field trip eve...

I woke up at 4:30 this morning, my brain already going 100 miles an hour.  Lots of little things to do to pull this whole thing off. 

40 students, 15 chaperones, 7 inquiry groups, 16 dorm rooms...

I think we're all set, although I do have paperwork still pending for one student that was a late addition (today!).  Amazingly enough, by the end of Wednesday, everyone had paid, and by Friday morning, I had all the paperwork, too.  There was quite a bit of that.

Yesterday was preparing the material the 8th grade needs for Monday and Tuesday.  Today was administering the pre-program survey (put it online, then emailed it to the students), finding and typing up prayers for the trip, sending reminder emails to the chaperones -- only half of them read it -- and then everyone else who is coming, and about then is when I got the "Hey, can we make this work?" message.  So we did, which of course made extra work.

Then to school, to print everything that needed printing, then shopping for water and snacks with a colleague.  Then driving around looking for name tags and a new expandable file, and ended up getting both at Staples.  Then home to wrestle Word into mail-merging the name tags so they'd have the student's group numbers and dorm rooms on them: best way to avoid having to repeat the information ad infinitum (I hope).

Anyway: still have to do my own paperwork (oops), pack, make a lunch for tomorrow, obsess over every detail yet again, and hopefully get some sleep before this thing kicks off. 

No chance of rain in the forecast, but it's supposed to be cloudy.  It would be disappointing to be at an observatory without getting a chance to use the big telescopes! I'm not giving up hope, though.  We'll see!
St. Albert the Great - St. Francis of Assisi - St. Bernard - St. Dominic pray for me!
(patrons saints of science, environmentalists, mountain climbers, astronomers)