In Children's Stories

I just finished a chapter of The Naked and the Dead.  Hearn, the Harvard Leiutenant, has been taken into a philosophical discussion of war with General Cummings; something about it being the nature of women to cheat, and it hurt me to read it.  I still have to type a page into the one-page file.  I ate some grapes and a quesadilla for dinner.  At lunch, I typed up the grant request to get a thousand dollars for books from the Riordan Fund. 
At school, we read a story about a grandfather and his grandaughter who participate in a bike race to follow a balloon until it lands.  Whoever reaches the balloon first gets a free balloon ride.  They studied the town and learned all the shortcuts.  They would have been the first to reach the balloon when it came down in a pasture but had to abort because of the presence of a bull.  The balloon's pilot's parrot flew off from there, and Gina and her grandpa lost the race in order to bring the parrot back to the pilot.  To show his gratitude, the pilot gave them a free ride.  You see?  Good deeds are rewarded.  In children's stories.  We saw "Sleeping Beauty".  Good triumphed over evil.  We did a lesson on estimation.  The kids are asked to estimate how many pockets we have on our clothes all together.  Then we put a unifix cube in each pocket and take them out and connect them in groups of ten and add them up to check our estimates.  Then we estimated how many children would stretch fingertip to fingertip across the class.  Then we estimated how many steps from our seats to the front door.  Then we checked them as we lined up for lunch.  Then we estimated how many steps from the door to the lunch area.  I roared at Damnesia to get in her seat when she had ticked me off for the hundredth time by chasing Marlin around the room when she should have been in her seat recording her estimation.  Whatever.  Sarong, one of the Special Ed Teachers next door, asked me if I was all right when I went over to ask what the school's address was for the grant.  I pretended I didn't know what she meant.  She said, "Well, we were sitting here about forty-five minutes ago when we heard..." She trailed off.  I said, "Oh, you mean my little attention-getter?" and smiled.  She did not smile back.