So.  Yeah.  The Walking Dead.

I’ve read the comics, right?  Got all nineteen or however-many-there-are trades on a shelf in my living room.  So I was already pretty familiar with the ongoing storyline and had a pretty good idea of What Was Going to Happen in this mid-season finale.  In fact, I’ll go this far:  if you’d have asked me to describe, beat-by-beat, what was going to happen in this  episode, I’d have gotten damn near everything right.  I was expecting one person to die who didn’t.  That’s it.

And it was still one of the best goddamn hours of TV I’ve ever seen; my pulse was still noticeably elevated hours later.  And it was positively unsafe at several points during the actual show.  Wow.

(And, as much as it surprises me to say this, bonus points for bringing back “Where’s Carl?” for the first time in, like, a season.)

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My kids took the second Acuity test of the year, which is supposed to be a low-stakes look at how they’re doing and how on-target they are to pass ISTEP at this point in the school year.  I’ve found previous iterations of Acuity to be pretty useful, so I emphasize with my kids that I want the test taken seriously, and generally they do.

It takes a bit of time for the results to come through.  Right now I have data on two of my three classes.  One has generally shown pretty good progress.  One has backslid pretty substantially since the first test– i.e., the kids are getting lower scores than they got in August, which is kinda the opposite of what I want.  Unsurprisingly, the special ed class is the climbers and the class with the big behavior problems is backsliding.  I’m not terribly happy about it but at least my suspicions are confirmed.  It’ll be interesting to see if a few weeks without Jihad lets me correct that or not.  I’m betting that it will.

Either way, I’ve got some work to do.  There are numbers to be crunched!  Wheee!