I Finally Got Into Mr. Mynd's Pants

I Finally Got Into Mr. Mynd's Pants
And Mrs. Mynd Helped Me Do It!

First, let me say that this is not going where you think it's going.  Get your minds out of the gutter, this blog is strictly rated G (okay, PG13 tops).  Second, let me say that the title is literally accurate, though figuratively misleading.  Here's the long story short (or as short as my verbose writing style will allow) on how this unusual turn of events came about for me.

As previously mentioned, Lainey is a teacher of the elementary variety.  I work with the crowd between four and five feet tall.  Today was our class field trip to an outdoor education center.  A place for kids to become environmentally conscious and learn to be ecologically responsible citizens.  Under the guise of a hands-on science experience, we took the kids to a wooded summer camp-type facility where they would get to hike in the woods and go canoeing.  Alright, there are hands-on science experiments, but the part of the trip I really like is the canoeing.  I'm all about the canoeing.  If given a choice, I would spend the whole trip down at the docks being the canoeing instructor, which is exactly what I had planned to do today.

Alas, I am chained to the classroom and the parents get to run ahead to the facility on the day of the trip for training.  A parent instructor complained about not knowing all the scientific words in his lesson and the weak-willed staff at the outdoor education center switched him to canoeing and me over to looking at river water samples trying to find plankton.  Lame!  I am a social studies teacher.  I have no interest in explaining the difference between phtyoplankton and zooplankton (phtyoplankton is a plant and zooplankton is an animal.  Hey, if I have to know it, so do you.)  When I arrived with the kids on the bus, I was informed that I was no longer canoeing.  However, I was meant to end up in a canoe by the end of the day.

It was exceptionally windy in my neck of the woods today.  This made canoeing challenging for my four to five foot tall crew members as their weak oaring efforts met with a much stronger wind, resulting in them getting blown around and ending up in the marsh grasses by the shoreline.  Surprise, surprise!  The fearless, vocabulary challenged canoeing instructors who had so quickly snatched up my role for the day couldn't get the kids out of the grasses.  So now I had my chance to canoe, as I was asked to assist them in extracting the kids from the marshy area.

I got into a canoe and was pulling away from the dock when another parent chaperone decided that he would come with me to help.  Apparently, he was concerned that I wouldn't have the strength to get the job done.  Chauvanistic idiot with a Superman complex!  I've been canoeing with children in that creek for years.  I've towed in stranded canoes alone before.  I've also never tipped over before.  Can you sense where our story is about to go?  This guy didn't know his oar from his @$& and he was going to show me how to do it.  Needless to say, within twenty feet of leaving the dock we had a problem.  My canoeing partner wasn't rowing in such a way as to keep us straight due to the wind.  We were getting blown towards the shoreline, a hard wooden bulkhead this time, not marsh grasses.  Superdad came up with the brilliant idea to use his oar to push us away from the bulkhead, only we weren't close enough to do it.  He leaned out of the canoe to reach for the dock and tipped the canoe over!

Way to go, Superdad!

I got dumped into forty-something degree water on a forty-something degree day.  In addition to being shocked by the cold and so mad that I was seeing red, I was embarrassed as hell to be the canoeing instructor who tipped her canoe and went into the drink.  To understand why I was both mad and embarassed, you need to know that a few years ago I took two fathers, both Army Rangers, to this same facility and made them canoeing instructors. ( I had a group of kids whose behavior did not allow me to spend my day canoeing.)  The Army Rangers tipped their canoe and I've since joked with one of the fathers that I should have gotten the Navy to teach canoeing.  That father had a younger child on today's field trip.  I'm sure I will be hearing from him soon and the teasing I will be getting from him and my fellow teachers is going to be merciless.

I'm wet, I'm cold, and I'm pissed off!  Don't ask.

I got out of the water and onto dry land, although the longer I stood there with a river of creekwater running off my clothes, the less dry the land was.   To make matters worse, I had my cell phone and my camera in my pockets.  Since I wasn't supposed to be on the water I'd been carrying them to record our special day and forgotten to take them out before racing to the rescue.  If anybody needs to get in touch with me, YOU CAN'T.  At least, not til my phone comes out of the bag of rice.

I tromped with Superdad to the facilities health room where we discovered that they only had spare clothes for the kids, not the grown-ups.  Superdad called his wife, who rushed over with a change of clothes.  I, being single, had no spouse to send to my house for a new outfit.  Utterly freezing and with no possibility of someone bringing me a new set of my own clothes to change into, I made an SOS call to Mrs. Mynd.  I asked her to run to her house and bring me clothes to wear.  Since she is a petite toothpick and I have much taller and curvier proportions, the only clothes in her house that would fit me were... you guessed it, Mr. Mynd's.  This is how I ended up in Mr. Mynd's pants (and his socks and his shoes and his Steelers jersey).

Thank you so much, Mrs. Mynd, for coming to my rescue.  I'd have been drip drying for six hours without your speedy assist.  Thank you, Mr. Mynd, for the temporary loan of your clothes.  I hope you get a lot of mileage out of telling people that I got into your pants and that you enjoyed the photo your wife took of me as a drowned rat in a Steelers jersey.

I am never going to hear the end of this.  This story will be retold in perpetuity for as long as our school goes to the outdoor education center.  Maybe years from now I'll be able to laugh about this?

Not a great start to girls' weekend.