acathartic

That's probably not even a word.  But it's how I'm feeling, here at my mother's house, coming to the end of my stay here.  I feel accomplished, even though the inventory is barely begun: there are no more hidden caches of anything, here, now.  Accompanied by various siblings over my stay, we've excavated closets, chests, dressers, file cabinets, innumerable boxes and bags - and (just me) the attic, from where I heaved (many) bags and boxes of yarn, and books, and other unbreakables, feeling like the Grinch who had packed up the Who's Christmas quite thoroughly so he could heave it up the chimney.

It's quite a bit of work to excavate all that, but then another entirely to actually work through it all and dispose of it, sorting the good into piles and the recyclables one way and the trash another.  I am very pleased that anyone walking into the house would have no idea that any of that went on, unless he or she happened to see the piles of bagged trash and boxes of recycling ready to go out.  My timing there was lousy, although I did manage to get 9 bags of trash picked up this morning.  That leaves 6 to go, plus the recycling.  There's nothing I can do about that, so I just tucked it into one of the bedrooms where it's not in anyone's way.  I concede that's it's far from lovely, but so be it.

I wonder if I am emotionally defective, though, because I'm not finding this in the least bit difficult.  It is really surprisingly easy for me to throw things away, when they're my own things, and I'm not having any more difficulty here.  I can scan something written, or take a photo, and then I know I'll be able to access the memory, and that's really all I need.  (Never mind that I am bringing home an extra suitcase; that's mostly my mother's Nativity scene, which is a lot bigger than I remembered it being.)  In this, I am very different from my sisters, who were with me here today as we slogged through an incredible amount of saved paper.

Mostly I feel as if I've done some good. Once everyone has claimed what they want, we can have an estate sale and get the house cleaned out.  All this will make things so much easier when it's time to put the house on the market.  I have a breathless, "Oh!" reaction to the idea of selling this house, letting the reality of never coming back here sink in, but then that moment passes.  I'm busy.  My kids are growing up,  I have a lot going on, and my days of having 6-7 week vacations on Cape Cod are over.  C'est la vie.

told ya

The meeting was a waste of time, of course.  No one had anything productive to say one way or another, just some vague sniping ("Don't we do this already?") and no one was willing to go out on a limb with me and say the grading burden is unmanageable... until we were on our way out to our cars after the meeting was adjourned.  Then I heard, "Wow, it would be great if they would drop the requirement for 8th grade next year."  Gee, maybe if you had said that at the meeting and given the district reps the impression that you agree with my proposal?  All that ended up happening was kicking the can down the road to April 1, for some reason no one could clearly articulate.  The decision is, of course, not up to us, and the initial word is, "I doubt that will happen. We were founded with the idea that would do science fair,"  which is of course the best reason to do a science fair, ever!

I won't go so far as to say everything is backwards, but our curriculum development starts and ends with standards, and standards are not objectives.  If we're not specifying what it is we want our students to learn, we're wasting everyone's time with random stuff that has no purpose (like the science fair.)

There was some other interesting/vaguely disturbing news about new textbooks next year, which I'm still processing, but mostly I'm just trying to put it all out of mind since I can't do anything about it.  I'm burnt out and already feeling negative, and the tail end of this illness is hanging on and making me crazy.  I wasted enough time on it, and I feel I should've known better than to try.

Way too much work to do, no motivation to do it.  Not a good combination.