Today our school was under a Code Purple alert from 7:30-12:00. Code Purple? Good grief. "What's a code purple?" I asked a couple of teachers along the sidewalk. "Code Purple? We don't know," they answered. We have Code Yellow, Code Green, Code Pink, Code Red. Code Blue and of course, Code Purple.
"Well, we'd better find out because we're under it right now," I answered. After that I scrambled through my wire basket looking for anything with colors on it. Nada. Then I shuffled through file folders from 2007. Code Purple. Code Purple. Does it mean a bomb? A person of suspect? A hurricane? What could it mean?
Finally, I glanced behind my computer and there tacked on the wall was the chart. Code Purple = severe weather. No problem. Good to know.
Hold on there. I forgot what that means for me, personally. It means no children are to be on the sidewalk until noon (except for lunch, and then they really have to scurry to the cafeteria and back.)
Literally, what Code Purple meant to me was that I had to tromp all over the campus to my different classes. Forget the plans to have children type on Alphasmart computers. Oh, no. I had to quickly formulate a lesson in my head, grab up transparencies and vis-a-vis pens and pretend this was the lesson I had written in my lesson plans. "Boy, the children are going to be disappointed," I muttered.
Code Purple flat wore me out! I should have worn my tennis shoes because by the time 3:00 rolled around, my feet were killing me and my tongue was lolling out of my mouth from all the huffin' and puffin' around the school grounds. Code Purple! Ha!
I guess for thirty minutes we had severe rain. No lightning. No thunder. Just thirty minutes of hard rain; but the rest of the morning, the sky was just awash with quickly moving dark clouds. By the way, New Orleans got snow today. So did Jackson, Mississippi. I wonder if they have a Code White in New Orleans? I'd like a Code White in Fort White.
Now I'll show you a couple of photos I took last night with my digital camera.
Could this be Code Green for alien space ships? Nah.
Whatever it is, it sure looks spooky hovering in the sky.
By golly, it's the moon.