Presentations and Bath Tubs

Our Back To School Night at ASD was this last Monday. It was a great chance to meet with some of the parents and tell them about the school, my class, and the programs we offer. For this, my teaching partner, Chad, and I decided to give our individual presentations in our classrooms, then switch to each other's to talk about our specific subject areas. (He teaches reading for both our classes and I teach math.) When it came time to give my presentation to my homeroom class of parents, I made the lovely discovery that my projector wasn't cooperating and there would be no way to show the lovely Power Point presentation I'd made all cute and informative over the last few days. Bonus: because of this, I had no "notes" to refer to and had to basically wing it and hope that I mentioned all the important pieces of information. Then came questions. My favorite came from a dad who asked, "Little Johnny seems to have a lot of time after school for video games and watching tv. What can we do about that?" This was his way of saying I'm not giving out enough homework.

After questions, I told the parents (as well as wrote it on the schedule on my door, all pretty) to go to Chad's room for the Reading portion. The plan was simple enough, but by the time we'd decided on how to do the whole switching classrooms thing, we had thrown around many scenarios and tonight, I'd executed the wrong plan. I notice that after a few minutes, they're still waiting outside his door and no one has come to mine. As Chad comes out to the hallway, I realize that I'm supposed to be in his room. Oops! I then take off in a frenzy and proceed to sound like what I'm pretty sure was a bumbling idiot in front of the other class. Again, with no Power Point. Oh well, life goes on!

I've come to find that it is never a awesome life moment when I'm thinking to myself, "This has to go into the blog." These moments are never few-and-far-between in my life, so I thought I'd share the most recent one with you.

I thought I'd take a nice, long, hot bath after a day of not feeling well. This can be tricky since there's no way to actually plug the tub, so I got inventive and used a balled up wash cloth. Sweet. I'm laying there enjoying the hot water (for once), when I have to sit up to adjust the wash cloth. I should now interject a little tid bit about the size and shape of the tubs here in Doha. It's longer than most American tuba as well as much more narrow. Not so narrow that my sufficiantly sized rear-end can't fit into it, but narrow enough. I think the laws of physics and displacement came together in this moment to ruin my night because as I leaned to sit back, I didn't really think about the narrow tub and massive amounts of water. Combine those and the velocity with which I sat back and I've now created a virtual tidal wave in my bathroom. One really large whhooooooosh later, and my bathroom floor, all 65 sq feet of it, has been covered with water. Wait, it gets better...

At this point, I'm definitely not happy for many reasons, but mainly because the only two towels I had in the bathroom were either completely soaked or halfway soaked. I now have to figure out how to get to some dry towels, clean up the water, and in order to do both, get out of the bathroom without killing myself. I throw the halfway soaked towel down into the water so that I have at least something semi-stable to walk on. Upon looking around my room and thinking about what I have in the apt, I realize that I have NOTHING other than another towel to help me clean up the water. The only bright side is the fact that there is a drain on the floor of the bathroon. As I realize this, I also notice a pair of regular ole rubber flip-flops (Old Navy) and have an idea. A few seconds later, I'm on my hands and knees on the floor and have turned my two flip flops into a make-shift squeegee. It seems to be working fairly well and I'm pretty darn proud of myself until my knees decided to go surfing and gave out on me. Before I know it they've split and are sliding in opposite directions and I now have to brace myself so as not to fall on my face. This continues to happen randomly/everytime I move until I've "squeegeed" most of the water down into the drain. By now, I'm feeling like quite the winner, let me tell ya..