Run! Run!

And! Consider the Army Physical Fitness test passed, circa 6:00 or so tonight. Thanks, YMCA!

I'm not slick enough to read on the treadmill (currently: The Phantom of the Opera, which is surprisingly good even for people like me who've never seen the musical), so instead running is all music. Lady Gaga and I crossed the (theoretical, treadmill-based) finish line with seconds to spare. Go team!

Anyone got some stretching tips, though? I seem to have pulled some muscles in my upper back during the push-up component of the test, and I'm not overly psyched about it. I've never been as good about stretching as I should, but I'm genuinely not sure what to do differently!

Contagion

So, like I've mentioned a lot lately, I'm exposed every day to a lot of ick. (Despite being over the flu, I haven't been back to the gym yet, by the way, so the final requirement for the athletics badge is still on hold 'til this week, I hope.) But spending time thinking about has led me to the natural next badge project: Public Health.

The first task: "Tell what should be done to a house which has been occupied by a person who has had a contagious disease." I can make that happen, because I spend time worrying about it after school every single day.

Unlike in 1911, quarantines and even the intense house-cleanups that used to go with them are pretty well out of fashion -- the CDC explains that, while they keep no records of voluntary quarantines, the mandatory type is extremely rare these days. The biggest concerns, they elaborate (largely via the H1N1 info pages) are twofold: the cleaning of doorknobs, books, and other common surfaces and the washing of hands. Now, the CDC recommends various antibacterial household cleaners for the surfaces and soap and water for hands, and a good bout of laundry-doing for all involved.

The laundry (and the CDC's H1N1 reference page) is reassuring: when I was a kid, no story broke my heart like "The Velveteen Rabbit." Specifically, the part about the rabbit being confiscated after the boy has scarlet fever. See, I think the rabbit becoming real is lovely, but as a child I was so attached to my stuffed animals that the notion of one of them being taken away if I got sick was omnipresent and sort of terrifying. (I was, for a notable time, actually a little nervous about having my favorite stuffed animals out if I had a cold or something, just in case.) I'd actually even been a little worried about looking into this particular requirement, on the off-chance I'd learn that, no, I actually should have burnt my favorite childhood toys.

Oh man. Just got a little overemotional there.

Hand-washing notes are forthcoming: oddly, my friend Wendy and I had a long discussion about how we each wash our own hands just this afternoon, and I'm trying out a slight modification to my handwashing routine. I'm a little more excited about this than maybe I should be.

Anyway. All's well that ends well and I'm going to bed.

I haven't forgotten you

I just still have the flu.

I can't shake this one, guys. Five days (maybe six, if you want to count last Friday when I started feeling crappy), and an ongoing low to moderate fever, headache, ew. John made me delicious lentil soup, so that helps.

I had to buy hermit crabs for school today, and I think that maybe I'm kind of a softie. See, I spent way more on the crabs than I can actually get reimbursed for. But! I feel really bad for creatures that live in cages. And I learned that hermit crabs are unable to breed in captivity, so every hermit crab you see in the pet store was caught in the wild somewhere. Think about that. Insane. (Yes, I know they have brains smaller than a sesame seed. But still.) So anyway. I bought the hermit crabs a ton of stuff. Lots of sand (I heard they like to burrow). Dechlorination drops for their water (the chlorine can build up on their gills). Sea sponges for their water dishes (otherwise, small crabs can get caught in the dishes and drown). The list goes on. Also, since I heard hermit crabs are social animals (in the wild, they live in colonies of hundreds or thousands), I bought up every crab in the store. (Sure, it's only three, but still: I'm going to go back in a week or two 'til I have eight or ten.)

Thing is, I don't even particularly like hermit crabs. I just feel bad for them. I feel a little like my grandmother though all this. When my mother was a teenager, she had a cat. Cat the cat. And my grandmother hated Cat. She had no interest in him whatsoever, except in keeping him out. She wanted him outside or n the basement, no two ways about it. But Gma didn't really like the idea of cat food -- it seemed so unappetizing. So, on a fairly regular basis, she would go to the butcher to get liver for Cat. And she would cook it for him. Not because she really wanted Cat in particular to have a tasty dinner, but because the idea of anyone having unpleasant food just seemed wrong.

I am the Gma of hermit crabs.

(Update: John just arrived home from work with a bouquet of tulips for me. This has 100% made my day. Aw.)

Flu!

I have the regular flu (not the swine one) -- fever, chills, light sensitivity (which I thought was a symptom of vampirism, but John assures me that no, just flu), the whole lot.

Clearly, there is only one appropriate response: I've spend the entire day playing Pandemic 2, all while muttering under my breath "if I have to be sick, everybody has to be sick." Sadly, only the part about the audible muttering is made up. (Also, I am totally moving to Madagascar, since I cannot infect it, try as I might. What the hell, Malagasy? Why do you always close your ports just when I start to up the symptom severity?)

Boogers

As I guess I've already mentioned, I have a new job teaching elementary school science (a job of such specificity that I didn't know it existed before I interviewed for it). It's a big change moving from middle to elementary school, but the biggest issue is a surprising one:

Nose picking.

Seriously. I cannot even handle it. The little kids hardly know better, of course, but still, it's ongoing and it's making me think a lot about the public health badge.

Also prompting some public health thoughts was my trip this weekend to the Chinatown flu clinic's swine flu vaccination event. Despite a long, long line, things were remarkably well-organized. We arrived by ten, signed in, and received a noon appointment, though we waited and got seen by 11. There were color-coded lines, tidily organized time charts, and I was, in general, totally, totally impressed by the efficiency of the whole shebang. (Heck, the clinic even had escorts to bring small groups of vaccinatees up the elevators.)

Incidentally, the vaccine I got was the nasal spray version, which had a back-of-throat numbing effect and a weirdly dental hygiene taste, but was so much better than the shot. Oh man. I want all my shots to be administered via nose from now on.

This was not my first use of one of the city's free clinics, either. This summer, when I was between insurances, I went to the Bed-Stuy Lung Center for a TB test. Once again, a long wait time, but this time it wasn't evened out by excellent service -- though, of course, given the cost of the appointment, I hardly have grounds for complaint. Really, though, I waited there for nearly three hours for a five-minute blood test. Since summer, for a teacher, isn't exactly the busy season, this wasn't a big deal. There aren't many free lung clinics in the city, and they're pretty high on demand and low on funds. If that means they can only employ so many doctors, can only have so much in the way of office staff, so be it. That's far from the fault of the fine people there. But let me tell you, using the free clinic there kind of sucked.

Please, please, please don't you dare take this as a statement that publicly funded health care is a bad thing. Not hardly Underfunded and overused health care is a less than ideal thing. The situation of uninsured folks who have to wait all day for a single appointment is a bad thing. I have the utmost gratitude to the city's health system. (Hey, free swine flu vaccine! Free TB test!) But there's such a gap between the health care haves and the health care haven'ts, and sitting in the Bed-Stuy clinic with lots and lots of poor kids . . . . There are few words.

There's more here to consider, and more I'd love to go into. But now may not be the time. Not in a blog post entitled "boogers."

Wind? Still no.

Despite restoring the box kite (this time with the Education section of the NY Times), the second flight attempt failed -- I think that flying a kite of this weight will require more wind than I'd planned on.

Updates on other discarded badges: I still need to run 2 miles to pass the Army Physical Fitness test and, therefore, to earn the Athletics badge. A blend of colder weather, personal laziness, and a soul-draining job have kept me exercise-free lately, but I joined the Park Slope YMCA this morning (making use of John's faculty discount!), and so I can promise (or nearly so) a solid badge-finishing effort this very week. Hooray!

This week was a long one, and not entirely in the best of ways. I knew going in that it was going to be my final week teaching at the public school of despair, but I'd thought my last day would be Friday. Until Tuesday night, when my principal asked me to shift my final day to Thursday instead. This was kind of great (hey, extra day off!), but also meant that I had to spring into action-Emily mode, finishing all kinds of project grading, summarizing of student progress, etc. a day ahead of time for the hand-off to the new science teacher. Things went a little bonkers then, and it's hard to feel like you're doing a good job when you're in a great huge rush all the time.

Somehow, all my students found out by Wednesday that I was on my way out (I didn't tell them, I swear), and they were apologetic and guilty about it, though my leaving actually had very, very little to do with them. I told them so, again and again, but reasoning with 13 year olds is tough, especially when you're trying to do it while remaining reticent about your actual motivations, and there were a lot of tears from the girls. (One, though, took me aside and, hilariously, asked "Why is it that people are nice to you when they think you're leaving or dying? I'm not going to change, though. I'm just a bad kid. It's who I am." I have to respect that self-awareness.)

In good news, I'm employed again -- I start on Monday at a private school, teaching elementary school science in Manhattan. Wish me luck! I feel a little social-justice weird about it (is the message I'm sending "yo former students, I'm going to go teach rich kids instead!"), but that's not the point, I promise. The school is gorgeous, and I'm going to have a lot of freedom to design the curriculum, so I'm feeling good about things.

Tonight: Halloween parade in Manhattan. John and I are both going as Philly aspiring celebrity blogger Arthur Kade. We've even got the hats.

Flying a kite: one thing missing

I realized recently that, since moving to New York in July, I've turned into the sort of person I hate -- the kind who never leaves the city. It's easy not to, of course, especially without a car, but still it's not exactly a desirable condition.

So, whatever problems I have, personally or otherwise, with my job (my last week starts tomorrow!), I've got to give them credit: they do the right thing by taking the students up to hike in Rockland County. We went on Friday, and while it wasn't the most rural undertaking (heck, you could pretty much see the Tappan Zee Bridge from the parking lot), it was still worthwhile. The leaves had just reached that yellowy-changed stage, and the quiet made some of the girls downright nervous. I taught a few of them how to make whistles out of acorn caps, which would pretty much be the worst idea ever if they had regular access to acorn caps in Brooklyn.

It was funny to see some of the students out in the woods -- while they're, in many ways, more equipped for life in the city than I am, they're at a total loss in a less-urban environment. Many of them worried that the earthworms we saw would bite them, and one girl in particular told me she was worried about getting eaten by a deer. (No amount of reassurance from me had any effect.) That said, they also appreciated a lot of woodsy things I forget. Every leaf was a source of excitement, and while they worried that pretty much everything might be poison ivy (or just plain poison), they also wanted to know what everything was. What's its name? How does it grow? How many are there? I know I didn't ask those questions when I was growing up, though we could dither about how much that was my regular exposure to things a little outdoorsier and how much was my being a total indoor kid.

Next up, today, was flying last week's box kite, which had been languising on the highest shelf in my house in order to avoid the advances of Charlie the cat. Keys in hand (this time), we got to Prospect Park only to realize we'd forgotten one critical thing.

Wind.

Despite our best efforts (and despite taking up a field that may well have been better used by the high school boys nearby who were totally trying to play football right on top of us, I would describe the kite flying as . . . spotty. Also, as you can see from the picture, I'm kind of a spazzy runner.

I'm pretty sure, honest, that the kite would have flown if there were even the tiniest bit of a breeze. On the few occasions there was the faintest rustling of leaves, I managed to get the kite to take off a little bit, but I think it would require what one might call a blustery sort of day to get in much really good flying. Besides, it's made of dowels and twine, neither of which are known for their lightness/gravity-defying properties, so it's possible that even a lighter kite would have had more success today.

In one last-ditch effort, we went up to our building's roof, where disaster struck. The kite finally remembered, hey, I'm made out of wood, string, and waxed paper, and I've spent the afternoon falling down to the ground. And, in one soul-stirring moment, the paper ripped and the kite was done for the day. (I've left out the photographic evidence of this very moment -- it's far, far too heartbreaking.)

I do think the kite will be flyable, with a few minor repairs. Right now, it's time to focus on replacing the waxed paper. Some kitemakers recommend newsprint or even garbage bags instead, but I'm not sure. Any experts? I'm hoping to make a final kite-flying expedition by Tuesday. (Dear Tuesday, Please, please, please be windy. Love, Emily.)