It’s Baaack! (aka There Goes the Neighborhood #4)
It was there before I went to California and when I got back it was gone. I don’t know where it went. Maybe it was called into service at the site of the Sky High Boondoggle. [I could be boiled in oil for saying that so shhh!]
I was beginning to think they were never going to clean up the mess at our entrance to the schoolyard. They finished the new “multi-purpose room” boondoggle sometime last summer but they never did anything about the mountains of dirt that were left behind. By the end of this winter, the whole area was just about impassable. You either slipped on the ice or sank knee-deep into mud. Or slipped on the ice and fell into the mud. (Click on the pic or on this link for a mini-slide show.) On the worst days, as I carefully picked my way over the ice and around the mud, I would think, “I should figure out who I can email to ask if they’re ever going to clean up this mess.”
The last time I got riled up enough to email somebody about a schoolyard issue was when the principal of the Haisley Fiefdom decreed that the woods behind my house be padlocked shut. It’s just a small woods but I like to walk in it a couple times a day. For the life of me, I could not figure out why anyone would lock the woods. Did they think terrorists would hide in there? This woods isn’t *big* enough to hide a terrorist.
That was quite a few years ago when I wasn’t so far removed from having kids at Haisley and I still knew a couple of those “PTO ladies”, so I emailed Jacqui. She relayed my message to the queen principal and the answer I got was something about how there was a whole bunch of science “going on” in the woods and if people’s dogs pooped in there the kids wouldn’t be able to experience it. The science, not the poop.
Say what?!? I’ve lived next to the woods for 22 years. I can’t remember *ever* seeing a classroom of kids in there “doing science” or anything else. And I know they aren’t allowed to go in there at recess. I wanted to say, “if the PTO has as much money in the treasury as it did when I kept track of the books, I think it should outfit all the kids in the school with rubber boots and spray the dog poop off of them with big hoses before they re-enter the school.” Instead, I made the relatively polite reply that I walked in the woods every day and I had never seen a lot of dog poop in there and anyway, what about cat poop and rabbit poop and raccoon poop and skunk poop and possum poop and groundhog poop and, well, you get the idea. The woods was soon unlocked and, to this day, I *still* do not see kids “doing science” in there.
I don’t know anyone on the PTO any more and this mud thing didn’t seem to be something to bother any of the PTO ladies about anyway. So, I would think, “when I get home, I’ll go to the district website and figure out who to email.” Then I would get home and get involved with laundry and homework and cleaning the blue toilet and blahgging and yadda yadda and forget until the next time I had to pick my way around the mud mountains.
This morning the bulldozer was back. It was there before I went to California and when I got back it was gone. I don’t know where it went. Maybe it was called into service at the site of the Sky High Boondoggle. I wonder if they’ll do anything with the bulldozer this time or if it’ll just sit there for a while like it did in February. I’m not holding my breath.