The Story of My Day

So we had an "starfsdagur" today at work, as if all the other days we aren't really working.

But I was productive as all hell, holed up in the classroom that soon won't be mine anymore, grading papers at suicidal speed, listening to various odd bands found on You Tube.

Not terribly exciting, I know. About the only amusement that part of the day provided were all the copy-paste papers that the kids tried to foist off on me as their own. For starters, there are maybe two students in the school who even know what adrenaline is, let alone how to use it in a sentence. Add to that the absolute laziness of their scams! I mean, seriously kids, if your going to plagiarize, please don't use something from the first hit thrown up by googling the fucking book's title! Use some guile! I give bonus points for guile!

So I stayed until 4, using my mad deductive reasoning skills to figure out who owned what paper, as a goodly amount of them were either unsigned, or included just the first name. "Anna" for instance. I have 7 fucking Annas in my classes!

Don't even get me started on the pathetic attempts to make the page and a half minimum by filling an entire page with clip art...

After that, I walked over to the paint store and bought some lovely autumny green and yellow paint. Every body's got a red kitchen these days.

Proceeded to carry the paint 2km to my much neglected housing, painted the trim in the bedroom (after removing 12 screws necessitating 5 different screw-driver bits) and got all the obviously loose tiles on the floor removed.

These tiles will be the death of me. The fuckin' things are hideous for starters, mismatched around the edges, little thumb-pad sized bits of white, and grey and black, the grout turned to powder, or worse, a chemically orange goo. I want to remove them. Seriously, give me a broad-head masonry chisel and a mallet, and I'll be good for a couple hours of wonderfully cathartic thwacking.

Come to think of it, give me a mallet and something to smack and I'm generally just in hog-heaven.

But the owner(s) can't decide if they want to fix the damn things and have me lay laminate over it (WTF?!?!?) or just let me take them out and then lay the laminate. So for now my floor is in limbo. Not wanting to start painting the walls as late as it was, I opted for a slightly different cathartic destruction, namely stripping old paint and plaster off one of the idiotic architectural features in what will hopefully someday be my kitchen.

Stripping paint by hand is kinda fun. The same kinda fun that picking your nose is when your a kid, only less gross and less likely to make your nose bleed. Its the whole digging for grip and then the satisfaction of pulling off a really big piece at once. Good times.

So yeah, that was my 15 hour work day. 8 hours of grading papers and useless meetings (I've sat through 5 meetings about the importance of keeping up moral, and not one on emergency drills, what the hell is up with that? Nobody notice that we live in one of the most seismically active spots on the planet?!?!?) followed by 7 hours of painting, tile-prying, and paint stripping.

If I had to choose, the latter wins hands down.