Traumatized by worms

 I had worms in my classroom! Big, long, fat, icky ones! 

We had a couple days in a row of heavy rain (an atmospheric river, as the weather people say), and it was on one of those mornings that I came into my classroom at 7am and saw what I thought, at first, was a snake but turned out to be a very large worm. It had it's head up off the ground and was wiggling around. Eew! I shrieked and ran out of the room. Liz, a coworker down the hall heard my scream and came and took care of the worm. She scooped it up with a piece of paper and took it outside. It totally freaked me out. Then just as first period was starting, I saw another one, a shorter one but still just as icky! My assistant principal was in the room at the time (I had been telling her about my worm situation), and she took care of that one and tossed it outside to join the other. And then, during 3rd period, while students were quietly doing their state testing, I saw another one! Actually, I stepped on it, and I shrieked again, which scared and totally interrupted the students. Thankfully, there were only about 8 minutes left in class. This worm was also huge and gross, even grosser because I had squished part of it. Blood, guts, bleh! With a bit of drama and squeaking, I scooped it onto a piece of paper and tossed it outside, too, and then had to clean up the nasty guts on my floor. By that point, I was completely grossed out and very worried I was going to be finding worms all day long. The door that goes to the outside has a small space at the bottom where, apparently, they were able to come in. I've worried about that crack and the fact that I can see daylight through it, but it was spiders and mice I was worried about before. Worms were new. I took some cleaning cloths and covered up the crack at the bottom of my door, and I didn't have any more worm visitors. Nature belongs in nature, NOT in inside spaces, and definitely not in my classroom or home. I emailed the head custodian, and he put in a work ticket to see if we could get this issue resolved, so I don't have any more creatures or critters in my room. 

Mr. Steward, my coworker across the hall with a quirky sense of humor, emailed me this image later that day. Too funny. And so gross! He's also the one who made me the nametag for our training that next week. 

My Bruin Bites lunch that Friday, made by the culinary students, was chicken yakisoba. I had a hard time eating it, not because it tasted bad--it was good--but because it resembled, a little too closely, the slimy creatures in my room earlier that week.