Pesky buzzards

There's this student from last semester who is driving me nuts. He is determined to talk me into a higher grade. He's called and he's emailed. Now he's bugging my department chair, who called me today. The kid got a B+ but he won't be satisfied (his EGO won't be satisfied) until he somehow pesters me into a grade change. And the kid has already graduated! Why hasn't he grown up already?!!!

I really do wish I could teach without grades. It doesn't seem to matter to students whether they learn a damn thing or not--just give me that grade! And GIVE is the operative word. It doesn't matter whether they've EARNED the grade. They pay their tuition, thus they've purchased their A.

I don't normally get so down on students, but I'm not sleeping well, so I'm cranky. Last night I woke up when my husband came to bed and then had trouble getting back to sleep. Then about an hour after I'd managed to fall asleep, I began to hear this sound that I thought was the cat scratching the carpet on the stairs. When I got up, I could tell that the sound was coming from my bathroom. It wasn't the cat at all. It was my shower in the bathtub, doing some kind of weird dripping. I went in the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain and saw absolutely nothing. Whatever it was had stopped. Haunted bathroom? Is the new roll of toilet paper haunted with the ghosts of all the trees that died to make it?

Part of the problem was my husband's OCD obsession with getting the "right" air conditioner supplement for our bedroom. Like many homes up here, we have a basement and two floors above the basement. Our bedroom is on the top floor. The central air unit is designed to cool the main floor effectively while turning the basement into a meat locker and the upper floor into a slightly cooler version of whatever the outside temps are. Normally we handle the problem with the attic fan, but it was storming last night. The air was really humid. That's the weather forecast for the next week or so, in fact. So we'd been talking about getting one of those floor model air conditioners that vents to the outside.

So Esteemed One goes to Home Depot. He gets this humongous air conditioner, brings it home, and pulls out the instructions. The box clearly says that no emptying of condensation will be required. The instructions clearly say that owners will have to regularly empty the pans of condensation, which did not please the Spouse. So he shoves the big box (about 3 x 5 feet) back into the car and takes it back. Then he goes to Lowe's. He returns home with a window unit designed for casement windows. (Previously he'd decided against that unit because it was supposedly noisy.) He pulls out the instructions and finds that our casement windows are not large enough to hold this behemoth. It's over 100 pounds.

So now he's on his way back to Lowe's with this air conditioner. I wonder if stores ever ban people from buying stuff and returning it. If so, my husband is setting himself up for a lifetime ban from every store in town.

He suggested building some kind of ugly wooden box to hold a regular kind of window air conditioner. Boy, wouldn't the neighborhood watchdogs love that!! If they nagged the city into citing us for parking a car on the grass beside the driveway, imagine how they'd love seeing a big wooden box sticking out a window.

So I am grouchy. All I want is to be left alone, to regain my equilibrium. Instead, I'm being pecked to death by ducks. S.