The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Today was awful; I had to put a kid out in five of my six classes, which is fucking ridiculous, and I got asked if I qualified for a fucking senior citizen’s discount while attempting to buy a whole rotisserie chicken and two boxes of cookies at the grocery.
No I do not shut the fuck up.
So yeah. Gonna go crumble to dust in my bed now.
Forced Taught the boy to shave tonight, and his shitty little 12-year-old rat mustache is no more. He is disappointed. I have never identified more closely with my own father, who I recall having precisely the same conversation with me when he forced taught me to shave at about the same age. Also, I’ve reminded myself why I abhor disposable razors, which are even worse for a novice shaver, since he didn’t really know how to hold the razor and thus did less shaving than just shoving shaving cream around on his face.
I did not die yesterday, and in fact the boy’s team did quite well, and he managed a third place (of 23) in one of his events. The team, which is loaded with sixth graders (6-8 are eligible), did not qualify for nationals, but given that 2/3 of them had never competed before (and, oh, also, I don’t want to go to nationals) I’m pretty proud of him. That said, we got up at six and didn’t get home until about 10:30, so it was a long day, and I think all three of us feel somewhat robbed of our weekends.
Therefore: video games, of course.
One of my oldest friends’ oldest daughter— go ahead, parse it, it makes sense, although I have to admit I’m not a hundred percent sure where that apostrophe should be, or if “friends” should be plural in the first place– just accepted a college offer. Also, earlier today I made reference to an old movie, and a student asked me if it came out in “the nineteens.”
I’m going to go to bed, and crumble into dust, and not worry about any of this any longer.
I thought about putting an exclamation point at the end of my age up there– 47! — but that implies a level of excitement about this birthday that I don’t really feel. Honestly, I could do without it, and I’m feeling a little bit of stress about this one that I really don’t remember being there the last few times July 5 rolled around. Maybe it’s got something to do with yesterday being the hottest day in the history of the human race, or maybe it’s just that I’m undeniably in my late forties now, with 50 staring me in the fucking face, and I feel like my sudden realization earlier today that my hobbies haven’t changed noticeably since I was nine years old is kinda hitting harder than it deserves to as well.
But fuck it. I’m 47. That’s what 47 looks like on me. There’s a video going around on TikTok right now of a woman who claims to be 28 who looks at least a decade older than me so things could definitely be worse. And it’s not like I don’t know plenty of people who didn’t make it to 47 to complain about it, too.
(EDIT: This post is auto-linking to my birthday post from last year, which I also started with a selfie. I am wearing the exact same shirt today that I was wearing a year ago. Apparently the idea of wearing red the day after the 4th entertained me both years.)
Anyway, I’m an electrician now. This has been hanging in my former dining room/ current library since we moved in in March of 2011:
It had a bunch of dangly glass things with it that we removed almost immediately, and I’ve mostly been hitting my head on it since we moved the dining table into the other room. I finally took it down and replaced it today, with this significantly simpler model:
That’s an LED ceiling light, and you can adjust the temperature of the light. Right now my wife thinks it’s perfect and I think it’s too fucking white, so we can look forward to fighting over that for forever, but I don’t need to buy those stupid fire-shaped lightbulbs ever again. I also swapped out the existing dimmer switch with a newer one that was supposed to be specifically for LEDs. This is, as it turns out, a pretty simple job all around, mostly requiring convincing yourself that you’re not going to electrocute yourself while you’re doing it. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that my house has aluminum wiring, having been built during the five-year or so period where copper was hugely expensive for some reason. There are special little boxes you’re supposed to use to connect copper and aluminum wires, but again, they aren’t complicated either; they just make the job a little scarier.
I also discovered while swapping out the dimmer that it was installed wrong, and was in fact installed without the little boxes, which is basically exactly what you’re constantly told not to do when you’re working with that type of wiring– you don’t want to pigtail them together like you would with two copper wires, because something something science science and they can spark and cause a fire. I hope to hell that that dimmer switch was installed a lot later than the rest of the house (it would make sense that it was a late addition, since, after all, it used copper wire) and I’m really hoping that I’m not about to find out that every power switch in the house is installed incorrectly. Since this went off more or less without a hitch we’re going to swap out a few other fixtures that we’ve decided we don’t like, and while we’re doing it I’ll look at the switches and make sure they’re installed right.
The punch line to all of this is that now that it’s in I’m not sure I like the new light. It’s higher in the room than the chandelier was, as you might expect, and so it throws shadows on the books and statues and various and sundry other things in the room in a way that was very different from the chandelier; you can get some hints of what I mean from that picture above, although I wasn’t smart enough for a “before” image. We’ll see; I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I also haven’t seen it at night yet, so we’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of hours.
Anyway. On to 48, I suppose. Sigh.
I have taken worse selfies, I guess.
I’m also going to keep telling the internet to send me birthday money until it actually happens. C’mon, one of y’all take the hit. Somebody out there has to have more money than sense. 🙂
I have spent my birthday recording a Platinum Trophy Guide for Return of the Obra Dinn and reading. It is hotter– or at least more humid– than Satan’s asscrack outside and I just dispatched my wife to Long John Silver’s for dinner, mostly because neither of us feels like cooking and the boy has been begging for it lately. It occurs to me that on a day like today working at Long John Silver’s might literally be the worst job in existence, so I apologize to those poor fryer-burnt bastards for anything they’ve experienced today. It has, truth be told, been a fairly regular day, which … well, 46 ain’t exactly a milestone year. 45 went pretty well, at least personally, even if the entire world went to hell. In an ideal world this next year is as good for me mentally and physically as last year was for me financially.
We shall see. On to 47, I suppose.
Honest truth: I didn’t mind the white at all, and if you’re looking at this wondering why I’ve posted a bathroom selfie, it’s because my glorious white beard is now a glorious beard something closer to my actual— uh, no, let’s say original— hair color. I’m going to be 45 in a couple of weeks, so this is probably more of a 2/3 crisis than a midlife crisis, but I bought the gel dye quite a while ago just for the sheer hell of it and then never used it, and for some reason tonight turned out to be the night.
I shoulda gone green.
I’ve mentioned that my wife broke her foot the other day. She does most virtually all of the grocery shopping. While I am perfectly capable and willing to step in and handle that job, the simple fact that I don’t do it means that it will likely take me twice as long to get the job done because I don’t know where everything is, and I’ve discussed my (getting better) issues with panic attacks while wearing masks a couple of times as well. So as soon as we discovered that we could do curbside pickup for our groceries for just $5 extra plus the tip, we decided that at least for right now that’s how we were going to handle things.
Now, they allow you to set general rules for what to do if something you want isn’t in stock. I’m not sure what the options are (she did the ordering) but basically it boils down to they pick substitutes or they don’t. Our son has some allergy issues so she decided that the best move was just to go with no substitutes, and if for some reason we’re denied something that we feel like we need I can always make a run tomorrow for a couple of things.
You may recall also that I wrote a Comprehensive List of Things I am Currently Boycotting a couple of weeks ago. One of my friends mentioned Papa John’s in the comments. Papa John’s is another sort of edge case for me; I generally avoid eating there but that’s as much because my aging digestive system can no longer handle their garlic sauce (which is absolutely essential to the Papa John’s experience; do not insult me by suggesting that I can eat their pizza without drenching it in garlic sauce) than it is because of their politics.
That said, I’ve been craving the damn place ever since reading that comment. It’s a terrible idea, so we haven’t caved, but it’s been lurking there in the back of my head.
We decided on the way home from getting groceries that we’d have pizza for dinner, as there were supposed to be two pizzas in our order. Then we got home and discovered that one of them wasn’t there, presumably because they were out of stock on that specific kind of pizza.
Damn. We briefly discuss other options, and Papa’s comes up, and I shoot it down, because it’s a terrible idea. And then I interrupt the conversation to go use the bathroom, and while I’m in the bathroom I hear my son yell for my wife from our other bathroom. And when I come out, she tells me that I have something I need to deal with in the other bathroom.
And, well, a minute or two later, after seeing what I had been summoned for, I sent this text:
If you’re thinking “Okay, this sounds like that happened, but the size of a baseball? It has to be something else.” No, it doesn’t. That’s what happened.
I have about an hour to get my affairs finished off for the evening before I begin paying for dinner.
8:45 PM, Friday May 8: 1,283,846 confirmed cases and 77,178 American deaths.
The boy is in kindergarten, y’all. Or at least he will be, once summer vacation is over.
Whoa.