I’m sick! Sick, I tell you, and I’m sick in a weird way. My legs feel as if they’ll give out at any minute. My throat is all messed up. Is this what exhaustion feels like? I don’t know. I want to work out lest I weaken my habits but perhaps my habits are what caused me to get sick. Do normal workout people take weekends off? Maybe I’ll take the weekend off, or at least until I feel like working out again, and try to modify my lifestyle so this, you know, works.

All the boys are up, by the way. M is still sleeping. I think she was up in the middle of the night.

So how was the first of class? Rule #1: The students stare at you the first week of class. They’re not comfortable enough to speak up much, so don’t even bother with full-group interaction. I tried with the juniors, the assessment class, and even they were hardly up for conversation. Oh well. They usually get better. I’m behind on prep because I feel like I’m rushing home to cover the kids while M attends meetings. The worst should be past. Next week the boys are in school and M’s working her 60% schedule.

On Wednesday the boys and I drove up to the Green Bay Zoo…see below for pictures. I didn’t want the kids sitting on the computer or television all day, because they do a lot of that with the babysitters, so I loaded them into the van near 9:30AM and headed north. I didn’t tell the boys where we were going so they guessed (e.g. “Canada”) the entire way. We saw about 500 (I’m not kidding) motorcycles on the other side of the highway. Terry at work later told me that Harley organized rides that met in the UP before turning south for Milwaukee. We arrived at the zoo a bit after eleven but parking sucked. Apparently there was another parking lot a little off the zoo but we couldn’t find it so we parked (somewhat) illegally in spot reserved for people using the county park and walked across the street to the zoo. Our entire combined admission totaled 14 bucks. N gets quite excited at zoos, running ahead, so he picked the directions and we checked out the baby tigers (very cool), llamas, etc. The highlights seemed to be the giraffes (the zoo is so open and the crowds so sparse we walked right up and fed him/her), the prairie dogs, and surprisingly, the trumpeter swans. Oh, and the moose. I suppose we walked around for close to two hours. The boys spotted a tower, the kind that park rangers use to monitor forest fires (I think), in a reforestation project next to the zoo. We took a path through the woods and the two oldest boys climbed to the top of the tower and took some cool pics. Maybe I’ll post those later. N at first wanted to climb the tower but changed his mind, saving me the “fear of heights” indignity in front of my children. On the way back to the car T showed N yellow finches in a tree. He’s a good oldest brother.

The ride home was fine except for 1) the stupid motorcycle people who do not get out of the way, and 2) the fact we got off the highway for an A and W restaurant, which was not a real A and W restaurant, with carhops and frothing mugs of root beer, but instead a typical hovel tacked onto a gas station. Disappointing. We ended up at stupid McDonalds because the kids, you know, were getting hungry.

More later. I should take out the garbage before the 7AM deadline.