News Briefs

...or boxers, if you prefer.

I got rejection #2 today from a charter school in Nampa (next to Boise).  I figured since I'd applied six weeks ago and hadn't heard anything that I didn't have the job.  

I applied for a job as a research assistant in Eugene, Oregon, that sounds interesting.  I am probably only just qualified, but if they read my cover letter and letters of recommendation, I should at least merit a phone call.  I hope.

Boise finally posted their open positions--one in middle school English--that I was able to apply for with just a few clicks.

Helena doesn't have much going on in the way of high school jobs right now, but I'm hoping they just haven't posted yet.  They just barely got elementary jobs up last Thursday.

Anyway, jobs for next year are about all I am thinking about just now, even though I should be making a power point for American Modernism.

So keep sending your positive vibes our way.  I get the feeling this is going to be another seat-of-the-pants move.

Waiting for that big envelope...

I got a tiny little envelope from the University of Alabama today, and I almost had several heart attacks before I saw that it wasn't a rejection letter, just a "WTF?!" from the financial aid office who received my FAFSA information and wondered why they were getting that stuff for a person who didn't even go there.

In other news, I have a job interview with the school distict in Idaho Falls next month!  Okay, it's actually a scheduled time to appear at a hiring fair and be interviewed, but it is still cool.  I am also applying for a job at a brand new charter school in Nampa, right next to Boise.  The job description sounds a little intimidating--the requirements for dress and comportment seem pretty stringent--but the classical model on which they base their curricula sounds interesting.

Besides that, things are boring; that's why I took two weeks off from blogging.  It looks like things are going to stay boring, at least until I get some big envelopes in the mail, so stop waiting at your computer pressing refresh every other minute to see if I've updated.  Those are hours you can never get back.

I am tired.

School has been in session nearly four weeks now, and I am pretty exhausted.  I am usually there from 6 to 4, then I come home, usually with more school work in tow, and make dinner (sometimes), clean up (on some days), do laundry, or just sit on the couch and ignore everything until I go to bed sometime between 8:30 and 10.  (I'm usually quite proud of myself if I make it into double digits in the evening.)

So for everyone bugging me about not posting, fuck off.  

And for everyone else (especially parents and in-laws), kindly pardon my absence from cyberspace.  

Posting just feels like too much work after everything else.

P.S. Deidre: Happy Birthday.  Your phone must be broken, too.

*blink blink*

By far the most noticeable and sort of strange side effect of taking phentermine to get both my bootylicious curves and cholesterol under control is an incredible ability to focus my attention on tasks.

No kidding.  When I very first started taking it, I was all aflutter with nervous energy for the first few hours until I levelled out, but lately I get this crazy focus along with it.  I can get on a cardio machine at the gym and hammer out 40 minutes without really thinking about it.  I'll start on a project and forget to eat, go to the bathroom, feed the dogs, or whatever, and before I know it, HOURS have gone by.  Tyson's been gone this week, and I've been alternating between playing video games and reading blogs and stuff and working on materials for my class next year in about four-hour stretches at a time.

Today a contractor with a giant tile cutter pulled up in front of the neighbor's at 6 a.m.  The dogs started barking so I got dressed, fed them, let the dogs out of the back house, ate some quick breakfast, took my meds, and sat down at the computer at about 8.  I remember resurfacing at noon and thinking, "man, I'm hungry," preheating the oven for leftover pizza, and forgetting all about it for another hour.  I did think to set a timer once I put the pizza in, or I may well have caught the whole house on fire.  

Based on information from my browser history and jump drive, I have reconstructed what my day looked like, I think:

1. Read blogs.

2. Read comics.

3. Did crossword on yahoo.

4. Made a blog post.

5. Dicked around on Facebook. (This is about where my medicine would have kicked in.  I remember feeling really thirsty about then, a sure sign of being hopped up on stimulants.)

6. Started working on school stuff.  Typed up job descriptions for 6 management positions, training checklists for 4 of them, and evaluation sheets for all.  Lots of it was straight off the hard copies I have in a folder, but I had to invent some things, too.

7. Made a long list of logs, calendars, and other organizational templates I still have to make.  Decided not to get into an involved search for whether I could import XML files from my gradebook program into Word, or if I needed an Excel table instead.  Made sketches of what some of the tables should look like, instead.  Somewhere in here is where I ate leftover pizza (sort of--I kept forgetting I was supposed to be eating and kept working instead until it was cold).

8.  Started searching for school and office supply wholesalers.  Specifically, compared prices on cheapest 2" binders available.  This is where my right hand started to ache and I had to switch to my left.

9.  Shook head to clear the cobwebs.  Realized my butt and right foot were asleep and I really had to pee.

10. Checked email.

11. Remembered I was supposed to check the status of my federal student loan consolidation application.  (Hooray for 4.2% interest!!)  Waded through online bureaucracy to find out my loan was in "preprocessing," meaning nobody's probably even looked at it yet.

12. Read increasingly desperate emails from local Kung Fu studio I expressed interest in.  Followed links to some interesting videos on the different styles they teach.

13. Facebook again.  After my students last year accessed my blog from my profile, I removed it, and now that I am back on I am driven by an intense need to know what's been going on in the lives of lots of people I don't really like in person all that much.

14. Blogs again.  Nothing new since this morning.  I need a bigger blogroll.

15. Realized I was very, very hungry and the dishes I started this morning are still sitting in cold, murky water in the sink.  Ate ice cream and tried not to think about it.

And now it's, well, it's now.  I purposely worked too hard at the gym yesterday (I'm sure there was a reason, but now I've forgotten it), and my mouse arm and shoulder are aching.  I stayed up too late and woke up too early, but my brain is still just humming away.  If I wasn't so sore, I'd be doing a few more things, like: looking online for a memory foam mattress topper, doing research on the AWESOME Christmas present I'm thinking of getting Tyson, looking up ab exercises, playing with Pandora radio, trying to learn how to use Excel, trying to figure out why dividing a portion of text in a long Word document into columns makes a new section start, therefore restarting page numbering and also how to fix it, looking for or designing a snazzy logo for my program's course expectations, making a list of school supplies we can sell to get the other stuff we want since our budget's all slashed to hell, looking for advice on how to write a small grant to get some DVDs from Boys Town Press, practicing importing XML files into other documents, reconciling my checking account in Quicken, plugging the AmLit reading list I made yesterday into a week-by-week planning chart for each quarter of next year, going back over the stuff I did today and making sure a few of the details are consistent with my 25-page expectations packet, figuring out how the code for my "Recent Comments" plug-in got broken and how to fix it, and pricing plane tickets to Rochester in November.

Whew.  I am glad I have to go to the airport soon to pick up friends or I might never leave this chair.

UPDATE: This is possibly the stupidest post ever.  Still, I seem to have expended an awful lot of energy getting it all down.  Case in point?

in which I have a new hobby!

This is even more fun than that "No Blood For Oil" graffiti debate in that bathroom stall in the English building!*  It's "Missed Connections"** on Craigslist!

You: Astonishing young lady in "LOVE" t-shirt and "Death or Glory" sneakers. Brown eyes, and a penchant for bright minty-green colors. 

Me: Tall blond guy in the row behind you, across the aisle 

I noticed you at the Vegas airport, and thought you noticed me. I nearly sat by you on the plane but then got sidetracked across the aisle and a row back. I am not looking for anything interaction-wise, but I wanted you to know that you are probably the most attractive woman I have ever seen. Just perfect, really. 

I noticed that you are a nervous flier. I used to be one, too, but reading the novel "Airframe" by Michael Crichton really helped me with that. You might try it. 

Thanks for making the flight more pleasant.

*I used to check in every Thursday afternoon between American Lit and my creative writing workshop to see what someone had written.  It must have been 2003, just before we got into the war and Tyson and I were like the only people on Earth who thought that was a bad idea, and I have to say reading that bizarre, vitriolic conversation scrawled on the bathroom stall was the most entertaining part of my week.

**Yes, I know I should have started following these after reading Ghost World.  But it takes me awhile sometimes to get on the bandwagon.  (It's quite a big decision.)

In other news....

We are about to have our first rainstorm of the year!  It is cloudy and windy and ominous-looking outside and I violently miss West Texas thunderstorms, but if this is as close as I get, I'll still take it.  After new filters, a new pump, and a new motor (not to mention a new electrical hookup to replace the exposed, ungrounded death-trap of a socket on the roof) our swamp cooler is finally working, and it is deliciously cool and damp inside, with pulled pork cooking for dinner and a cat asleep on my lap.  It's little things that get me through Mondays.

"I lost my URL; can I have yours?"

I was playing around with my template today, trying to get everything to appear in a nice three-column format, but something was wrong and I didn't have the patience to learn html today when I was just tooling around to avoid doing real work. Anyways, in the course of backing up and reinstalling my original template, I lost some code somewhere and part of that was my links list, which I hadn't really updated lately anyway so it was no real loss.

So if you want a shout out vis-a-vis my blogroll, let me know and I will hook you up.

Edit: Actually, when I took Windows off my laptop and installed stupid Linux, I forgot to back up my bookmarks, so if you have anything in your "daily read" that you'd recommend, send that along as well.

My brain is full.

If you had any news for me today, sorry. I will not be accepting any new information; my brain is full.

I have just had 20 hours of training in adapting a business model for a classroom environment, and I haven't slept the last two nights trying to process all of it. If I was a hard drive, I'd be making that whirring sound that means something important is about to happen.

This whole time, I wasn't sure I was really "getting" it, but today when we started working on implementation steps with our principal, I had several people (including the trainer who came in from Salt Lake and her counterpart here at our school) tell me there was no way I wasn't going to make this happen.

Basically, we're looking at combining three classes--three teachers, three sets of state standards, and 90+ students--and using a business model to let students have choice and individual accountability to accomplish these standards. Our goal is to get out of the lecture-worksheet-test pattern of teaching and give students access to what they need when they need it. It really looks like a lot of work up front, and we put together a binder that's about seven inches thick and must weigh 20 pounds, but I think we have most of what we need.

I don't know how else to describe it without going into tons of details--we had three days to take it all in. But suffice to say I'll be doing as little thinking as possible for the next few hours. I'd take the weekend off, but there's a meeting tomorrow morning about possible scholarships for masters' degrees with the online university Tyson's going to, and then I have to get up to school to make up for the three days I haven't been in my room.

But for the next few hours, I'll be making homemade corned beef and vegetables and Irish soda bread instead of thinking about stuff.

My Trite (TM) Weekend

Today I learned how a drain snake works: remove the pipe elbow and jam in the thingie, then turn the other thingie when it gets stuck, then swear and generally telegraph your frustration until a man comes to bail you out. It may be an imperfect system, but now I can do dishes, and we've both fulfilled our gender-normative roles for the day.

I also butterflied and high-roasted a chicken. The inside of a chicken is gross, my oven only heats up to 475 degrees, and my so-called kitchen shears didn't stand up so well to scissoring up a chicken, but it was still very tasty. It turned a very lovely gold color and because I brined it, it was very juicy. I also made sauteed zucchini with nutmeg.

I "paid bills" yesterday by checking my bank balance online then finding a heavy-duty Kitchenaid mixer on sale on Amazon and ordered it. (I am making pizza this week, and watching Alton Brown use his fancy-schmancy dough hook Friday night made me jealous and also ambitious).

I roughed in lesson plans for American Lit for the rest of the year.

I finally figured out the password to set up my email on Tyson's laptop. I am confused and perplexed by the new operating system, and I don't know that I won't just have to write it off for good.

I looked up Masters' degree programs and different state licensure standards. I want to learn about computers, specifically in the area of educational databases, so I'm checking out what it would take to get an MIS (Masters' of Information Systems), a library science degree, or a curriculum and instruction degree that would also complement National Board certification requirements. Right now, they are pretty prohibitively expensive--too much so for immediate consideration.

Tyson and I had a stellar dinner last night at Todd's. I really, really love food, but hate mediocre food. We had a great watermelon salad with cayenne, feta, and toasted pumpkin seeds, and split a great steak.

There is a chicken in my neighbor's juniper tree that showed up in the neighborhood on about Wednesday morning. Nobody knows whose it is or where it came from. I also found out that she is the grandmother of one of my students. Now I'm paranoid when I go out in my pjs to put trash at the curb or get laundry from the dryer.

Coffee + TrimSpa + Drama =

Elevated heart rate.

Dizziness.

Dehydration.

Not being hungry, which leads to not eating, which leads to headache and vague feelings of nausea.

Feelings of mild to moderate panic.

Inability to concentrate.

Talking very fast.

Inability to take a restful nap when given the opportunity.

Today I had a training for a new parent-notification system our school is piloting. When my administrator came in the week before the break to tell me about it, he said, "we're taking care of your sub." Of course, in retrospect I see that he meant "the district will be paying for your sub; it won't be coming out of your allotment of sick/personal days," but I thought he meant he would also be notifying Denise, the woman in charge of subs at our school, to enter my absence in the automated system.

We were carpooling to the training today, and it didn't begin until 8, so I was in my room working until the first bell rang at 7. When no one had shown up at my classroom yet, I went to see Denise to see what was the matter. She was probably not the happiest woman in the world when I told her what the matter was; she was already in the process of tracking down 3 first-hour subs for other people. I'm actually pretty resigned to the kind of mistakes that just mess things up for me, but I really, really hate making the kind of mistakes that put other people out or call attention to the fact that I did something dumb. I apologized profusely (probably too much so), and went back to my room to get the kiddos started on their posters. Finally, about 10 minutes before I had to leave, a teacher from down the hall came in to take over for me.

The training was interesting, if impractical for a non-administrator like me. The system the district is buying is amazing. Without gushing about it too much, if I was the principal of the school and I needed to send a series of recorded messages to students' parents, I would be doing a little dance right now because it is so easy. I am, however, just the English teacher of 160 students and will have no access or rights to the autodialler and therefore won't be able to use it, so the training was an interesting, interactive, hands-on waste of time (and drama). The day wasn't a total loss: I did make the internet call me on the telephone, so that was actually pretty cool.

When the training ended, I raced back across town to school so I could get there before my after-lunch class only to find out that after 3 class periods of other teachers covering my class on their preps, a sub had finally arrived just in time for my prep, just before lunch, so I might as well let him do something and get paid for it. That part actually turned out for the best, even though I just wound up feeling guilty, rather than relieved or pleasantly surprised, at my afternoon off, but tomorrow is the last day of the quarter and I have about 20 more research projects to grade. That was about when I realized I hadn't eaten anything but toast and stimulants for breakfast and needed to eat if I wasn't going to feel sick all afternoon.

Oh, and because I learned my lesson today, I've already put in for the three days I'll be out for even more training fun in two weeks. Nobody can say I don't have a learning curve!

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?

Gak!

Okay, so I am poking my head in here really, really quickly. You should be reading this post in a high-pitched, manic voice because I have like 5 minutes of free time today.

Why, you ask? Well, let me tell you:

thejuniorshavecrucibleoutlinesduetomorrowandthefreshmenturnedtheiressaysintoday andimstillbehindongradingfromlastweekandneedtocatchupdidimentionthatmyjuniorshave morethan40assignmentssofarthisquarter? insteadofthesmarter(andmoreboring)choiceofworkingallweekendweallwenttocaliforniainsteadwhereitwascoldandtheboysgot somefishbutthatmeanttodaytherewasallkindsofstufftodo
thenigotalovelynotefromastudent-parentsayingtheyhad "moralissues"withtheessaypromptandthereforeshehad"excused"herselffromtheassignment sotherewasthatdramaandididntreallyknowwhattodoaboutitbesidesstew

whew

iwassupposedtostarttutoringforproficiencyexamstodaybuttherewasnoannouncementsandno flyersandnoplansoranything(thatonesmyfault)soanywaybut thatmeansihavetokicksomebuttbeforewednesday
soiamheretakingaquickbreakbecauseimfeelingguiltyaboutalsonotbloggingbutthereislaundry readytocomeoutofthedryerandahandouttomakeforact3ofthecrucibleandineedtomakeagrading sheetfortheoutlinesthataredueandifidontgetsomeofitdoneithinkmybrainwillexplode.

So there's that. Hope your weeks are starting out manageably because I seem to be stressed enough for everyone already.

boring, boring, boring, BORING

I am so, so glad to have only 3 days left until Tyson gets home. I am so bored, I don't even know what to do with myself. And it doesn't help that Tyson is off in Zermatt, at the base of the Matterhorn, skiing and paragliding and eating gruyere fondue with curried pineapple.

Today I cleaned the living room, organized the various audio and video components, moved some furniture, and bought a nice lamp that actually matches things (not that your purple-and-red lava lamp wasn't neat, honey, it just didn't go), and now I am still bored. What I really want is a magic wand to move the computer desk, tear up the carpet, pry up the tack strip, use the angle grinder to get rid of the floor nails, vacuum up all the dirt, and teleport the 6 boxes of laminate flooring I need here from San Diego. (They could have done it in that Harry Potter movie I saw last week.) Then I could spend tomorrow playing with my table saw and putting down floors, which is actually pretty fun. Then I wouldn't be so bored.

Ugh. It is a good time I think for a nap.

Yes, this was a while in coming...

I'd been sort of stalling until I took some pictures of my pink hair, which, in turn, was waiting for the following convergence of events:

1. School to be out


2. My hair to be pink


3. Having bought a new camera to replace the lost one


4. Getting Tyson to take a picture

As you can clearly tell, I was so anxious to have the preceding 4 qualifications met that I didn't wait for the fifth, which, obviously, would be a non-napped-on hairstyle. But whatever. I knew you, my six loyal readers, were anxiously awaiting my post, and I didn't want to delay it any longer.

The other reason I have been remiss in my blogging commitment is that last week was the last week of school, so therefore when the Nevada lege awarded grant money the Thursday prior to teachers in at-risk schools who completed 30 hours of professional development by the end of the school year, that meant I had eight days to put in an entire additional workweek. <-- That sentence, by the way, is only an overture to a workday that starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 7:30 p.m.

So now that I've successfully (I think) justified my absence over the past two weeks, we can get down to business.

It's actually been quite a productive first four days of summer vacation. I got new contacts, put my student loans back into forbearance, cleared up some insurance stuff, applied for and turned down a job at REI (no pink hair, no last trip to Bishop with Tyson before he leaves--even the hefty employee discount couldn't persuade me to change my only two firm plans for the whole summer), unloaded my carful of classroom stuff into my new room (one wall is approximately this color--eew!), drove all the way back across town to my old school to retrieve the jump drive I'd left in my computer upon check-out, helped (mostly by staying out of the way) friends train horses, and schooled Tyson at Guitar Hero in front of his class. As penance, here is a picture of me sleeping it off with my elbow straight up in the air last night.

So there it is: my update. In a few minutes I will post a new (belated) Audience Participation Monday, then I'm making breakfast-for-dinner.

Plans, etc.

So I met yesterday with my new DC at Foothill to go over some general school/course information, and I got a better idea of what I'll be doing next year:

English I Honors (9th grade):

1. Great Expectations
2. Romeo and Juliet
3. The Importance of Being Earnest
4. Of Mice and Men
5. The Odyssey
6. Tom Sawyer

assorted grammar/vocab/writing stuff

American Lit (11th grade):

Chronological everything, from early Native American oral tradition to contemporary poetry. I flipped through the textbook, and I'm not liking some of the stuff they picked from authors I usually like. There's no "Rip Van Winkle" or "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" for Irving, a single essay from Melville (hello?! Where's "Bartelby"? Or "Benito Cereno"?), nothing good from Hawthorne (I'll just have to find "Young Goodman Brown" or "Rappacini's Daughter".)--basically, it reads like an anthology of B-sides from famous American authors. They should call the textbook What They Also Wrote because very little of it is the best, famousest stuff. And really, this is high school. They can just read the famous stuff for a while longer.

On the upside, lots of my paperwork, such as drafting semester exams and course syllabi, is pretty much done. Woot.

Now I can start getting some really good thinking done.

Well, shit

It's Audience Participation Monday again, and I had the idea that we could work more on our story, seeing as how we haven't actually finished one yet, but it seems that Tammy has taken care of that one for us.

Because I had only about a half hour to come up with a plan, and Monday is a 12 hour day for me, and there are nachos and Guitar Hero waiting for me, today's game is simple.

Put on your PJs and fuzzy slippers 'cause this is a whole hellava lot like a slumber party game. No, we're not going to wait until someone falls asleep, freeze her underwear, and try to make her pee by putting one hand in warm water and one in cold. This game is called

IT SOUNDED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME...

and it is, like, the easiest APM yet. What have you done in the last 10 or so years that, in retrospect, may not have been the wisest decision you have made, even though it really, really seemed like an okay thing to do? If in the next few hours I (with your help, even) come up with some variation on it, I'll let you know. In the meantime, take it away, participants!

What I'm afraid of

Some of you (ahem, Tyson) have asked me why I don't do more on my blog, or why I don't do "that writing thing" very much. These people (Tyson) give the same couple of reasons every time they mention this: sometimes I say clever things, I know and use lots of words, I like writing, etc, etc. But when it comes to what somebody once called the "ass in the chair" principle, whereby a writer parks his or her ass in a chair and actually produces written material, well, that's where the whole paradigm sort of breaks down for me.

Why?

There was a time when writing seemed very important to me. For three semesters in a row I enrolled in creative writing workshops in college (two semesters were with Penn-Faulkner Award-winning professors, one helpful, one pompous). I faithfully kept a journal for about six years, not just the standard, unimaginative, sparse "dear diary, today was a regular day" kind of stuff, but lengthy diatribes, descriptions, conversations, poems, and so on.

You know what I think it is? My first semester in college, I fell in love with a man 10 years my senior and had an immediate, intense need to feel like an adult, like a fully developed real person, not a person-in-progress. Curling up on my bedroom floor with my spiral notebook, a handful of cigarettes, and Bob Dylan on the stereo just seemed so--adolescent. Coming up with theories about how the material world exists only as a manifestation of our thoughts, feelings, and memories about objects now just seemed dumb. Then I took a philosophy class where basically what I learned was that no matter how great your idea sounds on paper, and no matter how many years you devoted your career to refining it, somebody somewhere (or a roomful of somebodys) can tear it to shreds with barely a flex of their mental muscles, and if your logic has a hole in it anywhere, then, by default, it must be wrong.

I do want to make clear at this point that T in no way made me feel like this; he did not belittle, was not condescending in any way (except maybe once about Bob Dylan. And those of you who know Tyson will say that he is fairy adept at poking holes in theories, whether he does it maliciously or not.). My internal critic, always by far the loudest voice in my head, just kicked it into high gear.

The other thing I'm afraid of goes back to way before this: I am sometimes embarrassed to call attention to myself in the brains department. Maybe it is partly left over from college, too, but I hate that guy who raises his hand every five minutes and delivers well-reasoned answers at length. (Maybe that's why I prefer the short-n-pithy approach, you know, so it's like, not a big deal or anything. Very non-threatening.) To this day, I don't like playing Scattergories with most people because I hate feeling like the giant, overeducated nerd who has to explain answers because people don't know what they are.

What that means for me now is that, as a writer, I find myself all but crippled by insecurity. My poetry is, at best, sophomoric, my ideas are pedestrian, and there is nothing I can say that the next person couldn't say better. I figure, if it's not "good," then there's no point in my doing it. I hate bad poetry; that's why I don't write it. I get bored almost instantly reading most small-time comics, so I all but refuse to finish my own comics. I hate reading the same old trite "this is what I did today" schtick online, so I wait and wait and wait to update my blog. Then I just sit around in smug self-satisfaction until somebody else posits what I was kind of thinking, so all I have to do is agree with them and pretend I "just didn't have time" to come up with something like that. (I also think that ties into my penchant for self-sabotage, but that's something I'll take up later. Maybe.)

Secretly, I know that for me, "hate" and "am jealous of" are sometimes interchangeable, as in, "Man, I hate all these skinny rich people you always hear about that get to jet-set all around the world kayaking and rock-climbing all day long. These people will be the downfall of Western Civilization, I tell you what."

Anyway, I hope this clears up some things for you, and for me.

A moral quagmire

So I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2 since Monday, and it appears I've gotten myself into a bit of a bind. It started Friday when I picked up a neutral-good wood elf druid and my tiefling rogue didn't really care for her namby-pamby tree-hugging help-the-animals quest to the Maiden's Grove. I'd been tossing influence points between the two all through the Highcliff quests--first one would be happy with me, then the other, but never both at the same time.
So by the time we finally get to Neverwinter, I'm ready to do something really nice for the tiefling: I choose to help the crime syndicate on the docks rather than the City Watch. We've got to get into the closed Blacklake district, and the only people who can get us there are cops or criminals. Neeshka's made her opinions about the Watch pretty plainly known, and I figure she's be happy to hang out with the thieves and thugs in the docks for awhile, seeing as how she used to be a thief in Neverwinter herself. So I see this thug Caleb and he puts me in touch with the head of the criminals, who tells me I have to kill or bribe the city watchmen at the four guardposts in the docks area. No biggie. We take down the guards at the first post before I remember I can bribe them instead, which I do, and feel better about it. Then we get the chance to wipe out some thugs from Luskan, which I am more than happy to do. Then when I go back to finish my quest, she tells me I have to burn the City Watch building to the ground and kill everyone in it!
The problem is that one of the watchmen, my contact if I'd decided to join up with them instead, is this guy Cormick who comes from the same small town in the swamp as I did. Actually, he's sort of a town legend: "the boy who got out" and so forth. AND I actually met him at Fort Locke and talked to him and everything.
I actually had to quit playing the game, I felt so bad about this! I can't believe I let one of my companions decide for me what to do. I even went back to one of my saved games with the intention of re-playing all the stuff in between there and Neverwinter, then choosing to drop the tiefling in the bar and take the druid to join the Watch, but it would mean two or three days of redoing stuff. I just keep telling myself that I will probably play the whole game again because I like being all kinds of different characters, so next time I can do it right. Tyson doesn't mind having a character that goes around killing everybody, but it really bothers me.

Besides this, I am wasing dishes and doing laundry and getting ready for family to come over tomorrow. The house is a mess and we still have no heat, so we've got a lot to do. And if I start feeling any worse about this whole City Watch mess, I may just switch back to Sims 2 for awhile instead for some good wholesome much-less-morally-sticky fun.

Yes, yes, yes....

Whatever you're thinking, the answer is yes. Now isn't that a freeing idea? What I had in mind was something like "Am I a slacker?" or "Am I just writing tonight because Deidre did?" but really, why stop there. "Should I have ice cream for dinner?" "Why not skip laundry tonight?" or "Those dishes will still be there tomorrow, right?" all seem like perfectly acceptable questions for which the answer could conceivable be yes.

I don't have too much to say, but a couple of things came up that I thought I'd share before they got too stale.

First, for all of you who found the last week depressingly void of campaign ads, here's a link. Yeah, it's a week old today, and, given the AMAZING week we Dems (and Indies) have had, it seems like even longer. However, I know most of ya'll lead lives approximately as exciting as mine, so it's not like you don't have sixty seconds to check it out. Listen, don't read.

Second, I played soccer today for, like, the first time since fifth grade. The teachers played against the kids after school today (for Educator Appreciation Week--go figure). So I'm chasing the ball down the sideline and one of my seventh-graders mutters under his breath, "man, she's faster than me," and even though I was about to have a heart attack it was the best part of my day. Okay, we got beat 3-0, but, to be fair, the kids got to rotate out every five minutes until the last round, when 11 teachers had to defend against 25 kids. Plus, one of the deans accidentally kicked a kid in the crotch, which, because of my non-involvement in the situation, was quite hysterical (and satisfying).

Third, I saw Stranger than Fiction on Saturday, and I was super-impressed. Will Ferrell was strikingly believable in a straight role, and the existential factor never got too weird or self-conscious. Plus, Maggie Gyllenhaal was extra-cute as a liberal grassroots bakery owner (the bakery is called Uprising--get it?) with a great haircut and tattoos. Then there was Emma Thompson, looking an awful lot like Hugh Grant, and Queen Latifah. I don't care what ya'll say, Latifah is a great actress.

Fourth....hell, I don't remember what fourth was. I'm half-watching my giant projector TV, which, despite looking great and extending across six feet of my living room wall, is still filled with the same mediocre crap everyone else is watching on TV. I think it's making my brain melt.

Anyhow, my life is boring. Really, really boring. Link, soccer, movie, and you're pretty much caught up on everything since the last time I wrote.


Oh, wait. Deidre wanted to hear something domestic. I'm making white chili (chicken, white beans, and green chilies instead of the regular stuff), and it smells great.

Because I haven't checked in for awhile...

One of these days, I will get around to reading this book. Seriously. I finally just read my first David Sedaris book, only to find out that he's seriously famous and only people who don't read books aren't familiar with this guy.

My real reason for being here today, besides the nagging voice coming in stereo from inside my head and from my husband and faithful reader telling me to at least put something up, is to bring you this, and maybe to mention that I had to go back to work yesterday. More on that, as well as a bringing up-to-date of my profile, etc, to come in the future. Also, I am working on a weekly interactive activity to give you something to look forward to each week (and keep me here each week!).