Updates

I hadn't realized how long it had been since I last posted. If you haven't friended me on FB, you may not be aware of the following things going down:

1. I am teaching half-time at an alternative high school. I facilitate a credit-retrieval class and teach senior English to 15 kids and am done by 11:30.

2. I am in grad school what amounts to full-time (technically two-thirds time, but no summer off) getting a Masters of Library and Information Science. There is a lot of reading to do. Then I get to be a librarian and make other people read stuff.

3. I got an extra job as a "theme reader," which means English teachers call me when they have too many essays to grade and the district pays me an hourly rate to grade them.

4. I found out yesterday that I can probably take one or two free classes through the state and be a school librarian next year, a whole year earlier than I thought. Also, when job postings say "master's degree required," it's sometimes okay to just be working on one (you're cheaper that way, anyhow).

So, good, I guess? I'm really liking working half-time, but we'll see how much when I get my first paycheck. I am really liking coming home by noon-ish, changing into PJ pants, and taking a nap.

Hooray for me!

My big envelope came yesterday as an email, and I'm in!  Hooray!  I'm a grad student!

In which I enumerate my awesomeness

I took the GRE today, and I was really nervous because I needed a decent score for U of A (not to mention that I base 80% of my self-worth on standardized test scores).  Not only have I not taken a high-stakes, thinking person's test in quite some time (about 10 years), I started to think that my brain is atrophying the longer I go without college (about 4 years).  I especially loathed the math portion of the test because it made me realize that, except for balancing my checkbook and calculating grades (besides, the computer does most of both of these tasks) I just don't think in numbers anymore.

Am I missing out?  Really, I nearly had a panic attack when I forgot how to find the perimeter of a circle, and then I had to multiply square roots of things and find the greatest common factor for 3 to the 100th power and 3 to the 97th power.  It's not that I can't reason my way through these problems, most of the time, it's just that the foundation--all the geometric theorems, the formulas for finding out things, the rules for multiplying numbers with exponents--those things are all rusted and shoved into the very back of my brain where all the other stuff from my sophomore year of high school lives.  But do I really need these things, except if I need to take another test sometime?  Is my daily life really less for not knowing?  Weigh in on this, readers, and I will start thinking about math again.

Anyway, I kicked so much ass on the verbal part of the test--700 out of a possible 800.  I'm glad I looked through that section of my GRE guide because I was able to recognize some of the tricks and traps on the test.  In math, I got a 660, which gives me a total score that is plenty good for an MLS program, but not good enough for engineering school.  I think my essays were decent, too, but again, I'm just not writing like that anymore now that I am not in school.  And the experimental portion of my test was a second essay (I was hoping for more vocabulary questions), so I had to write 3 total.  My brain is exhausted.

The Birthday Fairy visits early this year!

The best gifts (besides love and all that intangible crap that works great for Mothers' Day but doesn't cut it for birthdays or Christmas) are the ones you want, but for whatever reason won't buy for yourself. Ever stop to think about why twenty-dollar candles and baskets of bath stuff make such great last-minute, no-brainer gifts? 'Cause we walk by and want them, but sigh and buy that dollar bottle of Suave body wash instead.

I've been doing a lot of baking in the past few weeks--two kinds of pie, biscuits, blueberry muffins, blueberry pancakes, and so on--and after watching me cut 2 tablespoons of butter into a half-cup of flour SIX TIMES in my teensy one-cup food processor for things like biscuits and pie crusts, and turning out three lenticular pancakes at a time in my biggest pan on the stove, and not only flipping but rearranging roasted potatoes on the baking sheet so some would be on the light part and some on the dark part (P.S. that's the baking sheet I caught on fire a few weeks ago on the grill, and I still haven't scrubbed off all the carbon-powder stuff yet), Tyson visited our brand new neighborhood Target and bought me a food processor, a Calphalon baking set, and an electric griddle.

Maybe he's just gunning for more pancakes?

\m/(><)\m/

That's What I Just Said!

Some bigshot (I initially typed "bogshit"--twice!--how's that for a Freudian slip?) over at the Chicago Trib just had to add his two cents to my reminiscing about summertime and cheap(er) gas prices. 

So fucking original, dude.

Elaine's Rowing, I'm Crowing!

And my reputation is growing!

So I got pulled aside today for a closed-door meeting with my admin (always a little scary!) but what really happened was he told me I am all set to be the program coordinator for those block classes we're doing next year.  He made it sound like I would be essentially an uncompensated argument-settler and work-deligator, which I was happy to be asked to do, even if it didn't have a job title or pay package.  When there's something big that needs to be figured out, I have a lot of trouble with uncertainty where I have no authority to actually do anything about it.  Plus, I'll have someone to back me up when I come across as steamrollering over someone who's not being assertive enough (or just plain has a no-good idea).  Man, am I a controlling bitch or what?

But THEN as I was walking out of his office, my principal stopped me and gave me the same news, except that I would actually be getting a job title (Program Coordinator, with initial capitals) AND a prep buyout if there's money to do it (and there probably would be after count day in October).  What does that mean?  Only an additional 1/7th of my salary!  Well, and the expectation of doing a hell of a lot more work than with the informal title, but being compensated for an extra hour of work a day means I can focus on actually getting it done right rather than trying to cram it in somewhere in between other crap, all the while feeling like I'm done and should be going home.

So anyway, sorry if you have been having a lousy month or something and are continually being subjected to my telling you how great I am, but if that's the case, you've probably stopped reading my blog lately.

Don't worry; soon it will be summer and I will be back to being angsty and restless again and you can stop listening to me brag all the time.

Dinner is Cooking!

Well, it's brining actually.

Tonight I am butterflying and grill-roasting a chicken. I cut out the back (with my new kitchen shears; the old ones weren't quite up to par in the chicken-cutting department) of a 4-pound free range organic hormone-free blah blah blah chicken and it's soaking in salt water to help keep in juicy. When it's done, in about an hour, I'll break the breastbone so it will lay nice and flat on the grill. Then I'll chop up some chilies in adobo sauce until it makes a paste and add minced lime zest and cilantro and smear that all up under the skin. I'll put it on the grill for 15 minutes, smooshing it down with a cookie sheet with bricks on top, then flip it over. Near the end of the cooking time, I'll take a honey-lime glaze and baste the skin.

I am also going to grill up some ears of corn with some of the chili paste, butter, and lime juice.

Finally, I will go to the store and get stuff to make hot fudge pudding cake (even though I made brown sugar cookies yesterday and they are already gone) because I have to get butter anyway.

Can you tell I have been looking forward to this dinner all week?

I'm Pre-Approved!

I got an email back from the head of the New Teacher Training Cadre informing me that I can interview for the position I applied for, even though I'm short of the requisite 3 years of teaching experience needed. Okay, it's not a huge deal, it really just comes down to three extra Saturdays and a couple of weeknights a year, but I will be training teachers new to CCSD in one of our professional domains....

Okay, that makes it sound mind-numbingly boring, but if you look at it as an opportunity to effect grassroots change in our school district, it is much more exciting. Ask Tyson. He's doing his whole doctoral study on teacher training and retention.

Proactivity Saves the Day! Woo Hoo!

Tyson's and my dinner date was cancelled tonight, so I came home and started laundry and chores. I am going to watch Battlestar Galactica guilt-free tonight (and not only for watching TV with undone chores! Now I won't have to feel guilty on my date about secretly wanting to be at home watching BSG even though it was dinner with a friend who is about to move to the east coast).

Hooray!

Audience Participation Day!

We haven't had one of these in a long, long time, and I'm not saying it's going to be a recurring thing, like, ever again, but I need something.



I just got this phone, my first-ever cell phone upgrade in five years, and--get this--it will actually play something other than rinky-dink midi-sounding crap when someone calls me, and it's so so easy to chop up an mp3 file into a thirty-second ringtone that even I can do it.




But the transition from picking one little midi file that I don't hate too much to hear three or four times a day out of a list of 20 or so was actually pretty simple; now I have about 6000 songs on my hard drive to choose from.




My question for you is, what is the most awesome ringtone ever? I need about a 30-second snippet of a song (sorry, the 8-minute "Mariner's Revenge" is out) or a sound effect that I will not only love, but that will make me seem even more awesome when other people hear it coming out of my pocket, and maybe also make them laugh, or believe that I am possibly the coolest person they know.

Look what I can do!

Check out my tag cloud I just made. (The layouts function is being squirrelly, but I will put it higher in that right-hand column soon.) It is so awesome. I thought, as I was copy-pasting code into my template, that it was heady business, but then I did an actual google search, and I guess I could have put my stuff in and auto-generated one. Whatever. Mine will change when I have more posts in different groups, and I don't think the others will. And if they do, screw them anyway 'cause I just wrote (or inserted, anyway) my own code. Take that, bitches!

Because we haven't done this in a while...

I have an audience participation thingie for you. Defective Yeti wrote a program to help us all become more vocabularious. Here's what you have to do:

Click here. He'll explain everything so I don't have to. Choose the number of words you want (I did all 100, and it took about 40 minutes). Then, if you like, you can post your results on your own blog. Don't forget to come in here first to let us know how you did.

My own results are here, but do yours first because there are definitions on the chart, and you're not allowed to cheat!

Good luck!

I can do it in the park...

and I can do it in the dark!

By "it," of course, I mean kayaking. By myself.

So my plan was to get to Willow Beach, about 15 miles south of Hoover Dam at about sunset (which, you'll notice from the above photo, that I missed by a good half hour), paddle upriver until the sun set and the moon came out, then turn around and paddle back by moonlight.

I put the boat in, and paddled lazily across the water, more like a narrow lake than an actual river, watching the hundreds of bats swirl and dive above the water. A few bright stars and airplanes started to become visible over the cliffs. It seemed like an evening made for being on the water.

What I failed to take into account is the fact that, particularly on a river in a canyon, there is a pretty severe gap between the sun dropping over the horizon and the moon rising high enough to be of any help. It's also very dark during that time; too dark, in fact, to see the shore well enough to park and wait.

I kept paddling upriver, and upriver, and upriver, looking over my shoulder with increasing agitation for the bright yellow rim of the moon, and all the while it just got darker and darker and spookier and spookier outside. Remembering the motor boats that tear up and down the river, I tried to stick to the shoreline, but it eventually got so dark that submerged trees seemed to jump out in front of me, and, given the way the sound of the locusts, ducks, and whatever else was out there carried over the glassy water, I figured I'd have ample warning of an approaching engine to get out of the way.

I still couldn't rest easy. I tried to calm myself by imagining worst-case scenarios. This sounds like it would work, because I'm a strong swimmer, my boat is sturdy plastic, and it doesn't seem likely to get lost or attacked out in the middle of a river, so the list of reasonable worst-casers doesn't seem like it would be that bad.

But oh! my imagination works better than just about any other part of me. I imagined hungry man-eating water tigers, floating dead bodies that were, in reality, zombies, and a parallel universe in which the moon was never coming out. I imagined Deliverance-style wildmen lying in wait along the banks (in reality, much to steep for anything but bighorns, and only bighorn-navigable in places). I started counting strokes, telling myself that I could turn around and check for the moon after 100 strokes, then 100 more. After 300, I got too creeped-out to count any further.

After about an hour in which the moon stubbornly failed to appear, I turned back downriver. The darkness in this direction felt a little less ominous, probably because it was, at least, familiar. Going with the current this time, I made it back to the marina fairly quickly. My pants and shirt, which I had stuffed behind my seat, were soaked, but my camera was miraculously dry. I balanced my boat on the roof rack, and got it tied down in just a few minutes, using the light from the restroom windows to see. When I got back into the car, I was surprised to see that it was after 10, and I had been on the river for almost two hours.

Now I am tired, and smell like a lake. I need a shower, a bowl of cereal, and to crawl into bed with a cranky gray cat.

In which I enumerate my awesomeness!

Today was a good, if outwardly inauspicious, day.

• I ate sushi.

It was of especial delight because a) I didn't have to share my Sue roll (tuna, shiitake, cucumber, and avocado--yum!), and b) there is probably no sushi in Versoix, so Tyson can be jealous of my doings, for once.

• I talked to strangers in a public place.

People who know me (and my antisocial proclivities) will know that, for me, this is cool. I talked to the sushi guy (he says "Hi," Tyson), and to the guy at the bar next to me. This was, in fact, way better than Tuesday night, in which I got all dressed up to meet a friend at an actual bar, and did not talk to people or have a good time.

• I got a new book, and read it.

It's called Into the Wild, and there's actually a movie coming out about it.

• I visited my old Starbucks.

Where everything is different. It's been remodeled, it's staffed by tattoo-showing people (that was not OK when I worked there; I always had to wear a watch), and they closed at 10. (I spent four years of Friday and Saturday nights there making frappuccinos until midnight.)

• I read Dinosaur Comics.

I am working my way through the archives. Today I got to May 2005.

• I replaced broken parts on my roof rack.

Soundly, and all by myself. That is the second car-thing I have fixed on my own this past week, and it was cool.

Tomorrow I am practicing my kayak tie-down skills by taking a sunset/moonlight paddle at Willow Beach. I will probably also do dishes, and vacuum.

Ow, ow, ow

I haven't had skinned knees like this since I was a kid. That's not really a picture of my knees, but anyhow.

I started going to an Aikido class at the rec center twice a week. On Tuesday, we did this knee-walking thing that gave me some fairly small patches of rugburn right on my kneecaps. No big deal. Some Neosporin, and everything was OK.

Until last night. I was wearing these white sweatpants to train in, and after the initial knee-walking part, I happened to look down at my pants, and they had all these brown splotches at the knees. Sure enough, I had ripped up my knees again enough to bleed through my pants. Ow.

But I did fix the backward-rolling issues I was having on Tuesday, and I learned my first throw. Now if some would-be attacker grabs my wrist, then stands really still to let me think about what I'm doing, I can step behind him, twist his arm down behind his head, and pull him to the ground. Provided he doesn't try to resist, or have a gun or anything like that.

Erin's 100th Post Retrospective

It all started one hot, boring day in June 2006. I was three days into my first summer of freedom in twelve years, and I was getting tired of wandering around the house in circles.

My, it's amazing how things just don't change.

1. Vegas is still a miserable, smoggy, soul-searing, apathetic, lethargic, sun-baked hell-hole after about 10 in the morning.

2. I still don't have much more going on than meals and naps.

3. I still weigh the same as at this time last summer.

4. I think my skin cancer is back.

But if that was the whole story, there would be no reason for this blog to exist. Let's see what else happened over the last 100 posts:

There were lots of great vacations, with lots of great pictures. Click here, here, and here for cool, refreshing photos from the Sierras.

Last August, Tyson wanted some pictures for Tracy, an old friend from high school.

In September, we had a little poster contest. The second poster from the top was declared the winner.

In December, we got snowed on and said goodbye to the beach house.

Things were pretty boring around here until the end of February, with the debut of the a series of participation exercises. Soon dubbed Audience Participation Monday, these activities quickly became the highlight of this blog.

April brought a potential Spring Break crisis and a new job for next year.

May consisted almost exclusively of Audience Participation Mondays, and June, well, scroll down to reminisce about June. It's all still there.

I just want to give a shout out to all my readers who have been there from the very beginning--Tyson, my sister, and my moms. Without their support, this would probably have been another one of those "ehhhh" projects that sounded good, but never got off the ground. And for everyone else--Tammy, Erica, Elaine, Brannon, Michael, Billyfish, J--I'm glad you showed up and stuck around. (With apologies to anyone I may have forgotten. I can always add you in, good as new, and nobody will know the difference.)

Here's to another 100 posts.

YESSSSSSS!

In one of those moments that, after the fact, seems inevitable, I landed the job at X High School, a job I have wanted since I first subbed there three years ago!!! Seriously, this school is so whitebread--70% Caucasian, 95% meets/exceeds standards in writing, 74% graduation rate (compared to 60% district-wide!)--it's like Warren-Walker with more public-school hoops to jump through, but a better benefits package to make up the difference. Plus it's a four-minute drive or about a 10-minute bike ride, so I can leave the house at the same time as I do now, about 6 a.m., but I'll be home by about 2:30, even staying late to grade/plan. (For some reason CCSD continues to ignore research about adolescents' sleeping patterns and makes them go to school from 7 to 1:15, but that's how I prefer it, anyway.) While I don't know the exact breakdown of the classes I'll be teaching, the official title is Honors American Literature, so I'm guessing I'll have at least two of those.

Anyway, it was SO EXCITING, and it's already becoming difficult to concentrate on the rest of this year. I even got a move-in date, just like a new house. I can't wait to see what great stuff comes in my room.

So everybody stop in at the comments section and congratulate me and tell me how great I am, natch, and then go back to the animal rhymes or what ever else ya'll have going on.

In which I may just have aced an interview

I just got in from an interview with a principal at a high school down the street--a job I have been coveting since I saw the listing last Monday--that would be teaching American Lit to juniors at one of four "high-achieving" high schools in Clark County. ("High-achieving," according to NCLB, just means that they do a certain amount better than their mandated AYP. Go ask your child's teacher. They'll explain what all the acronyms mean. They'll probably find a few choice epithets to share with you, too.)

Anyway, my interview lasted about an hour, and a couple of times I thought we were about to wrap it up, but then we kept talking about more stuff. So I should know by Friday whether or not I got the job; maybe sooner than that if I get put on the top of the list. After my interview I went to the gym and now have my brain is all mushy from the interview adrenaline and the exercise endorphins and the the not having had dinner yet. (If you were wondering why my prose did not seem as tight as usual, that should help explain some things. Haven't you ever re-read that college essay you wrote at 3 a.m. the day it was due, hopped up on a pot and a half of coffee and a semester of worrying about it? And after you got it back and re-read it, you were either amazed at your genius or startled by the way your ideas went in a hundred different directions at once, like water spilling across a kitchen table? Apparently job anxiety and weightlifting do pretty much the same thing.)

Besides that, today is just a Tuesday. I got an email today saying that my sister will be coming out next week, so there is something to look forward to. That and the Decemberists (which none of you except for her really cares about, anyway, and she will be here for it.)

I should probably go eat something now.

All the Latest

Man, you guys are so awesome for entertaining me and yourselves for two whole weeks between posts! I will definitely have to do something like that again.

Anyway, in the days since we've seen each other last, a few things have happened, the most exciting of which is that last weekend I learned to ski! No kidding!

I understand that some of you are probably a bit skeptical, and understandably so, but I really did a good job. A student-parent at Tyson's school comped our lift tickets and ski rentals at Mt. Charleston last Saturday, then patiently skied down the bunny slope with me all day until I had the hang of things. I can stem my turns now and not fall when getting off the chairlift, and several other very impressive skills. I will need them in a few weeks because we are going to Keystone for spring break. Now I can actually show myself a good time while Ty and Nico go off and tear it up on the black diamonds.

On Thursday, I made Tyson come up to my school for a family night, which was the first time he had ever been to my school. He actually said he was jealous of my classroom, which felt awesome, considering I see 160 more kids a day and teach at the same skill level or lower to my 7th graders as he does for his 4th graders. Yesterday I subbed for a band class during my prep (for about $25, plus karma), and we listened to this thing about Tchaikovsky's life and music and everything, and it made me want to get all my classical stuff back out. I really, really loved Tchaikovsky back in my pre-Tyson, high-school life. It made me realize that I just stopped doing certain things over the past few years that I always thought would stay important forever. The funny thing is that I don't think I've really replaced those things with other stuff. I've really turned into a regular old boring grown-up in a lot of ways.

I'm not actually in the mood to do more than just comment on that right now; while it sounds as though it would offer a great avenue for personal exploration, I am simply in no mood. It's Saturday afternoon, the trees are just about to be all leafy again, and it's 85 degrees outside. Spring is no time for being depressed. Hope you all have a very good weekend, and I will see you for our next Audience Participation Monday.

Back all in one piece...

Unfortunately, this is not actually the picture of the slot canyons I hiked down this weekend; Tyson thought it better to take the camera to Texas for thirteenth-birthday-party photos rather than leaving it for me. I did buy myself some drafting pencils and a set of india ink pens in various sizes for practicing some drawing; maybe I will scan in one of them.

But anyway, I left Saturday morning for Utah, stopping south of Cannonville (about 30 minutes east of Zion NP), and drove down this little red dirt road to Willis canyon, where the runoff was covered in sheets of crumbly ice and packed snow. I hiked in maybe half a mile, just to a pouroff where I didn't feel like going around. Then I tried to find Cottonwood Canyon, south of Kodachrome Basin SP, but the road got really rocky and I didn't want to get into trouble on my first day out. (Plus I think I may have taken a wrong turn somewhere.)

So I made it back into Escalante, which is just about one of my favorite towns anywhere, about an hour before sundown. I had planned on sleeping on a foam mattress in the back of the car, but when I went back outside after eating dinner, it was freezing!

On Sunday, I had planned to hike Fiftymile Creek, a 5-mile hike from Hole-in-the-Rock Road down another slot canyon all the way to Lake Powell, but then I learned that the reason it was called"Fiftymile Creek" was because it was 50 miles from pavement on what would become a pretty gnarly, rocky road that far from civilization. It was a disappointment, too, because my hiking trails book promised beaver ponds and quicksand which sounded like a combination for a rather interesting afternoon.

I decided instead to head to the interestingly and inexplicably named Lick Wash, about 10 miles farther down the dirt road from yesterday (the less rocky one). Rather than rocky, it was muddy in places from snowmelt, but me and the car made it through allright. As I was hiking out of the canyon, I stopped to talk to a couple who had come in from the south, overshot the turnoff to the trailhead, and continued a few miles up the road I had come in on. "The road seemed really bad," the woman said. "I don't think we'll go that way when we leave." I almost laughed out loud when I got back to the trailhead and saw a big 4x4 pickup next to my little Matrix. (That's not my actual car in the photo, mind you. Mine is, for reasons that should now be obvious, dirtier. It's also missing a big chunk of front spoiler, thanks to Tyson, and probably to our off-road driving habits.)

The dirt road popped me out WAY south, on the 89 in between Big Water and Kanab. I passed a road signed for Toroweap, which, after talking to the nice Paiute ranger at Pipe Spring, I decided to forego because

1. Tyson would be jealous.
2. The road was 36 miles long.
3. I couldn't get in and out before dark.
4. It was supposed to rain overnight.
5. The last three miles were rock that would smash up the underneath of my car.
6. I don't technically know how to use my jack to change a tire.
7. I figured I had pushed my luck pretty far already.

To make a long story short, I drove and drove and drove until I was back in Nevada near the turnoff for Beaver Dam State Park in a little town called Caliente, where I stayed for the night, then went to Beaver Dam looking for fish, or for the lake that used to be there before they blew the dam a couple of years ago. I got snowed on in the pass between Caliente and Alamo, quite a surprise considering I didn't even remember that there were mountains between Caliente and Alamo, a distance of about an inch on my map. (Unlike almost anywhere else I know, Nevada has mountain ranges that may only be 50 miles long, 20 miles wide, and 2000 feet higher than the valleys in between. People from real mountains, like the Rockies or the Sierras, might feel more comfortable imagining air quotes around some of Nevada's "mountain ranges.")

But I am back, and getting ready to be back in class tomorrow. Hope everyone had a pleasant long weekend.