Got home from work.
Made a pot of coffee.
Drank a large cup of coffee from my Rasta Lion mug, which is my favorite.
Immediately fell asleep in my chair.
I am not kidding when I say I am immune to caffeine.
Author: Luther M. Siler
Teacher, writer of words, and local curmudgeon. Enthusiastically profane. Occasionally hostile.
Good news/bad news
The following sentences will seem contradictory, I think, but they are both true:
I am having the best/easiest/most fun year of teaching I have had in a very long time, and it may be that this is the clear winner in terms of my entire career by the time the end of May rolls around; and
I do not remember ever being as consistently exhausted as I have been for the last month or so. It’s 8:15. I’m going to bed. I’m regularly going to bed around 9:00 lately, and no amount of caffeine cuts through anything; I’m completely immune to the stuff by now.
That’s all I’ve got right now. I’m gonna go die.
I can’t believe I don’t know this
To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.
I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.
Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?
I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.
I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.
(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)
An unexpected proud dad moment
My son has been patiently working away at the Path of Pain since I got home from work, four hours ago. The person who put the video above together is some sort of divine creature; I never even attempted this feat when I was playing Hollow Knight, and if I had I would have invented twelve new swear words and killed one of the cats by about the halfway mark.
This kid hasn’t let a single swear word or even really a single sound of frustration pass his lips the whole time. No controller tossing. No muttering under his breath. Just persistence and patience.
I don’t know where the hell he got it from. Sure as hell not me.
Because kids are dumb
Remember how, when we were kids, getting sent to bed early was a punishment? And now going to bed an hour earlier than normal is absolutely the greatest thing that could happen?
Anyway, guess what I’m doing.
That can’t be right
Not that my immediate family is that large, but I’m done with all Christmas shopping for my immediate family, and everyone else is pretty much gift card people. My brother will send me a list for my niece and nephew, who are too young to get mad at me for buying the wrong thing anyway, and the basement goblin will likely get cash. The tree went up after Thanksgiving and I’ve been changing the lights every time I walk into the living room just because I can.
(Seriously, Govee lights are amazing. Ignore the price; order these. They’re absolutely worth every dime.)
Anyway, what this means is that everything’s going to show up broken, or not show up at all, or I’m suddenly going to realize four days before Christmas that my wife and son don’t actually like any of the things I got them for Christmas and I’ve somehow accidentally ordered a ton of stuff for me instead. This is actually a bit of a risk with the boy; he and I have enough tastes in common that I actually rejected a gift I was thinking about for him this year because I decided I wanted it and not him. He’d have liked it, I think, but it was a little too expensive for “he’d have liked it, I think.”
I have one thing left to do for my wife, which is going to involve Doing Art, and which will be a funny joke even if I completely fuck up Doing the Art. She looks at the blog kind of irregularly, so I could probably get away with telling y’all the plan, but … nah.
How’s your shopping going?
Addendum to yesterday’s post
God damn it, Matt Dinniman.
Two quick book observations
First, that my suspicion appears to have been correct: I think I’m probably good with reading the rest of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and then never touching anything that calls itself “LitRPG” ever again. The best thing about Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon is the title, which suggests that the book is going to be delightful. It’s not bad, but it’s not something that, at about the 2/3 mark, is leading me to believe that I’m going to be spending a lot of time with any examples of this genre not written by Matt Dinniman.
The second thing is that, yes, my Kindle is genuinely saving me money, as I’m reading this book for free through Kindle Unlimited and, believe it or not, I don’t think I feel the need to own it. Also, I got to annotate this sentence:
I haven’t used the annotate feature very much, but it might come in pretty handy when I want to be able to find bits of a book to talk about during reviews. Or, y’know, talk about the part in the book where there are worms throwing baby heads at the protagonist. Dungeon Crawler Carl definitely can trend toward raunchy and gross humor– a talking sex doll head is a major secondary character, for crying out loud– but Kaiju is a level beyond.
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