The air conditioning seems to be out in our building today. I'm on the 11th floor. It's already hot, now, at 8:49 a.m.

The windows don't open.

Hopefully I'll still be here to post tomorrow.

The air conditioning seems to be out in our building today. I'm on the 11th floor. It's already hot, now, at 8:49 a.m.

The windows don't open.

Hopefully I'll still be here to post tomorrow.

Last night during my community-college composition class, a disturbing event occurred. I lost control. I've teetered on the edge before, but the situation had always come back to the lighter side after a moment of inner panic on my part.

The first few weeks were the honeymoon period. They liked me. I was cool. I didn't make them do grammar worksheets (don't believe in them) or actually write out the homework from the St. Martin's Guide (don't see the point). In my opinion, they are in the class to learn to become better writers, and if they can do that without reading the book, great. If they need to read the book and they don't, it will be reflected in their essays, which make up the bulk of their grade. They will suffer, not me. So I guess I have been something of a softy, putting more emphasis on class participation and discussion of their ongoing essays with me than on any weekly sort of homework.

Last night, however, was bad. I handed back their graded essays two weeks ago. Last night, I gave them the opportunity to hand in revisions for a better grade. First off, only two people took this option. Secondly, when we broke out to do a classroom activity about a half hour before the end of the class, about half of them SNUCK OUT THE DOOR when my back was turned! I was appalled. I dutifully took note of who stayed until the end and talked a little more than I'd planned to about MLA style as a reward for those who stayed (vowing in my head to ding anyone who royally screwed it up in the next essay, even though I think it's really hard to master).

I guess next week's class will start with a short explanation of how the "attendance and participation" grade works. Most of them are scoring a cool C for either being consistently late or leaving early. I'll bet they don't realize that. The last thing I want to do is stand at the front of the class and lecture them on respect for me (they won't care) or how much they should care about my class (they all admitted on the first day that they are only taking it because it is required). What I strive to do with everything in the class is to show them that class is just a microcosm of the world. Everyone will always expect you to know how to present your position on any subject well. Everyone will always expect you to show up on time and stay until the end. Class is no different than life. They don't seem to get that, though. I guess I'm going to have to lecture. (sigh)

This weekend, my beloved and I left the little angel in my parents' loving care to ride the MS-150 charity bike ride. I planned to only try for 50-60 miles, because prior to the bike ride, I had not ridden more than 23, and I had not ridden up one "major" hill since before I got pregnant last summer. In other words - I was NOT in shape for this ride.

However, the weather was beautiful - it was actually cold for the first 30 miles or so. We had made it 50 by the time we stopped for "lunch" - bologna and cheese - they ran out of bread - and peanut butter crackers. My thoughts on the dismal food they expected to fuel us for a long bike ride can't be printed publicly. Shame on you, organizers of long bike ride! Shame! Shame! Anyhoo, it didn't really get hot until around mile 65, which was where my husband and my friend B. decided to pack it in and call it a day. They apparently could hear the siren song of Applebee's and big-screen TVs after their bologna and cheese.

My friend S., who is new to biking and had never been on a long ride, wanted to keep going. I agreed to reframe my focus for 80 miles and go on to the next rest stop. At 80, I secretly knew that I had had it. Stick a fork in me, I was done. However, S. REALLY REALLY wanted to keep going. And I knew that by the time a sag wagon came along to pick my sorry ass up, I could probably already be at the end of the ride. So I agreed to keep going, what the hey, half a banana and two cookies could fuel more biking, right?

By the next rest stop - 89 miles - I was in PAIN. My left knee had little shooting pains running up and down it, my neck was aching and my rear hurt so bad I cried out using the port-a-john when the running shorts grazed my haunches the wrong way. However, 13 more miles. (The ride was actually more like 103 or something.) I really knew by this time if I didn't finish, I was kind of pathetic. I mean, after going 89, how bad can 13 more be?

Bad.

Very bad.

Hilly.

Painful.

Peanut butter doesn't taste so good when it starts to come up.

Anyway, I finished. I did whimper a little. Okay, I was crying by the end, everything hurt so bad. But once I saw the swine pavilion (the ride ended at the state fair grounds), I knew my own huge glass of wine and greasy freedom fries were waiting for me, right after my wonderful SHOWER. So I bucked up. I also knew there was NO WAY I was getting back on the bike the next day, so I went ahead and got sloshing drunk.

It took six hours yesterday to get home, though (a 100-mile trip, remember) because of the POOR ORGANIZATION of the Sedalia end of the MS-150. Kudos to Kansas City for their end of the organization - flawless. Sedalia, BOO ON YOU. Learn to make decisions. And for God's sake, eat before you come to work. We had to wait a sum total of 85 minutes for various bus drivers to chow down at various feeds (BBQ, pancake, you name it - depended on time o' the day) while we waited, sweating and tired, on a school bus for them to shovel down one last forkful and push away from the damn table. Boo.

Anyway, we finally made it home. Grandma and Grandpa were playing happily with the little angel, who smiled the world's best smile when she saw us.

Last night, my knee was really throbbing, as was my seat, so I decided to use the two-year-old Ben-Gay sitting in the bathroom. I forgot how little you need to use, so I plopped a palm-sized dollop on each leg and rubbed it in. About ten minutes later, I was dancing around my mint-scented bedroom. I thought my thighs would go up in flames, and not in a good way. Then I was cold. Very cold. Cuddling under four blankets cold. This lasted about twenty minutes, until I finally passed out from exhaustion. The good news is that this morning, I felt GREAT. Yeah for Ben-Gay, if you can stand the application process.

Glad this weekend is over. I'll not be taking the physical challenge again until early October, when we attempt to take the little angel on her first 5k. Yee-haw. God bless charity events.

Yesterday I had a no good, very bad day. It started when my beloved overslept the business breakfast he was supposed to attend and woke up cursing. He was so upset, he accidentally set the alarm, which he's not to do every other Thursday because the cleaning people come then. My phone rang first around 10 a.m. My husband was in a meeting. I could hear the 1,000,000-decibal alarm going off in the background as my cleaning person frantically mispronounced my name. "The alarm! It is going off!" she cried. I instructed her to let the alarm people call me at work. They turned off the alarm.

Twenty minutes later, we repeated this process. Apparently the alarm people were not actually disarming the alarm, they were just turning off the noise. Every time the cleaning people opened a door, it would go off again. It occurred to me the cleaning people would have to leave, and they would probably choose to use a door as their point of exit. I looked up the customer service number for the alarm people and called them. They told me it would cost $18 to disarm the alarm for the day. I sighed. I thought about how the expensive cleaning service was supposed to relieve stress, not create it. I conceded the $18. The cleaning person called again. "I am leaving now!" she said. "No alarm, please!" I didn't know if the alarm people had had time to turn it off again or not. I inquired as to the cat's mental health. The cleaning person had not seen her in some while. I remembered the time she got scared and climbed into the crawl space under the bathtub, the time (at seven months pregnant) I'd had to call the fire department to fish her out because I was too huge to navigate the cubby space between the wall and the cupboard. I wondered if the cat had scaled the wall and was currently dangling from a light fixture. I sighed.

After my noon-to-one, no-lunch-provided usability meeting (in which everyone discussed how much everything I work on rather sucks), I was starting to reach a melting point. I was hungry. I was disgruntled. I was receiving toxic e-mails at the rate of 23 per hour. The usability guy was following me around as I attempted to find a depository for my former laptop (I just got a new work one) that I had inadvertantly locked myself out of trying to delete my profile so that the next recipient of the laptop wouldn't be subjected to a screensaver featuring the little angel. I walked into my boss' office, usability guy at my heels. At this point, she reminded me I had a 2 p.m. meeting, which would preclude me from completing the total revision of the 39-page document I had been working on, which is due end of day today.

At this point, I went hot. I felt the tears rising through my nasal passages. My boss, a friend from years past, could handle it, but I did not want usability guy to know. I faced her and tried to talk normally as the tears started rolling down my cheeks. She looked alarmed. "You look a little stressed," she commented. "I think I'm accessing my reptilian brain," I replied, succombing to my meltdown and turning to face usability guy. "I can't deal with you right now, E," I said. E. took one look at me and scampered away. I proceeded to have twenty-minute meltdown.

After the 2 p.m. meeting, I spent a productive hour working on my document, only to hit "No" in response to "Save Changes?" as I exited out of the program. Twenty minutes of looking for a auto-saved copy later, I realized the little angel was going to be the last kid in Oz and scampered out of the building, forgetting my PDA behind me.

When I got to Oz, I could hear the little angel screaming from upstairs, through two fireproof doors. Feeling like the Worst Mother in the World, I ran down the hall and swooped her up. "She hasn't been crying long," said the hapless worker, who is very nice. "I think she just doesn't know me."

I held the little angel close. She had the after-shudders of a good cry going on. She looked at me with huge, crocodile tears puddled in the corners of her little blue eyes. And then she smiled at me. A big, toothless, dimpled smile.

Suddenly, my day was fine.

The little angel is what my pediatrician's nurse calls "a spitter." She spits up constantly, sometimes going through six bibs a day. She spits up when you jostle her, when you put her in or pull her out of her new, baby-sofa convertible car seat, when you change her diaper, when you burp her, when you don't burp her and sometimes for absolutely no reason at all. I wasn't concerned with this until recently, when many, many people started commenting that she is awfully old to be spitting up so much. Now, the strangers were probably confused by her size - she is almost 18 pounds at five months - so she looks older than she really is - but people who know her well are also surprised by this. So I started to worry a little.

Of course, if you are worried, the last thing you want to do is call the pediatrician. Not only does the act of calling add credence to your fears in the first place, waiting for the dang nurse to call you back six hours later is pretty much just torture. Especially when they say something like "well, maybe you are feeding her too much." This is how my conversation with the nurse went yesterday:

Me: "I'm a little concerned that my five-month-old is spitting up too much."
Nurse Ratched: "Well, how much does she spit up?"
Me: "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes not much, sometimes five or six times a day."
NR: "You say she's spitting up more than she used to?"
Me: "No, not more, just not less. I thought it would drop off as she got older."
NR: "You say it's getting worse?"
Me: "No, not worse. Just not better. She's awfully big, so I don't know if I'm feeding her too much?"
NR: "How much does she weigh?"
Me: "Oh, she was 17 pounds, 10 ounces at her four month check-up."
NR: "She's HUGE! Maybe you are overfeeding her. You could be making her tummy hurt by forcing too much food, then she spits up." (Subtext: This is all your fault, you naive ho.)
Me: (panicked) "Oh my goodness! How do you know if you're feeding a baby too much?"
NR: "You don't. Some just keep eating forever, like horses. They'll eat until their stomachs explode. Or you could just have a spitter. You say it's getting worse?"
Me: whimper
NR: "You'd better bring her in for a weight check."
Me: "I'm worried about starting solids."
NR: "Well, she certainly doesn't sound like she needs more food. Bring her in."

So, now I'm concerned I've been stuffing my baby like a Thanksgiving turkey, have set her up for diabetes and obesity and will never be able to give her real food. She'll be on a liquid diet for the rest of her life, toting around a little mini-blender in her Superwoman lunch pail. She'll never know the joy of a cheeseburger, all because I, foolish new mother, FED HER UNTIL SHE PUKED.

I hate not knowing what I'm doing....

My sister, her boyfriend, my beloved, the little angel and I had a wonderful weekend. Saturday night, we went out to get wings (the little angel loves them - just kidding) and my sister and her bf ended up doing a shot of Jager (she looked at me soulfully and said, "I didn't think you liked Jager - do you want me to go get you one?" ha ha ha) to celebrate his band's latest album (I love saying that). Though I'm not normally a huge fan of the heavy-metal genre, I am impressed that his band is consistently touring and getting ink touting BoD as being a band "that would make your mother scream." I can't wait to see him on MTV, even if he does think the Grateful Dead suck.

Sunday it was dry, and so off to the Ren Fest we went. The Chicagoans were shocked into silence at the sheer elaborance of the set, the availability of giant turkey legs and the abundance of fat-lady bosum capped off with a rose. The only problem was the heat - my sister is not capable of tolerating much over 75 degrees, and it was probably closer to 90. I kept dousing the little angel with cold water and watching carefully for signs of heat exhaustion, which would have been hard to tell from her normal exhaustion (she slept through most of the event). We did buy her a fairy wand, which I'm sure she'll use later to beat the heads of other family members. But I did stare fondly for a long time at the fairy wings, imagining her little, red-headed self dancing around the lawn sporting a pair, and, of course, her wand. Ah, the imaginings of a new mother. Tra la.

This weekend marks the beginning of the annual Kansas City Renaissance Festival. It's one of the biggest in the Midwest - I'm not sure how big Ren Fests are on the coasts - I'm not sure if I imagine they would be bigger or smaller. Swilling dark beer in the middle of the woods seems more like something we German- and Scandinavian-descended fly-over state types might like to do, but folks are weird on the coasts. I'm sure the New York Ren Fest has a lot of takers, for instance.

My beloved and I have attended almost every year we've lived here, despite our better intentions. Despite the fact that after paying $15/head to get in, it still costs a dollar to walk through a poorly constructed clothesline maze. Despite the fact that wares in the shops remind me of things in the drama kids' lockers in high school. Despite the fact that I've never cared for dragons, plebians or knights. And despite the fact that every year it rains right before we attend Ren Fest, turning the entire village into a swill-pit that not even a good quaff of ale can make you forget.

My sister and her boyfriend are coming in from Chicago this weekend to see us and, more importantly, the little angel. I recall last year seeing a hapless couple at the Ren Fest attempting to push a stroller through three-inch-deep mud. I recall (as I was pregnant at the time) thinking I WILL NEVER GET MY STROLLER THAT DIRTY ON PURPOSE. However, it does seem only appropriate to expose my favorite Chicagoans to a bit of good old country weirdness for the mere price of $11 and five cans of food. So, we will watch the weather report. My beloved threatened that if EVEN ONE DROP of rain falls on Saturday, we will not be attending on Sunday. There's a 40% chance. Stay tuned. Huzzah!

This morning, I rushed back from the gym (but not TOO fast, after my $85 speeding ticket two weeks ago, damn those PV pigs) to take the little angel to Oz. My beloved had dressed her in an orange-and-yellow striped outfit (not as unfortunate-looking as one might think on a red-headed baby). I thought the outfit could be accessorized with these funny-looking Tigger booties I'd found in the four tubs of hand-me-downs bestowed on us by my beloved's seven brothers and sisters. Lo and behold, they were ADORABLE.

Not two seconds after I had them on her, the little angel noticed them (how could you not? I mean, really - these are a five-month-old's version of Jimmy Choo) and began laughing, waving her arms and flailing about the crib. Then she'd look down, see they were STILL THERE, and do the whole routine again. Most of this flailing would then result in her kicking off the booties and being sad. We went through this routine in the crib and in the car, getting out of the car and at Oz, until finally I put her down in the coolest Exersaucer they have and went to leave, booties in hand. She didn't notice. I figure it is probably the first in a long string of bait-and-switches I will pull on her. Darn, though, they are cute.