my days off

 It's my dad's birthday this weekend, but since I have to work, I made him a cake last weekend to celebrate early. I make him the same cake almost every year: a yellow cake with vanilla whip cream icing and lots of sweetened shredded coconut everywhere. He's a big fan of coconut.

There are a few foods that I have a problem with not because of the flavor, but because of the texture. Shredded coconut is one of them. The other most notable mentions are oatmeal, rice pudding, and soggy cereal. This cake is for my father's birthday but it still hurt a little when I pressed coconut into perfectly good icing and mixed coconut into unsullied cake batter. This is how he should know I love him.
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This is what my dining room table has looked like for the past two weeks:

And I feel like that's how it's going to stay until late August when school starts again. So far Perry and I have only made one trip to an office supply store to buy some classroom supplies and I can already see that this is going to get expensive. Perry won't start getting paid until September, so I don't know how new teachers are expected to come up with the money to buy all of these things. Is it considered along the same lines as having to buy nice clothes for an interview before you have a job?

I've gone with Perry once to see his new classroom and it's going to take several more trips to get it cleaned and organized. There's a lot of throwing out to do since the teacher that had the classroom prior to him was a bit of a pack rat. Four people mistakenly thought I was the new teacher when they saw us together cleaning out the room. I thought it was because I'm older, but Perry says it's because I'm a girl.

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I visited my parents and nephew like I do every weekend I'm off. My nephew was making paper swords at the kitchen table, so I sat down next to him and made him a crown to go with it. Less than 10 minutes later he was ordering me to attach a helmet to the crown so he could be a prince knight and had devised a rather elaborate system of "leveling up" crowns.

For each enemy he defeats he would get a jewel affixed on his crown until it was full and then he would level up to the next crown until it too was jewel encrusted. Most of the time I see him, he just wants to play Pokemon on his DS, so it was nice to do something aunt-like with him, even if it was just holding up a paper dragon while he threw a paper sword at it.

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This summer hasn't been very hot at all. Just a few days in the 100's and we're almost done with July. It's been really dry though. My mom stopped by my house to pick up the mail when I was on vacation and she mentioned this weekend how "crispy" my lawn looked. Well la-dee-dah. I've had a lawn for over 5 years now and I still don't get the allure of an eternally green lawn. It's summer. Grass dies in the summer. It comes back in fall. It dies in winter. It comes back in spring. It's the circle of life. And it seems like a waste of water and time to fight it. I'll water something new I've planted for the first year and after thats it's on its own. If it can't handle the Texas summer, 'twas not meant to be in my yard.

texas sage was meant to be in my yard

Back to the point, I was saying how dry it has been...but then it rained for almost four days straight. My lawn is no longer crispy and the temperatures have been hanging around the low 90's.  Best summer ever?

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I woke up last night because the ceiling fan kicked off and I found out the power was out in half of my house. I got dressed, checked the breaker box, found my electric company's number, and was forced to listen to Matthew McConaughey talking with his aw shucks southern drawl while I was on hold (that didn't even turn out to be my lowest point). They gave me another phone number to call and told me that if there wasn't really a problem (?) that I would be charged $50 for having them come out to check my power. Um. Ok. So I called the other number which was automated and put in a work order. Then since my dog Reggie heard me up, he decided he needed to go outside and pee. While we were outside a large mysterious winged insect flew into my hair and I whipped my head back and forth (name that song) so furiously my glasses went flying off my head and into the mud.  By the time I got back in the house the power was back on. Well, shit, I'm not paying $50 if they come to my house and see there's nothing wrong with the power. So I called the phone number again, but it is completely automated and no amount of pounding the zero button is going to make a real live human start talking. In fact by pushing all of the buttons I think I created another work order. So I called my power company again and they said tough shit, that's the only phone number we have, so I accepted defeat and went back to bed. When I woke up the power was 100% out in my house, not 50% and I was so happy since that means I don't have to pay $50. Actually, no. I was hot and angry. And that was my morning.