A day in the life...
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "The Casual Poster" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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12:15 pm
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N VA Friends
I have a former student who is looking for a job now that he's out of high school. He has some Windows experience, has troubleshooting experience, and knows how to ghost systems. Clearly, he's entry level, but he's smart, eager to learn, and is a hell of a guy.
Pop a comment here if you can help me find him a job. I have his resume.
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09:51 pm
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How do you tell if your husband loves you?
He gets this t-shirt for you!
http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pat070411.html
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08:14 pm
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And many happy returns on the day
Today, one of the first people I ever met from Livejournal declared her commitment to her most significant of others before family and friends. I wish I could have been there to see it, too. Given the people who are there, I am certain it will be well documented and I look forward to seeing the photos.
Kit, I hope your day was special and that you had a great time in the whirlwind that such an occasion is.
In truth, it was only a reaffirmation of what had already come to be...only now the state woke up and took notice. (Might not want to tell the Commander that part, though...)
Have a great time on your cruise!
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06:46 pm
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I have a new found sympathy for broccoli florets
Tonight, I'm making a risotto recipe...I've managed to steam my thumb along with the greens.
Ouch.
I hope the recipe turns out well. If I like it and make it again, I think I'll skip the steamed thumb part, though.
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07:28 pm
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An old piece of writing
It was a business transaction.
An exchange--
It was a business transaction.
Money for goods.
It was a business transaction.
I had 10 dollars--
It was a business transaction.
He had a gun.
It was a business transaction.
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07:17 pm
[Link] | Today, I was in the computer lab with one of my students, who was telling me that he was keeping his fingers crossed that he passed Geometry for the quarter. He had done an extra credit project and hoped it would be enough.
This led to a discussion of colleges, which ended up centering around his general lack of motivation. Joe* said that he wasn't sure that he'd suddenly get motivated when he went to college. But, he mentioned that he already had two ideas about what he wanted to study. When I asked him, he didn't say anything, but quickly typed in education, then erased it. Then he typed in theater.
When I told the story to Eric, the ending went something like this:
Me: I wanted to ask him about the education one, but I resisted.
Him: But the theater thing,...you asked him if he was gay, right?
Me: You're bad.
* Clearly not his real name. No one named Joe is gay.**
** Of course, I have no reason to believe this kid is either...
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07:05 pm
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"Tell your friends!"
Eric made dinner and it was yummy.
Pork tenderloin with a blueberry sauce served with steam greenbeans. Yummy.
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09:13 pm
[Link] | One of the things that I love about my husband is that he volunteers to work on holidays so that guys who have kids can be there for their kids. Christmas and Thanskgiving were family holidays and my parents never missed them. I like that Eric helps other people have those kinds of holidays with their families since we don't have kids of our own. Even when he was in the military, he'd volunteer to work Thanksgiving and Christmas so that people wouldn't miss the family days.
On the other hand, I occassionally have had some strange holidays since I married Eric. Most of the really strange holidays happened early in the marriage. But, non-traditional holidays have become the tradition.
So, it's been another low-key, non-traditional Christmas Eve.
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05:05 am
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Op-Ed reader
I've been reading the OP-ED oages a whole lot more. I generally check the Washington Post and The New York Times regularly and supplement with other newspapers to get different perspectives.
Every once in a while, there's a turn of phrase that makes me laugh out loud. This was the one that got me this morning: "And down at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson -- who famously distrusted organized religion -- must have been whirring like a turbine at Romney's declaration that 'freedom requires religion.'" I don't always read Eugene Robinson, but that was just too funny not to pass along.
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09:14 pm
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One Semester of Spanish Love Song
Well, I thought it was funny.
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05:29 pm
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In lieu of an actual post...
Instead of making myself even angrier at administrators by rehashing some of the organizational cluster fucks of my job, I submit my top 40 career matches. Note that my job is in the top 20...what I USED to do? 13. Gah.
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03:12 am
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And so it begins...again
Next week is my first official week on contract. Tonight is my first night of severely interrupted sleep.
I haven't gotten much planning done for the year and I have about a week to do it. This is the type of thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night because my brain keeps chewing on the ideas and problems with organizing a new year.
So, I go surfing the web for more ideas to sift through until I can get back to sleep. Tonight, it's been an hour of looking and thinking. I'm probably on the right track with my ideas. Now I just have to sleep on them.
And so it begins once again.
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01:04 pm
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I´m alive and well and in Xela
I wanted to let people know that I´m ok. I had a long journey here, but it´s all coming together. I´ve written about the first leg of my journey (the flight) in a separate blog. If you are on my FList, you can find it in my memories posts in contact info. If you aren´t and know me personally, then you can find it on Travelpod.com or by calling my house and getting the info. Travel pod lets you subscribe to updates, so if you want to know what´s happening, that´s a good option.
Once again, I am keeping these blogs separate, so I won´t be posting much here until I get back. Please comment in my other blog!
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04:32 am
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Travel time and a happy coincidence
The alarm actually goes off in 15 minutes, but I've been dozing for the last hour. I guess I'm still more keyed up than I thought.
I meant to make this entry a couple of weeks ago, but I never got around to it. So, I'll leave it as my parting gift.
( Incredible Coincidence and Pictures (large) )
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04:22 pm
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24 hours...
In 24 hours, I should be getting close to Xela. It finally started to hit me yesterday that I will be leaving for a month. I'm nervous, but excited. I'm almost, but not quite, packed. I haven't reviewed any of my Spanish this week and I'm currently obsessing about printing photos of my family to take with me.
It should be a good trip. I'm too jumbled to really write more than that.
Oh, and ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) quick_chick? The duffel is perfect!
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11:14 am
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Late on the literary bandwagon
Compared to my husband, I am a slow reader. He has polished off about 7 books in the last week and a half to two weeks. I've managed 1.5. I've gotten to the point that I read in bed almost exclusively. Some nights I don't read at all. Rarely do I get more than 50 pages in a night. That's not to say I won't tear up a book--I go for the eye candy of books and will read them fairly quickly. It's that now that I read so much for work, I read less for pleasure and when I do, it's pretty escapist fare. That's part of the reason that I've been active in our informal faculty book club in the last year. That club has stretched me beyond some of my usual escapist sci-fi/fantasy/horror-ish choices and into more contemporary fiction.
Because I have focused on the escapist, it sometimes takes me a long time to get around to reading what everyone else is talking about. Kite Runner is one of those books that my colleagues have talked about and actually adopted into the 12th grade curriculum. One of my colleagues gave me a hardback copy of Khaled Hosseini's new book A Thousand Splendid Suns, within a week of its release because she had an extra;, she probably assumed that I had already read Kite Runner. Even my students who have read it have practically gushed about it to me on several occasions. Hajra, one of my best 9th grade students this year who had urged me to read Kite Runner, noticed my copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns on my desk. She borrowed it and devoured it in a little under two days in the last week of school. All of this should have led me to believe that Kite Runner was well worth reading. However, it wasn't until about a week ago that I finally got a copy of Kite Runner and started reading it.
To be honest, part of my hesitancy was that I knew some of the plot already. Teachers tend to spoil parts of novels for each other and so part of the book was spoiled for me. What I didn't know at the time was that this "spoiled" part was the point at which the narrative truly begins and wasn't all that far into the novel. Truthfully, the exposition was a little slow for me, so I was surprised that the spoiled part came so quickly. After that, I read it faithfully and at times had a hard time putting the book down. I was drawn into the character's life and wanted to keep reading it.
But, I have to say, the characterization wasn't the best part of the book. The best part of the book was the ending. Many writers have real trouble ending and many times I am not completely satisfied. Sometimes, it's because the ending doesn't seem to fit. Sometimes it's because the ending is so clearly written as a hook into the next book, like the last line in the movie that makes way for the sequel. Sometimes its because it's rushed--it's like the author got so into telling the story that he or she realized that the book was getting too long for their original contract and decided to do a 15-30 page core dump wrap up. But Kite Runner didn't do any of these things. Sure, it suggested that these characters lived beyond the book (which is good because I was NOT in the mood for a "you die, the girl dies, everybody dies" ending, which would have been completely out of place anyway), but it stopped right where the story should have stopped. I won't spoil it, but I will say that I actually cried because it was so well done and so fitting.
Now I'm looking forward to reading A Thousand Splendid Suns and can totally understand why it was such an anticipated second novel.
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05:09 pm
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It's been one week...
A week from now, I'll be on bus on my way to Xela. I still find it hard to believe that I'm actually going.
Between now and then, I have to:
- Clean my office, the living room, bathroom, and kitchen (Boo!) in preparation for Craig and Judy's drive-by stop over on Thursday (YAY!)
- Listen to my Spanish tapes while cleaning
- Go to King's Dominion with my beloved husband (More YAY!)
- Finish pre-trip laundry
- Buy last minute things like face cream
- Get together some books and magazines for an acquaintance in Guatemala (he doesn't get too many English language books and has a little lending library in his Internet shop)
- Actually try to pack all this crap and see what I need to leave behind
- Take pictures of the cats both to have pictures of the cats and practice with the camera
It's going to be a busy week.
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05:40 pm
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Flyswatter, dollar stores, and hot dogs
Yesterday, I went to a couple of the local dollar stores to try to find flyswatters. I failed to find them.
Flyswatters are not an easy item to find. They appear for a brief moment in the summer and quickly disappear. I use them not to swat flies, but to swat a chalk board as part of a review game. However, my two swatters got lost this year. I suspect that I lent them to someone and didn't get them back. So, I started haunting the dollar stores. Sure, I could buy them for $6.99 a piece at Bed, Bath and Beyond, but paying $14 for flyswatters seems excessive.
One of the two dollar stores had another item of interest though--a pregnancy test. No, I didn't want to buy it and have no reason to. But it got me thinking--if I needed one, would I really trust a dollar store pregnancy test? It seems to me that springing for the EPT at Wal-Mart would be a much better option--better yet, springing for the co-pay on my insurance. I just can't see trusting a dollar store pregnancy test. Maybe it's just me.
This afternoon when I went to the gym, one of the tvs was showing the annual Nathan's Hot Dog eating contest. Here we were, the conscientious gym-goers watching grown men stuff hot dogs down their gullets as we sweat, walked, ran, and lifted heavy weights in the attempt to stave off hot dog and junk food-induced guts. The irony was not lost on me. To be honest, I couldn't really stand to watch it. It made me queasy. I guess I'm just not cut out for the competitive eating world. An you know what? I'm ok with that.
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06:33 pm
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Actually, it is lupus...
We got this in the mail today... I couldn't resist.
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01:38 pm
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Quick thank you
I want to thank all of the folks who came out to the Meat Faucet yesterday. It's been a long time since I've seen some of you, and I appreciate that Eric put the dinner together!
Thanks, guys. :)
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