A Cry for Help!

I want to write a little program where I can put in a grid of twenty each of six different meals (T has us eating 5-6 small meals a day made of a protein and whole-grain, fruit, or vegetable carbohydrate source), where I can choose with a little radio button for each day of the week and have the results printed up in a nice neat little chart. If I felt like getting really fancy, it could also make me a grocery list. I think it would work a lot like some web apps you see for surveys and stuff. Can FrontPage do that? How about Publisher? Does anybody know?

Another Preemptive Sick Day!

The one good precedent set by the Bush administration over the last 7+ years has definitely been the doctrine of preemption. Yesterday I was feeling crummy, but not quite sick, so I put in for a sub day, figuring I could cancel it if I wound up feeling better. When I got up today, I was feeling OK, but the kind of OK you know will start to wear off after about two hours in the vertical. So I'm taking the day off to lay around the house so I don't wind up getting really sick. Take that, germs!

And guess what?

After a nap this morning and a motorcycle ride out to Boulder City, I am feeling much better. Thanks, President Bush!

Isn't it about time for some pictures?

For the long weekend, we celebrated N's birthday by going down to Phoenix for a Renaissance festival they have there. He'd never been to one; I can't remember what came up in October, but we didn't go to the one here, plus it's always between 90 and 100 degrees here, and the idea of parading around in fancy clothes in wintertime was pretty nice.

As you can see, we lucked into a nice, overcast day. It started out pretty cold, and I was really, really wishing we'd brought the giant gray robe I'd made a few years ago. These pictures are from the tournament. We went to 2 different shows because there was a pirate, and really great special effects. Think the "Black Knight" sequence from Holy Grail.

There was also a falconer with some raptors. This horned owl looks just like T's cat, Fea.

This is a lees falcon, a relative of a peregrine falcon, the fastest known animal, who can dive at speeds in excess of 270 mph.

Outside Prescott, there was a wild animal rescue where we saw javelinas.....

and this tiger with a sinus infection,

plus coatis, really fat raccoons, coyotes, the butt end of a sleeping porcupine, a black bear, another horned owl, a raven that walked over to you if you said its name, big hairy spiders (although not the Goliath birdeater advertised in the brochure), and lemurs.

On the way home, we drove through Jerome and Sedona, but because it was a holiday weekend, we skipped the "vortex tours" and tried unsuccessfully to have a nice steak dinner in Laughlin instead.

Book Tag!

While I guess I could excuse myself, I won't because I need something to blog about today. By virtue of reading this blog, I've been tagged.

Here's how you do it:
1. Locate the nearest book that has a 123+ pages in it.
2. Go to page 123.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post that sentence and the 3 that follow.
5. Tag 5 people.

Here are mine:

Spider Jerusalem: "Surely my very presence fucks with their world anyway."
Technician Lady: "Nah. We've got a toggle on their memories. They'll accept you when they see you and forget about you and the city once you're gone."

(Book 2 of Transmetropolitan happens to be sitting at my elbow underneath a gray cat. )

Let's see.....I'll tag you, you, you, you, and you.

One of those days...

First, let me say that I am just plain exhausted. I have been working very hard to stave off the nasty germs all the kids insist on bringing to school, and so far I have not gotten really sick, but not succumbing to the stuff going around takes about as much out of me sometimes as just being sick and getting it over with.

I was already feeling worn-thin before my day even started today.
It hit me at lunch today that I am tired of being a teacher and should find another job, but before you panic (especially you, Mom, and you, husband), the feeling will probably pass when I get some more sleep. We're starting to plan a master schedule for next year, and the state has said "you need to do something about freshmen" which we already knew; we just got statistics on where our current 9th graders came from: most from a feeder campus, and the next largest group is actually flunkies from last year who didn't have enough credits to get promoted. So the state says "do freshman academies," meaning, have facilities and instructors that just exist to teach freshmen, use teaming strategies to keep kids from falling through the cracks, have smaller classes, etc, etc, but nobody's ponied up with the money or even a working model for schools to go by. It sounds like they need to move 9th grade back to junior high and 6th grade back to elementary school, if you ask me. Trying to implement middle-school best practices for only 1/4 of the students in a high school seems like a too-complicated way to do something that really shouldn't be all that difficult. As a result, of course there's been all kinds of grousing around the lunch table lately, and people are in bad moods, but it just struck me today that I am surrounded by a bunch of people who don't really give a shit about kids, in the middle of a giant system that isn't exactly geared toward helping kids all that much in the first place. Not in a practical sense, at least.

So then I make it back to my room, and there's this really snarky email from a parent saying her kid told her he'd used a homework pass on this one assignment, but the grade report still showed it was a zero, and like demanding an explanation from me. Ok, I understand that first reactionary flare-up of "whose fault is this somebody please explain," but there are like ways of politely stating that idea that don't sound like I am your personal education slave-robot. THEN on the staff bulletin board area of the mail system there's been all this dumb high-school-style drama going on about politics and people's personal soapboxes, and apparently somebody said something negative about cheerleaders' behavior, and somebody went and printed it up for parents, or students, or something, and then there were hordes of bitchy people involved, and it made me think "for 36K a year, I totally don't need all this." Not when I could go to night school and learn to run an ultrasound machine or something, or learn to fix air conditioners or even be a mail-delivery-person.

I'm sure I just have absolutely no perspective whatsoever today, since I've been sleeping badly (waking up, startled, every hour or so) and not feeling so great. It's just been one of those days I want to throw up my hands and yell "whatever. I'm done," you know?

If you haven't tried this yet...

More Free SelectSmart.com Widgets

Mine?
1. Theoretical Ideal Candidate
2. Kucinich
3. Obama
7. Clinton
15. Ron Paul
18. McCain
25. Mike Huckabee
26. Newt Gingrich
31. Steven Colbert

Hmmm.....

So my statcounter says I had 74 visitors last Tuesday, with a larger-than-usual smattering of folks trickling in just before and after. Unfortunately, I can't tell where they are coming in from because there's not anyone linking in from somewhere else.

It's more like someone is emailing a link to all their friends.

All their 14- to 18-year-old friends who go to their high school, says the paranoid part of my brain.

I sort of figured having, you know, my actual name in my url was one day going to make things awkward. So anyway, I hope everyone found the place okay, and never goes back to some of my earlier posts where I link to myself because I'm not going back and manually changing a bunch of dumb hyperlinks. Sorry.

Anyway, T and I are going to pick up the new adoptee-dog tonight. I will put up some pics and possible names very soon!