My parents never complained to the school about anything, but I really only had one teacher that was abusive/intimidating. And I tended to cope by metaphorically fading into the wallpaper in his class.

Though if it had been my finger he broke by slamming his pointer stick on a student's desk, the coroner would have had to surgically remove the thing from him after my mom was finished.

I am going home in a few minutes, and when I get there, I will take Benadryl and then there will be nappy-times!

Shut up NPR dude! I don't care if DST is a capitalist conspiracy. I want my hour of daylight after work!

When my uncle was little (elementary aged, I want to say 3rd grade), he wise-cracked to a teacher, and she took him into a closet, and beat him.

It is reported that my grandmother went to the principal and said, "Put her in a closet with me, and see who comes out."

I'm not sure why my parents didn't do anything. They seem a little startled with the vehemence with which I can talk of Mrs. Seung, but the bitch threw hangers at me and yelled at me for reading ahead in the book she'd been reading us.

The next year I had Mrs. Cummings who brought me in books from her own bookshelf because she saw I had read everything in the classroom already.

Year after that I was prevented from taking the Common Entrance exam by the headmistress because, I thought, of my age. Turned out they needed a ringer for the year afterwards. My mother pulled me from prep school after that year and got me into high school on the strength of her own good academic rep, instead of the exam that all J'can students take at age 12 or so, and whose results were published in the national paper and scrutinised laboriously.

It was kind of a messed up grade school experience. Highs and lows.

OK, my mailbox is going crackers with my coworkers also losing their minds over the sea otter thing.

I have a stuffed toy one at home. I think I may be bringing it in for a bit, to sit on the server rack.

"Put her in a closet with me, and see who comes out."

Your grandmother was made of awesome.

ION, bleah. Just got home after dragging my snorfling drippy crapped-out self up to work to unlock a file cabinet that apparently nobody on the planet but me and my boss has keys to, because I'd locked something in it that someone else needed desperately (he's putting together a giant PowerPoint presentation for a conference, 48 hours before the conference, and had been emailing me anguished and angry emails and running all over the office tugging at things and barking at people). Just two blocks up and two blocks back, but I feel like I've just run a marathon on one leg and one lung.

It definitely reinforces my desire to get out of any job where I'm incredibly valued and indispensible. Please, please, just let me be an (adequately compensated) anonymous cog in the great machine.

I don't mind DST most of the time, but making it start earlier is filling me with dread. I hate waking up when it's still dark out, and hate sending DH off to catch the bus in the dark even more.

8:30 am sunrises in November in Grand Rapids.

That's just wrong, yo.

Shut up NPR dude! I don't care if DST is a capitalist conspiracy. I want my hour of daylight after work!

I need to buy Daisy yet another drink!