas and research. In college I was that girl that you didn’t want in your small group project because I’d look for any excuse to not attend a meeting. There may have even been one instance in 1992 when I had Gulley call the house (no cell phones in ’92) where my group was meeting and tell me I needed to come home because there was a problem with our dog.
We didn’t have a dog.
So, technically, that could have been the problem.
I was all about semantics in the early 1990’s.
Anyway, the problem with finding yourself on a committee with the intent of character development is that you can’t exactly quit just because you’ve decided that it’s a whole lot of meetings and you might rather be painting the door of your backhouse. Oh no, you have to persevere, even though you are probably known as that girl who showed up thirty minutes late to the first meeting with a fresh Route 44 Diet Coke in your hand.
In my defense, I thought the meeting started at 1:30 and purposely left my house early so that I’d have time to stop at Sonic for a Route 44 to sustain me. Unfortunately the meeting started at 1:00 so when I breezed through the door at 1:27, I was more than a little conspicuous. Plus I was holding that dang Diet Coke so everyone knew it wasn’t like I’d just come from an emergency vet appointment with my dog because, CLEARLY, I’d just been to the Sonic.
I wanted to tell the entire room that I’d written the time down wrong and wasn’t trying to make a mockery of character and integrity with my laissez-faire attitude and Route 44 Diet Coke, but instead I just took my walk of shame to the back of the room while managing to knock someone’s very important research papers off their desk.
Since that time I have made it my personal goal to be the best committee member ever. I show up promptly to all the meetings and only leave early when I have something legitimate to do, such as going to get a pedicure.
Today, I left the meeting an hour early to be at the house when Caroline got home from school and we needed to finish her Valentines for the class party on Friday. After an hour of helping her cut, paste and write her classmates’ names somewhat legibly, I was whipped.
But I’d also come up with a brilliant solution.
If we want to build character in the older students in the district, all we need to do is put them in a room for a couple of hours a week with Kindergartners, construction paper, scissors, magic markers, and some glue.
Because patience? It is a virtue.