Ow.

Darren and I bought some really great pots for the deck yesterday. Two are round, about 2' across and 20" high, and the other is rectangular, the same height and almost twice as wide as the round pots. I ordered some black bamboo from the BC interior and hopefully it will arrive safe and sound in a few days. I have never ordered plants online before so I don't know how well I can expect them to travel.

I love the exotic look of black bamboo, and we picked a variety that does well in pots so we can expect to have a really lovely screen to hide our neighbor's pile of shit, which has shrunken and grown twice since I last complained about it publicly.

Anyway, I'm just saying this to explain why my head is killing me now. Those pots are effing heavy and we had to haul them up on to the deck ourselves. I think the rectangular one probably weighs 180 lbs empty. The round ones we were able to roll across the lawn to the deck stairs, but I knew I was going to be sorry today after moving all of them. And I am. So sorry.

The tension in my neck is so high that my head has been literally throbbing all day. I just took 3 motrin and am still in pain but sort of don't care.

And the pain prevented me from writing about something really fantastic that happened yesterday and that was our VERY FIRST PARENT/TEACHER INTERVIEW!!! WOW!

Just 15 minutes with Mrs. Lincoln was long enough to find out that Jackson is doing well, but has the same issues at school that he has here - which are probably all common kid things. Like, he doesn't really like to be put right on the spot and with his tendency to want to please, sometimes answers the teacher's questions with things he thinks she is likely to want to hear. We learned that everybody likes him, especially the girls ... His preschool teacher said the same thing. She said we'll be in trouble in a few years with this boy!

And we saw some of his artwork, and heard about what he likes doing best in class, and who he spends the most time with ...

God, I am so distracted I can't even finish talking about that right now. You know what happend to me in the mall today? This Russian guy who works at one of those carts in the middle of the hallway selling hand cream and nail oils and stuff pulled me over to his little table. If you know me at all you know that my nails are what I would vote least likely to be asked out to the prom, least likely to succeed, least likely to grow up to marry a rich man, least likely to graduate from beauty college, etc.

Did he call me over because I look like the kind of person with really awful nails? Or did he think I looked like the kind of person who spends a lot of time making them look good? I have no idea. But he was SUCH a good salesman! He either has natural talent or went to a special school. His accent was really cool and he kept saying things like "polishink" and "buffink".

Of all the nails he could have grabbed to demonstrate his product on, it had to be my thumb that only JUST RECENTLY recovered from the allergic reaction to the nail strengthener. Remember that? Seriously, it just finished peeling. The peeling moved all the way around my thumb to the other side. And the nail grew out with little indentations of the blisters that had been on my skin. GROSS. (Uh oh, I just noticed that all the images from before I switched over to Goole's new beta version of Blogger are missing. That really sucks. I hope they can fix it!)

So he grabs my thumb (Jackson, by the way, was with me and we were on our way to get a cookie so it was not a relaxing experience) and goes to work on it with this four-sided buffer made of diamond dust, cotton, silk, and I don't know what else. Maybe the other side is just the space for the label. And he doesn't let me see it until it's all done and then TA DA, he reveals it and you know what I said?

I said, "EW!". Because anybody who feels like I do about their nails does not want to draw attention to them at all. As Jackson put it, "All the lights were shining right from it!". It was soooo shiney. It still is soooo shiney. It feels like plastic and I can't stop feeling it, it's totally weird. It looks wet, and as he was doing it he kept talking to me about it in his thick accent which sounded so cool that I just stood there feeling embarassed but sort of wanting to keep listening to him.

I was looking at his nails, which were also very shiney, thinking it looked a little silly but not knowing that was how my own thumb was going to look. He said it would take a couple of weeks for it to not be so shiney but I have a big stack of sandpaper in the kitchen I can take to it when I get sick of touching it. The good thing is that he buffed out all the little blister pocks.

Doesn't it look like there is polish on it? It's soooo weird.

So anyway, what with the headache and the distracting thumb, I can't really go on about the parent/teacher meeting. But it was good.

Over and out.