at least i've got bubble bath...
2006-02-28 | 8:15 p.m.

Forget Valentine's Day. It's days like today that make me wish I had a man in my life.

I left my apartment at quarter to seven this morning, so as to allow myself enough time to walk to the bank and then have a sit-down breakfast of tea and a bagel at the local Tim Horton's before hopping the Metro at 7:30 to make my stage (Quebec for practicum) at eight.

That plan was going so well, right up to the moment I spilled hot hot tea all over my white shirt.

So, I had to stuff what was left of the bagel in my bag, grab the tea, and guzzle it down on my way back to my apartment to change.

After that inauspicious start, I did make it to the school on time. Three speech/ language/ phonological awareness screenings. One Francophone child who couldn't do half of the tasks because they involved rhyming words that don't rhyme when you translate them. One shy child who spoke so quietly we couldn't hear a word she said, and so we had to give her a score that is probably way too low to accurately represent her language skills. And one shy child who cried and ran away from the duck puppet (although when she came back she was fine and super-cooperative).

After lunch, it was time to do an articulation test, an oral-peripheral exam, and collect a speech sample from a child with an identified speech disorder, for the Phonological Disorders project that's due waaaay too soon. That kid was a sweetheart, and very talkative, so no problems there. Although he did try to lick me at one point.

With that done, it was time to come back downtown for my 4-7 class. Which ran long.

I was alternating between dozing off and squirming with shoulder cramps, which made me feel pretty bad, because it was actually a really interesting seminar tonight.

With all of that done, returning home after 13 hours...

It would have been heavenly to have someone here waiting for me.

He'd cook dinner, or, if he didn't have a culinary inclination, insist on ordering in whatever I wanted. He'd rub the feeling back into my achy shoulders while waiting for the food to cook / delivery guy to arrive. He'd reassure me that I'm insanely smart and can afford not to study for Thursday's Speech Science midterm tonight. We'd eat dinner and loaf on the couch in front of the television for a while. Then we'd go to bed early. But go to sleep at the usual time, wink wink nudge nudge and so on. And I would get a good night's sleep and wake up feeling much much much less frazzled.

Given my current (okay, chronic) state, that wasn't going to happen. So instead, I treated myself to a long hot bath with three times the usual amount of bubbles. As soon as I got home.

Dinner's in the oven now.

And later on tonight, I intend to curl up on the couch with the manual for the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation and attempt to figure out how the heck I'm going to categorize the speech errors of a kid with a motor planning disorder, who never makes the same error twice.

Oh well. At least I smell good.

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