The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Slept until ten this morning, which is the first time I’ve done that in a while, then spent the whole day reading and pushing through Veilguard, which I’m bound and determined to finish before Christmas. Now I’m on the couch, cat in my lap, watching British people make pottery.
Not bad for the first day of break.
Nothing but unwise ideas and shit I shouldn’t write down in my head tonight, so I’m gonna sign off early and play Veilguard. Last teaching day of 2024 tomorrow; the rest of the week is basically babysitting.
I recommend books and music and video games all the damn time, but I don’t stray into other products all that often. Let me say that you could spend as much as you wanted on Govee Christmas lights and they would be worth every dime:
Just fucking awesome. There’s literally hundreds of preset patterns even before you get to the user-customizable ones or, y’know, just colors, and it’s all kinds of fun to sit in front of the tree and just fiddle with the app.
Meanwhile, we’re expecting 4-7″ of snow tonight, so if y’all want to start doing the Dance of Two-Hour Delay, that’d be great. I don’t actually want a snow day tomorrow because that makes the rest of the week really fucking complicated but a couple of hours of extra sleep in the morning would not be looked askance upon.
Also, yes, that’s a stuffed quetzalcoatlus as a tree topper. My son’s idea.
First of all, in accordance with our most ancient and sacred traditions:
And while your family is eating dry turkey and you’re arguing with Aunt Ruth about whether trans people deserve to be able to pee in public or not, my family is doing this:
I know I talk about this every single time I put a Lego set together, but holy shit, the people who design these things are the smartest motherfuckers on Earth. I’m building the TIE Interceptor right now, which has been sitting on the floor in my office waiting for the right mood to strike me for probably several months now, and the cockpit and interior structure of this thing is just nuts. You can’t really see how detailed the cockpit is at this angle, and I couldn’t get any good pictures of it one way or another, but there are multiple screens in there for the minifigure to look at, along with two control sticks and a little radar screen with a picture of an X-Wing on it. My favorite little detail– see the two tiny gray dots at the top of the cockpit, underneath the two pale yellow studs? They wanted those two triangle pieces attached to them to be at an angle, and the pieces holding them at that angle are clearly guns. They took gun pieces from some other minifigure and reused them to hold the “screens” at the right angle.
It’s so creative it makes me sick. I could never be smart enough to design one of these damn things, and I’m in awe the whole time I’m building them. The model you get at the end isn’t even the point anymore. It’s all about marveling at the ingenuity it took to create these damn things, and wondering what these motherfuckers could do if they applied their skills to curing cancer instead of making toys.
(Oh, shit, I think I have the red pegs backwards on one of the wings. I’m gonna have to check that, before it’s too late to fix.)
(Actually the top row of pegs was backwards on both wings. Fixed!)
Anyway, I spent the day in Michigan visiting my wife’s family, and continuing to be vaguely weirded out by the fact that while her cousins are all perfectly nice people, I have never particularly clicked with all of them, but every time I see them lately one of their kids suddenly becomes interesting. I swear I have talked about this before, although I can’t find the post now; my favorite member of her extended family is her closest cousin’s younger daughter, which is weird, and I’m at the point where when we go to these things I just assume I’m going to spend most of my time talking to the generation underneath us more than I’m actually going to talk to her cousins.(*) It’s less weird than it could be; everybody’s in or out of college now and my son is the youngest person at these things by a mile, which is too bad for him. We were at this particular cousin’s house for the first time today, and one of her daughters, who I have known since she was ten and is now 26, finally actually started talking today? And she combines being a horse girl and an emo kid somehow, and I find that combination kind of hilariously endearing.
Jesus. I’ve known these people for sixteen years? I really should learn everyone’s names.
(*) Her uncle Bill is super cool too, for what it’s worth. So I spend my time talking to the youngest and the oldest people there.
I have spent all day, other than a brief run to the county solid waste department to get a ton of cardboard recycled, sitting in the same chair, trying my hardest to not fall asleep and mostly failing. I’m honestly kind of amazed that I managed to make it out of the house before noon, to say nothing of the effort required to break down all the boxes, because there has been nothing in the tank since then. We’re going to Michigan tomorrow for Thanksgiving The First, of possibly as many as four, and five hours in the car is going to do me in regardless. If I was smart I’d get my lesson planning done; I was smart enough already to make sure that I didn’t bring any grading home this weekend, so I don’t have that to worry about.
I would like everyone to know that I did not watch IU lose their football game today, so you don’t get to blame me for it. My wife suggested yesterday that we watch it, and I think even the bare mention of me paying attention to college football again led to the loss. I apologize to all those who are suffering.
Today featured either yet another bout of Mounjaro-related massive intestinal distress or yet another panic attack, and one way or another I have now missed six days of work in November. That is too many days of work.
I woke up this morning fully intending to go to work and was immediately hit with a wave of nausea so potent that I had to lie back down again before I fell down. If anything, I’ve felt sicker today than I did yesterday, and everyone in the house stayed home from work/school today. My wife suspects food poisoning as all four of us had Burger King on Sunday night; I’m a little skeptical as we didn’t all eat the same thing, but whatever it is, I’m fucking tired of it, and while I’ll still maintain that the symptoms (and the timing) are overlapping pretty damn well with panic attacks, those aren’t contagious.
I am going to work tomorrow if I’m not in the hospital. If I have to throw up out the window of the car on the way there, so fucking be it. I’ve already missed five days out of the last two weeks and I refuse to miss any more between now and Christmas, damn it.
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