The most obvious good thing was that the lady who ran it, despite having a high battiness-quotient on first appearance (house absolutely packed with garage sale finds, feral cats, and the fact that she spends all her free time making enormous papier mache animals), was actually quite organized (and her work is lovely), and she had several good structural pointers for the specific project that I am hoping to embark on (elephant, howdah, don't ask) that I don't think I necessarily could have found on the Internet, and I think she saved me a lot of time and frustration. And she had good handouts, AND party favours! my very own pint of resin glue. Worth every moment, and now I have my own little papier-mache mini-cupboard to show for it.
The cherries on the top of the evening, however, were the seriously crazy middle-aged lady fellow students. Crazy #1: as I was driving up, I saw a woman wandering around on the street looking distressed (I knew she was a fellow student, because she had a pile of cardboard boxes with her), and so I said, "Oh, are you looking for the furniture workshop thing? Follow me, I know where it is; you can even hop in the car if you like." She went into a tirade about how this was ridiculous, she had been looking for this place for over fifteen minutes, she couldn't possibly get in my car because it was unsafe, it was completely inconsiderate not to have street numbers properly marked on the houses (note that on the 'how to find it' instructions/map, it said "look for the house with the giant yellow egg in front of it," and I had this conversation with crazy middle-aged fellow-student lady #1 standing approximately fifty feet from a house with a gigantic yellow egg and a big sign saying "Art Workshops!" in front. Excellent. On arrival, she said to the teacher, "I need to speak to you in private please," and then from the next room we all heard her sobbing (I am not making this up) about how traumatic it had been for her to be driving around for fifteen minutes unable to find the place, this was completely unacceptable, she was going to have to go home immediately to recover, it had ruined her entire week... etc. (She didn't stay).
Crazy lady #2 was the misinformation queen. I think I can honestly say that I was completely delighted with every single thing that came out of her mouth. She started off telling us all about her cats ("Cats can't digest anything except protein. Anything other than protein kills them dead instantly.") and we ended up in a long discussion about her heroine, Frida 'KahlOO' (pronounced to rhyme with Baloo, the Bear from the Jungle Book, and incidentally played by 'Thelma' Hayek in the movie). For instance, did you know that no man would have survived Frida Kahloo's terrible accident, because men have much less flexible internal organs than women, as it turns out; this is also why women can bear children and men can't. (Here was I thinking it had something to do with uteruses (uteri?) and ovaries). My favourite bit was that Frida apparently told the apocryphal story of her body being blasted suddenly into an upright sitting position by the heat from the incinerator at her cremation [that part really is true, apparently; I Googled it when I got home] in her own autobiography, which seems like kind of a neat trick.
Crazy lady #3 was a woman who was just regular baseline crazy. She was the kind of person who was not content to let anyone, least of all the teacher, be the expert in anything. Any topic that came up, she had a degree in/had done a class or workshop in/had been asked to do that by a such-and-such important person. There was paramedic in our Pediatric Advanced Life Support class today who was the same way - the teacher couldn't mention a possible clinical scenario without this guy coming out with some macho story in which he'd saved the day by inventing some makeshift solution because the regular PALS guidelines didn't cover it... oh my GOD people like that are exhausting. But I was in superzen mode today, and I didn't mind at all, I just did my papier mache cupboard/megacode and was happy. I am pleased that I have now done PALS enough times that I can actually run a megacode on a plastic child with confidence (admittedly, I am sure I would totally fall to pieces if I were ever to have to run a pediatric code for real, but it's nice to see some improvement in skills. When I did ACLS and PALS in medical school, I spent the whole time hiding at the back thinking, oh god please don't pick me don't pick me don't pick me. Now I think, oh god, please don't pick the obnoxious paramedic guy, because then we'll be here for another half an hour while he pontificates.)
I am addicted to the American version of 'The Office' right now. I have watched the entire first three seasons, and I am in love with John Krasinski. It has completely replaced the Harry Potter books and "So You Think You Can Dance" in my affections.
