I skipped work yesterday ;) Took a personal day to take Michael to the allergy specialist and to get Heather to orientation at Nashville School of the Arts. I realized today that her sudden outbursts of anarchy (ie, "I'm not buying one of their stupid planners. I'm going to get one from Staples. I don't care if they do put me in ISS.") are really her way of panicking - she feels totally scared and out of control, so she attempts to regain that sense of control by being obstinate. But we worked it out, talked it out, and by the time she'd gotten her photo ID and met up with five or six of her friends from previous schools/school years, she was in much better spirits. The defensive posture was pretty much gone. She was disappointed that she'd have to take Algebra again this year, but passing the Gateway with a 96 wasn't sufficient to excuse failing the class. Same thing for physical science - it's round two, but hopefully with different results. Spanish she can forget - she's taking first year French. I won't be able to help her much, because everything I learned I've pretty much forgotten, but I probably can help with the conjugation of verbs. That part I do remember, for some reason. My baby's in high school - I'm getting old.
There are certain things about Nashville which would drive a Baptist minister to drink - in public. One of these things is the entity known as NES. Whenever NES isn't out butchering trees, apparently they're arbitrarily turning off power to entire city blocks. Granted, we had a storm the other night. Granted, there were a lot of people without power, and there was a transformer damaged. But notifying Vanderbilt 15 minutes after you've already done it that there will be "intermittent" power outages, then leaving the power off for an hour and a half, just doesn't seem Kosher to me. Blakemore is very busy street, as is 21st. I know that the traffic lights on Blakemore between Natchez and 21st were out, no police presence, just reliance that folks driving in Nashville would know to treat the intersections as 4-way stops. Since I swear two-thirds of the population doesn't understand the concept of a 4-way stop, this was a bad idea. Meanwhile, back at the ranc...
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