Greater Love Hath No Teacher Than This...

Let me start this post by making one very important point: I love my kidlets.
I do.
I even loved them enough this week to dress up as Duct Tape Girl for superhero day.
I then proceeded to love two of them enough not to use my Duct Tape super powers to physically and emotionally maim them after they broke a very large, very expensive piece of school property I had sent them to retrieve (I will get around to posting about that little adventure after I have had three years or so of intensive psychiatric counseling...maybe). But as much as I love my kidlets, my friend Elizabeth loves hers more.
How much does she love her kids?
She loves them enough to sacrifice her time, her sleep, her health, and her sanity to organize and run a huge fund raising dinner for them.

This is a feat I would never, ever, ever attempt. Ever.

Why? Because my masochistic nature can only carry me so far over to into exhaustion land before my sense of self preservation (in this case, my carefully cultivated quality of laziness) kicks in.

But that's not all that stands in my way of taking on a gargantuan task like this. Besides the vast amounts of time and near impossible work loads putting something like her "Cowboy Dinner" together requires, Elizabeth also had to know people who could help out with certain things. She had to use her many connections to make the evening a success.

I, unlike Elizabeth, have no connections.

I have no centerpiece hookups...

...or quilt suppliers...

...or hay providers. I am completely connection-less. I don't know any people who could help me out with that sort of thing.

Wait, let me rephrase that. I do know people who are charitable enough to help me out with something like that...

...I just like them too much to ask them to connect me with goods that two seemingly responsible 8th graders could cause irreparable damage to while doing something as simple as transporting them from one room to another...

Sorry. Please excuse me for a moment while I take some deep cleansing breaths and imagine myself in my happy place.....good air in, bad air out. Good air in, bad air out. Ahhhhhh.


Ok. I'm much better now. Thanks for waiting.

But back to Elizabeth and her deep and abiding (and somewhat self-destructive) love for her orchestra students. Elizabeth loves her kids, so she put on this dinner. I care about my friend Elizabeth (and her washer and dryer that she is going to let me use now that rodeo season has ended and I have no reason to spend hours at the laundromat admiring the view any longer), so I agreed to help out.

When I showed up to "help out" last night, Elizabeth told me that I had two jobs. She took me into the one of the janitor's closets to show me the first one, and I have to admit that I got a little excited when I saw the cool gym Zamboni machine. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out that my job was really managing the ice machine on the left side of the photo.

That actually would have been a great job for me, if only I hadn't been wearing the world's most comfortable shoes which turn into the slippery Mary-Janes-Of-Death when they get wet.

But throughout all of my slippery-shoe-related near death experiences last night, I was comforted by the knowledge that if I had slipped and fallen, Elizabeth would have thrown a beautiful fund raising dinner to pay for my medical expenses and long term care.

My second job, serving dessert, was actually more dangerous because of my aversion to food service. The problem was that, although I do love to serve people, there are two ways in which I refuse to give that service. The first is donating blood, which I know is necessary and admirable, but causes me to lose conciseness at the mere mention of it (seriously, I passed out, like, six times while tying that last sentence because it mentioned giving...you know what). The second type of service I normally refuse to participate in is food service of the commercial variety because for some strange reason, people who I would normally think of as charming suddenly morph into helpless idiots when I am trying to provide them with food that they have paid for. And last night was no exception. There were actually a few times when I wanted to carve up the pie and brownie demanding customers, which I wouldn't have actually done because just the thought of cutting someone with a knife makes me fell queasy and.....THUMP.

. . . Whoops. Sorry about that.

Now, what was I typing about?

Oh well. Must not have been important. Moving on...

Even though Elizabeth only assigned me two jobs, I did volunteer for a third...hastening the departure of the diners after the diner by pulling the fire alarm. I thought it would really help to speed things up so we could get things cleaned up and get home, but Elizabeth's dad politely refused my services in that matter.

While I as helping with the dinner (which was held in the high school gym of the district Elizabeth works for which just so happens to be the arch rival of the school district I work for) I decided I should take advantage of my little foray into enemy territory and do a little reconnaissance.

My main goal was to try to discover why it is that Elizabeth's school district has, on average, about 180 less school days than my district. Seriously. I think that district only had about 9 full days of school last year, and I wanted to know why. So I put my investigative journalist background to good use and took off with my camera to do a little snooping. What I found would shock and amaze you. But because this post is already so long (some of you have had to shave twice while reading it, I know) I am electing to share only one of my discoveries with you tonight. And that is ...THIS DOOR.

A steel door. The kind of door you would expect to find a mad scientist working behind.

The kind of door you would expect to hide government scientists performing alien autopsies.

The kind of door you would expect to see Jack Bauer shoot through to escape from terrorists after biting off his interrogators nose.

But it is actually the door to the high school's kitchen. That really helped me understand why a decade has more Leap Days than Elizabeth's district has full weeks of school.

But in closing, I would like to return to the main point of this post, which is that Elizabeth loves her students way more than any other mentally stable educator I know.


And, because I am still in investigative journalist mode, here are three pieces of evidence to back that up.

Exhibit A. This is me after trying to do a little extra to help out my yearbook kids (you can read about that soul-sucking experience here)

Exhibit B. This is me after walking my honors kids to DQ which is less than a mile from my school (you can read about that adventure here).

Exhibit C. This is Elizabeth about an hour into what would end up being around 8 hours worth of clean-up after a fund raiser she spent over two months preparing for.

The bottom line: Elizabeth is an amazing and dedicated teacher and her kids are lucky to have her.

So just think of what she could do if her district actually held class on a regular basis so she could teach them?!?!