You Can't Save Up

For those of you who read my posts for insights about education, this one doesn't connect, at least not in any explicit way.  These are just the thoughts I'm having as I prepare for camp.

For the next several days, I will be preparing for Royal Family Kids Camp.  Let me just tell you that camp preparation is no joke.  Unlike other travel, where you might stay in a hotel with toiletries provided and the ability to quickly pick up something you forgot, when packing for camp, one must consider EVERYTHING they will need to live for a week.  In addition to your clothes, you have to pack your sheets and towels and a clock.  Depending on where you are staying, you might even have to pack your own shower curtain.  That's before you consider the packing you need to do your camp job.  For counselors, that means cabin decorations and camper gifts.  For activities and program directors, that may involve pulling a trailer of supplies.  The nurses need to think about how many bandaids, gloves, and bee sting kits they will need, not to mention an organizational system for all of the kids' meds.  And don't get me started on the food service people - their preplanning is unreal.  In that regard, I've got it easy with my camera and adjacent accessories, my computer (with charger, dongle, and bag), and a notebook for all of the reminders (which camper wants a shot of them riding a horse, what each twin is wearing today so speed later identification, reminders of what to pick up on the WalMart run).  As I said, packing for a camp is a little more intense than packing for a vacation.

There are things, however, that we can't prepare for in getting ready for camp.  The heat is intense.  After all, it is the 2nd week of July in Eastern NC.  We are outside for much of the day, and we are very active.  Whether fishing, horseback riding, swimming, running relays, riding bikes, or doing archery, we spend a lot of time in the hot sun.  When we go inside, air conditioning has been running for hours to keep down the humidity.  (Did you know, by the way, that Willis Carrier invented air conditioning for the purpose of humidity reduction in magazine printing, and the lowering of the temperature was just a side effect?  Sorry for the sidetrack.  It's compulsive.  I've been out of school for a month, so I haven't taught anything in a while.)  Anyway, you come in from the heat and immediately start evaporating sweat, resulting in feeling incredibly cold.  For years, I have said that someone could make a fortune if they could invent a lotion that would remove heat from you while you are outside and store it to be released back into your skin when you went inside.  Or, wouldn't it be great if God had just designed us that way in the first place?  He could have.  It was within his power to give us the ability to store excess heat for later use.  He chose not to, so we can't save up.

The other thing I can't prepare for in all of my planning and packing is sleep.  When I was a counselor, the job was emotionally and physically intense, but it was the only week of the year when I actually slept 8 hours every night because I slept when the kids slept, and "lights-out" was at 9 o'clock.  Now, that I am the photographer, my week is very different.  The daytime part of the job is easier.  It's mostly running around taking pictures and organizing what needs to be sent for printing then going to Walmart twice a day to drop off and pick up pictures.  The majority of my work, however, takes place at night.  Those prints need to be identified and sorted because each of our fifty campers receives a photo album at the end of the week with at least 24 pictures in it.  The pictures are placed in the books.  I make a list of the kids we are low on, so my photography partner and I can make sure to aim at them more the next day.  I have a checklist to make sure that I have at least one photo of each child in the pool, with grandma and grandpa, doing an activity, singing or reading the Bible, etc.  If they have a sibling, we make sure to get a shot of them together.  (Man, my 18 years as a yearbook advisor comes in handy for this job.)  Anyway, all of this leads to progressively less sleep each night of the week, and occasionally an all-nighter on Thursday because that's when the bulk of the video is made.  I wish I could prepare for this by spending this week saving up sleep.  If I could, I would sleep an extra hour or two each night of the two weeks leading up to camp and save up on the rest.  God could have made us work that way, but he chose not to.

Why did God make us this way?  Why wouldn't He allow us to save up on heat or sleep or any of the other things you might wish to stock up on.  I think it is to teach us two things:  wisdom and reliance on Him.  The book of Proverbs is filled with wise advice about how to live prudently, including the balance of work and rest.  It's not a big deal that I get very little sleep for a week, but it would be foolish to live that way on a regular basis.  If it were possible to store up sleep, we might be tempted to live in unwise ways when it comes to rest (even with the way it is, we tend to make foolish sleep decisions).  

The second purpose, I think, is to teach us dependence.  God wants us to resist our natural inclination to rely on ourselves and our own understanding.  When he provided manna for the nation of Israel during their forty years of wandering in the desert, they were commanded to only gather the amount they needed for the day except for the day before the Sabbath when they were allowed to collect a double amount.  If they even tried to save up, the manna would spoil and be worthless the next day (except that the double portion collected pre-Sabbath miraculously did not spoil).  God was training His people not to hoard His provision because they might come to believe that they were the source of provision rather than Him.  I would imagine in the first weeks of wandering, it must have been frightening to get up each morning and look outside the tent, wondering whether you would eat that day.  That first Sabbath, after having seen extra manna spoil for six nights in a row, they might have worried that they would wake up to rotten food.  Yet, every day, God was faithful.  I wonder if ten years in, they felt secure or still wondered if today would be the day the manna didn't come.  (I do know that at some point they become so accustomed to being miraculously fed that they complained about it and asked for something different.  God help us - humans are prone to rebel, aren't we?)  For forty years, God gave them what they needed and no more.  Because they wandered for four decades, they had to teach the next generations the rules and show them that the rules were there because of God's faithfulness to them.

Next week, when I finally fall into bed at 2:30AM on Wednesday night, I will pray for the few hours of sleep I will get to be deeply restful (and that it will come quickly as it is difficult to turn my brain off).  When I get up and make the morning run to Walmart, I will pray that He gives me the energy to do the work He has put before me that day.  I remember writing about this during the days of the pandemic when I was using every bit of energy I had, but camp serves as an annual reminder to rely on Him because, if he has given you a task, he will also enable you to complete that task.

Adaptable Planners

No one who regularly reads this or knows me will be surprised by this, but I am a planner.  Some of that was built into my DNA, but becoming a yearbook teacher is really what cemented it into my daily life.  You can't end up with a good yearbook unless you have a lot of plans laid out.  I plan lessons, units, days, and semesters.  Even during the summer, I make a to-do list for the following day before going to sleep at night.

Good plans rely on good information.  For yearbook, you need to know when and where the volleyball game will be played.  You need to know when the dress rehearsal is for the play and how many cast members there are.  For lesson planning, you need to know what supplies you have available and whether your schedule that day involves a shorter time frame or missing seniors.  

Today, I was dressed in my walking gear and was putting on my shoes to head out to church.  It's a 90-minute walk, so I have to be ready to leave between 7:20 and 7:30.  It was ten after seven when I noticed that the sky seemed a little darker than normal.  I supposed that I should perhaps look at the weather forecast, and I found that we are expecting remnants of tropical storm Claudette to be coming through this area for most of the day.  Somehow, in all of my planning, I had missed that little detail.  Now, I had to look at my other options.  Will I drive to church or watch it online?  I can accomplish the same thing in different ways, so I have to figure out which way is preferred.  

School is that way too.  No matter how good a planner you are, times will happen when you miss important details.  You forgot it was a half-day when you planned a test.  There's a pep rally you forgot would take away one section of your 8th-grade class.  You suddenly realize there isn't any salt in the lab.  You have to adapt.  Salt is an easy fix; you can run to the store quickly.  You might even find some in the teacher's lounge.  The half-day might pose a trickier problem.  Moving a test isn't always easy because it might run into other tests, so do you move it or do you shorten it to fit into a shorter testing time?  The answer to that depends on your schedule and the particular material covered on the test.  Losing one of your class sections is annoying because you either have to plan something for the other classes that is valuable but doesn't need to be made up in the other section or you are going to have to teach that one class really fast the next day to catch up.  

Here's the point I am making.  You should absolutely plan.  Flying by the seat of your pants on a daily basis is irresponsible.  But, you will suffer if you stay rigidly fixed to those plans because school is filled with plan changers.  Adaptability MUST be part of your makeup, or you will lose your mind.  After a few years of experience, this becomes easier because you know what the ultimate goals are and can keep your eye on those while figuring out a different way to achieve them.  

By the way, this is an important life skill to teach students.  We all know that no matter how long you give students to do a project, many of them will wait until the last few days and cram them in.  You can help with that by putting in checkpoints along the way; I'm not saying that they can't lie on them, but at least you are putting a structure in place that shows what adaptable planning looks like.  On any project I have that lasts longer than two weeks (I have three), I ask students to submit a timeline during the first week.  I ask them to look at their schedule and plan realistically rather than idealistically.  On each checkpoint, I ask if they are still on schedule because I want them to know that not being on the planned schedule is acceptable if there is a good reason, not just procrastination.  Life happens.  If the answer is no, I ask what their plan is for adapting to those changes.  Can they catch up, or do they need to readjust their timeline?  

The content of a project is important, but the skill of adaptive planning will remain with them throughout their lives.  Teach it.  Model it.  It matters.

Little Did I Know

Because I teach middle and high school students, most of my adult life has been telling people to calm down, get some perspective, and stop overreacting.  That's definitely what I was doing a little over a year ago, when the first cases of Coronavirus arrived in Washington.  That's when students started asking what pandemic meant and asking me if schools would close.  Little did I know at the time that I was under-reacting.

On this date, one year ago, we got the email.  We had been planning for it for three weeks, but we had all hoped we were just being extra prepared.  Wake County had made the decision the night before not to go virtual yet, and we assumed we would follow suit.  Then, the email came from our head of school that said we would transition to a virtual environment.  Two days would be devoted to teacher preparation, and we would teach our first classes virtually on Wednesday, March 16.  A year later, I have learned a lot, and I am doing things I would have never dreamed that I would be.  I was so naive a year ago about what the year would bring.   

My Granny has said to me dozens of times that if there were a book in which you could find out what would happen in your life, she would not want to look at a single page.  I'm glad that book does not exist because I think I would have definitely looked at every page of this past year and then been overwhelmed by what I read.  If I had known what was coming, my mind and heart could not have absorbed it all.

There are so many things I'm glad I didn't know, but here's what comes to mind today.

That we wouldn't be back at school for the remainder of the 2019/2020 school year - When we walked out the door in mid-March, the plan was to return after spring break, April 14.  I truly thought that would be it.  We had heard that the incubation period was two weeks so often that I thought four weeks would certainly be sufficient.  It was not until April 24 that we learned we would not return to school in person or have graduation or a senior dinner or a yearbook celebration.  If I had known that On March 14, I might have curled up in a corner and remained in the fetal position.  I'm so glad that I would knew things about three weeks at a time.

That taking precautions would become political - I probably should have seen this one coming.  After all, the guy in the white house hadn't been thriving on division and chaos for only the three years before, but for at least the three decades I had known his name.  Knowing that didn't make it any easier to see people I love treat each other badly for things like mask-wearing and getting vaccinated.  I had to snooze and mute some of my friends online because reading their posts was taking too much of my mental energy (which was already in short supply).  I never dreamed staying home would become a red v. blue issue.  If I had known, I would have been too cynical, so I'm glad I didn't.

That I would teach a full school year masked - When we found out we would return in person, I didn't care what it took.  Being alone so much had not been good for my brain, and I knew it wasn't good for kids either.  I said, "I'll teach in a mask.  I'll teach in a hazmat suit.  If you need to wrap me in bubble wrap and roll me to my classroom, I'll do it."  I still feel this way, but I had no idea what a difference teaching in a mask makes.  It turns out that I do a lot of things in my classroom that require my mouth to be seen, from mouthing words silently to ask kids if they are okay to blowing air across paper to show Bernoulli's principle to playing the panpipe and harmonica (and nose flute) as part of our unit on sound waves.  I had no idea that my sense of humor is communicated largely through mugging faces, so it took a long time this year to convince my 8th-grade students that I am hilarious.  I have found that being heard in a mask is not the challenge I thought it would be (because I've been loud for my entire life), but there are daily moments in which I think, "Oh, wait, how am I going to do that in a mask?"  I'm glad I didn't know that when the year started because I would have been overwhelmed trying to figure them all out at once instead of one day or week at a time.

That I would not be in church at the times we most need Christian community - Last year, I walked to the church on Easter Sunday, knowing there would not be anyone there.  I just desperately wanted to do something I would normally do.  I thought that might be the hardest day not to be in church.  Then, George Floyd was killed.  I had a few chances to be with other Christians in the days after that happened because it was right before school checkout time, and we had returned to do some packing up for the summer, but that was it.  My church wasn't meeting in person yet, and I was largely left to process the lessons and pain of that time, including watching the riot as it unfolded downtown, without the presence of Christian community.  That's not a criticism of anyone.  My pastor addressed it in our online services, and my head of school created a group to address some of the issues, and we met virtually a couple of times during the summer.  But, as we all now know, processing painful things is just not the same in a virtual meeting as it is when we are together.  We are made for real community, not virtual community.  God walked with Adam; he didn't just download knowledge into his brain.

That hybrid teaching would be so hard - I try really hard to balance being genuine with professionalism, so I don't talk much publically about how hard hybrid teaching is.  I don't want to communicate that I wish we hadn't done it because that it is not accurate.  For this year, it was the loving thing to do.  Because of vulnerable families, fearful students, and required quarantines after exposure, it is necessary to have virtual as an option for our students.  It is also hard to communicate how hard it is to plan for some students to be virtual and some to be in person (especially in classes with hand-on components, like STEM classes).  Keeping two groups of people engaged requires a constant switch of attention, which burns glucose, which drops your blood sugar, making you more tired and hungry.  I never dreamed how much harder it would be to grade work that is submitted digitally because you can't just write on it.  Giving appropriate feedback takes ten times longer than it normally would and matters more than it ever has.  In the best of years, teachers suffer from a phenomenon called decision fatigue because of the number of choices they have to make every day.  In the hybrid environment, the number of decisions is at least double, possibly more.  Staying pretty much planted in front of my computer goes against all my teacher instincts about moving around in my classroom.  Not being able to have a private conversation with a virtual student (or really an in-person student either as staying distanced and wearing a mask means you can't have a quiet conversation) has made simple follow-up far more difficult.  There's a lot more to this list, but I'll stop now because I don't want you to think I am just whining.  There's just no way to communicate how much harder this is than I expected.  I'm just glad I didn't know that in August or the jaw clenching I was already experiencing might have broken my teeth.  

That I would find some unexpected sources of joy - One of the things I started doing during the summer was writing letters to people whose work brings me joy.  I have written to the hosts of my favorite podcasts, people who made the TV shows I like to binge-watch, even a few singers and authors.  There are two that really stand out because they have become a part of my daily routine.  I knew who Stephen Colbert was long before 2020, but it had mostly been the occasional YouTube clip that got shared on social media.  For the past year, I have found him a source of great comfort, entertainment, and joy every day.  I hate it when he takes a week off.  He's a comedian, but he is also a very open man who shares his faith, his love for his wife, and his emotions rather openly - I just wish I could be friends with him and Evie.  Watching him at the end of each rigorous school day has helped me through this time in many ways.  I have also discovered a British show that's been on for fourteen seasons without my knowing it.  It's called Would I Lie to You, and I'm not sure anything has ever made me laugh harder than this show does - like tears running down my face, snort-laughs.  I don't watch it every single day because I am starting to run out of episodes, but when I especially need a good laugh, I go to YouTube and watch the next one on the playlist.  You may be wondering why I would put this on a list of things I am glad I didn't know a year ago.  It's because they have been a delightful surprise in my life.  If I had known about them before, they would have been expected and probably somewhat mundane.  Finding them during this time has been an unexpected blessing.

There are more, but this post is already longer than I had anticipated.  I am thankful that Granny's book of your life doesn't actually exist.  Living this past year one day at a time has been the only way to stay sane, even for a planner like me.  I guess it's why God designed time and human interaction with it the way he did.

Strength for Today

I am a planner.  I've always been a planner, but when I took on the role of yearbook adviser, it was only enhanced and strengthened.  I have to-do lists for the day and the week, and those lists are sometimes cross-referenced.  I am not inflexible, but it is only by having a plan that I can adjust my plans.  Yet, here we are.  Planning during the pandemic requires a pencil with a strong eraser and a shorter view.

I realized a few days ago that I've been saying the same prayer in the car each day on my way to school.  It is, "Lord, give us enough strength for today."  I don't ask to get through to Friday or make the semester work.  I ask for enough energy to make it through what I need to do for that day.    

When the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness for 40 years after their liberation from Egypt, they were not able to plan for their needs either.  I'm pretty sure they were planners because their society was agrarian.  If you think I'm a planner, I've got nothing on farmers.  They had herded sheep and grown food for generations, and then they were in the desert.  God taught them to rely on Him for their daily needs by making it so their clothes would not wear out and by dropping food from Heaven each day.  Knowing they would doubt His provision could continue and that they would want to hoard the manna, He made it spoil at the end of each day with the exception of the night before the Sabbath.  I assume that this is also the source of the request in the Lord's prayer to "give us this day our daily bread."

As I contemplated my prayer and the Israelites, I realized that this is one way God using the pandemic. He wants to give us more faith in Him and less in ourselves.  Teachers, make your plans, but know that the strength you need to carry them out comes from the Lord, and He has given you the energy you need for today.  Trust that He will give it to you tomorrow as well.

(I grew up singing hymns in church, so they are sometimes in my head.  As soon as the words "strength for today" came to my mind, my mind began playing "Great is Thy Faithfulness" on a loop.  Enjoy this lovely performance of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwiBz1QA4o)

Snapped Into Action

The story I am about to tell you is about my school.  I make no judgment about those schools that have made different decisions.  We are in a situation with no precedent, and each has to make the decision that is right in the context of their community.  With that disclaimer, I want to tell you about the incredible people with whom I work.

Wednesday night, after our first day of online instruction, a parent expressed gratitude on Facebook for how GRACE "snapped into action."  I smiled because I know it looked like a snap from the outside, but it was a long, slow snap of either two weeks or ten years, depending on how you look at it.

Two weeks before we all started social distancing, a meeting was called.  "We need to start thinking about what we would do IF schools have to close."  At that point, almost no one thought it would happen or that, if it did, it would be several weeks away.  That meeting was a Thursday.  On Monday, we had department meetings to brainstorm contingency plans, filling out a spreadsheet with questions like, "What do we need the kids to take home?  What do we need to take home?  What is and is not possible to do at home?"  Behind the scenes, our administration and IT departments were having meetings about the best tool for the delivery of online instruction.  By Friday, we were being trained on Google Hangouts Meet and outlining policies for the virtual learning environment in the event we MAY need to use it.

At that point, we thought we would have at least one more day at school to give the kids a little training, but Saturday morning, the email went out that we would transition to online learning immediately.  Two days, the faculty would be at school for planning, and we would start delivering instruction on Wednesday.  Our teachers spent that weekend adjusting our hearts to the news and preparing our homes for the change.  I live alone and only had to prepare for a teaching spot.  Those teachers who are also parents had to figure out multiple places and determine whether their internet access was strong enough for multiple people to do video streaming at the same time. 

Our IT Team and administrators started making events in the Google calendar for each of our classes for every teacher and student.  (I printed the fifth and sixth-grade rosters for our Media Specialist and was stunned to find it was 82 pages long!  I don't know how they input every student in every class K-12.)

Monday and Tuesday, there were meetings and work time and tears and training.  We made goofy videos for our students to watch on social media, letting them know how much we love and miss them.  We were encouraged to model adaptability and growth mindset to our students and communicate frequently with our parents.  We researched best practices in online schooling, shared tools, got help from our blessed Millenials, and prayed for our students and each other.

Through those days, we thanked God for putting us in a position where we could respond this way.  It all started back in 2010, when we went one to one.   All 5th through 12th-grade students at GRACE are issued a MacBook Air to use for the school year.  4th-grade students use classroom Chromebooks at school, and 3rd-grade teachers sometimes check out a cart to use them as well.  Without this equipment, there would be no way to provide equity to our students in online learning.  In the second year of the program, we realized the need for a Learning Management System (LMS).  The learning curve was pretty steep that first year, but we eventually became comfortable using it.  Now, we just say, "It's on Talon," and students know what to do.  In the years since, we have been coached by some amazing people (Laura, Daniel, Tomeka, and others) on how to implement technology usage in the classroom.  Like European cathedrals that took generations to build, each successive technology teaching coach has laid bricks on top of the foundation originally laid by Sean and Diane when they first cheered us through the one to one model.

Wednesday morning, we began online delivery of content, each teacher in different places.  Students jumped in quickly, and with few exceptions, they behaved well in our classes.  We've laughed and stayed connected.  We've met each others' pets, and students have used things at their home to show examples of our content (from a fish tank to an accordion).  Each teacher has office hours online for students to ask questions, and some do.  Others just drop in to say hello.  Teachers have checked in on each other with hangouts as well.  We miss each other dearly, but we are grateful for these tools and for our ability to use them.  We have a daily faculty meeting to debrief what is and is not working and to pray.  Without these face to digital face interactions, I would lose my mind from isolation.  It's been great to see people, even if it is across a screen.

As I scrolled through Facebook on Wednesday night, I was grateful for the support of our parents because, while parents from other schools were complaining about trying to teach their kids at home (and students after the new AP test guidelines were released), our parents and students were expressing their prayers for us and thanking us for our efforts.  As I watched videos and read statements from other heads of school and superintendents (who are still trying to figure out what to do) and read the arguments about equity from some very ungracious educators on Twitter, I realized just how perfectly everything led up to us being prepared for this.  Not everyone has a one to one program, pedagogy training from a technology coach, a forward-thinking administration, supportive parents, a special ed department to meet the needs of struggling learners, a counselor who checks in on the more anxiety-prone, colleagues who provide encouragement and support, and kids who adapt.  We are truly blessed.


No one can predict what will happen in the coming days.  It does seem this is going to go on longer than the 2-3 weeks we originally planned for.  I am hoping and praying that we will have May with our students (not because of the academics but for the end of the year closure), but there is no way to know.  When I left the building for the foreseeable future, I said goodbye to a principal who was making back-up plans for a virtual graduation while still praying that we won't need those plans.  At GRACE, we have hope for the best, but we also plan for the worst.  Because of those forward-thinking planners, we were able to "snap" into action.

Not the Day I Thought I Would Have

"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit' yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'”

 - James 4:13-15

As teachers, we make a lot of plans.  This is a good thing.  Teachers who go into the classroom every day and wing it do a disservice to their students.  We must plan the day, the week, the quarter, and the semester (while still remaining flexible), or we will never teach our students as well as we could.  As a yearbook teacher, I have to plan photography schedules (from classes to athletics to artistic events), and I must teach students to plan for the meeting of deadlines.

There is perhaps no day of my year that is more planned out than the day we distribute the yearbook.  This was how it was supposed to go this year:

- The weekend before, the yearbooks are sorted into grades and labeled with student names.  

- The day of distribution, I have a substitute.  I arrive at school 6AM to get everything I will need for the day out of my classroom before the students start arriving at 7:45.  

- We distribute our books from several locations to ease traffic congestion, so I move boxes on a hand truck to different rooms.  At least one of those rooms also has AP exams going on in the morning, so I try to get as much done in there as I can before they get started and then work as quietly as I can afterward.  

- My school has two campuses, so when I have finished setting up in one place, I drive boxes of elementary students' books to our other campus, unload them, and deliver them to classrooms for the teachers to distribute as it works into their day.  

- I then go back up to my campus to prepare for our distribution event, a pep rally celebrating the Fine Arts programs of our school.  

- The final part of the rally is the reveal of the dedication of yearbook.

- The remainder of the day is yearbook signing time.

That's what was planned, but this day certainly didn't turn out the way I had planned.  The first few items went as planned, but when I got to the elementary campus, I was getting far more tired and weak than usual.  One of our maintenance crew helped me load the books into the lobby.  When I went to park the car, I felt a little sick.  I went to the bathroom and threw up.  You know how weak and shaky you are after that, so there was no way I was going to be able to deliver boxes to classrooms.  I went to the front desk and suggested a change of plan.  Our receptionists said, "You look terrible," gave me a bottle of water, and let me sit in the corner for a few minutes.

For some reason, all I wanted to was to get back up to my own campus.  I can't really explain that except that is the same feeling you get when you just want to be home.  Had it been any other day, I would have gone home at that point.  That's my only go-home rule:  You vomit; you leave.  But I really didn't want that to happen on this day.  There's a Walgreens next door to my campus, so I decided some caffeine might be helpful.  I bought a drink, and as soon as I got back in my car, it started again.  People of Walgreens, I apologize if I scared any potential customers away while leaning out of my car, vomiting in your parking lot.  I really couldn't help it.

Since I wasn't delivering boxes to classrooms, I had an extra 90 minutes or so to attempt recovery.  I wanted someone to know what was happening, so I went to our art teacher and told her I would be in my car and to come and check on me if she didn't see me by noon.  Then, I had an experience I've never had before - napping at work.  It took a while to figure out how to recline the driver's seat (why is that even a thing?) and get into a reasonably comfortable position.  I slept for about 45 minutes, woke up feeling like a human being again, looked in the mirror to see that I was a human color again (I had been the green of a Mt. Dew bottle before), and continued with the events of the day.  

I believe you should reflect and learn something when things don't go as planned, so here's what I learned.

1.  I may not be as necessary to the process as I previously thought.  All the yearbooks were distributed, despite my illness.

2.  Sometimes, you have ask for help.  I would have rather had no one know what was happening, but it simply wasn't possible.  People rallied and took over what I couldn't do.

3.  Even when you don't have the day you planned, things turn out okay.  Some even told me the next day that they thought it went better than ever.