The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
For those of you who have followed previous blogs of mine during presidential campaigns: I will not only not be liveblogging tonight’s disaster, I will be as far away from it as I can.
My apologies to the three of you who were hoping I had a stroke halfway through.
More later.
It was kind of a depressing morning, and at first I thought blogging about it would be a funny story and now I’m mostly just crabby and angry, so maybe I won’t inflict that on everyone today.
The last couple of weeks, as you’re well aware, I’ve been renovating my bathroom. It’s been exhausting. All home renovation is exhausting; I’m not trying to claim uniqueness, but it’s been a goddamn tiring couple of weeks.
I went back to school today. You may remember this picture:
Every single one of those boxes, including the ones offscreen and the large pile of 60-some-odd smaller ones you can see in the distance just to the upper-right of the center of the image, has been dealt with. I know where every box but three belongs; considering there’s a couple hundred of them that’s not a bad day. I don’t think I’m going in tomorrow because administration is going to be at a meeting all day and I’m going to need a crapton of help to deal with this:
That shit ain’t a one-man job, that’s an assembly line waiting to happen, especially since I need to take over the library to distribute everything. Honestly, if I can get three or four people as backup it won’t be nearly as bad as it looks.
He said.
Now, the fun thing is, about twelve of those boxes in that top picture are for me, since I went ahead and ordered myself some supplies (note: legal, encouraged) with the remaining money that we had to burn through at the end of the year. I have to admit it: sorting through math manipulatives today, I missed teaching just a little bit, just for a little while.
Then I remembered that the lion’s share of leftover boxes are going to be used for the Cardboard Challenge at the beginning of the school year and that feeling went away, because holy shit do I want nothing to do with the Cardboard Challenge, along with any number of other things about working at a school that are not actual teaching.
It would be nice if someone from one of the jobs I applied for over the summer would call me back. Or at least it would be nice to log into one of the application sites and see that someone else had been hired. Because right now it feels like I just tossed those resumes and cover letters into a furnace and pretended that I was submitting them.
Sigh.
(No, that’s not the cover; I heard y’all. But it’s a decent placeholder for right now.)
Spent my morning finishing off the rather lengthy process of culling the Teacher Posts from Blog Previous. I had initially thought that Malumba would come in around 75000 words; after the first round– and including nothing from this site, to say nothing of original material, and there probably ought to be some— I’m at 83000 words.
Now, this is just the first cull. There’s going to be a second phase where I decide to eliminate a lot of the stuff I just dumped into Scrivener. And about 1/3 of those 83000 words are “fuck,” so at least some of those probably ought to go. But damn. You may not have noticed, but I tend to talk about teaching a bit around here, and I feel weird letting the book abruptly just stop in 2012, especially since I wasn’t writing much in 2010 and 2011 and so those sections of the book are really sparse.
What I’m getting at is that this book might end up a bit longer than I had initially intended. Which, whatever; the ebook is still gonna cost $4.95 (or maybe less) and I doubt it’ll make a ton of difference in the cost of the print edition. But man. This could be a pretty long book.
(Next step: going through this blog, then figuring out how to organize this mess, then actually editing/rewriting everything. Whee!)
I recently became aware of a Facebook group called Michiana’s Panhandler Invasion. I became aware of it because Facebook spent a while insisting that I should join it until I figured out how to convince the site’s thinkbots otherwise.
(A quick note, for the non-locals: the area on the border between Michigan and Indiana is frequently known as Michiana.)
Anyway, I suggested in a related conversation that the group might be better renamed 1300 Assholes, possibly occasionally updating their name with the most recent appropriate number, and then banished them from my mind. I have enough evil crap to deal with in there as is and I don’t need these morons or their shit clogging my brain up.
There is an intersection not far from my house where there are frequently a couple of panhandlers. Not constantly, but maybe half the time I drive past there during daylight there will be someone at the intersection, and sometimes there are two different people on opposite corners.
I drove through this intersection on my way home from picking the boy up from day care today. There was no one at the intersection, but someone had spraypainted “PICK UP YOUR TRASH” on the curb in big green letters, along with the word “LIAR” three or four times.
I am not exaggerating or lying in the least when I say that I’d rather have the panhandler than the ambulatory sack of meat trash who decided to paint that hateful shit on the curb. Fucker probably thinks he’s a Christian, too.
I hate it here.
Well… uh… the carpet looks *great*, but photographs do not do it justice. Like, my phone is showing phantom dirt, or maybe it’s got a little time machine attached to the lens that I didn’t know was there before, or something like that, and the carpet looks muddy and disgusting despite no longer being muddy and disgusting.
The grout in the entryway actually looks about the same, which is moderately disappointing.
Here; I dry-fit some of the floor tile in the bathroom today. Have a picture of that.
Tufts of dog hair and other grossness deliberately left for comparison purposes.
I actually want to start by talking about this picture; I found it, as I often do before writing a post, by idly Googling a phrase from the post to see what pops up. At thumbnail size, I didn’t read “Skill” and “Whom,” I read “Kill” and “Maim,” which caused an immediate click, and now that I’ve seen the thing at full-size I’m just as confused as hell, because 1) weird and gross and 2) inaccurate in an oddly specific way, because I don’t know that I believe anyone who would put this together would ever use “whom” in the second column instead of “who.” We’re going for middle school verisimilitude here, yes? No middle schooler has ever said “whom,” ever.
Anyway.
My wife has the entire week off, and the two of us are devoting it to Getting Shit Done Around the House, meaning a fair number of not-huge projects and at least two that definitely count as huge– including finally finishing off a project that we started a very long time ago that is quite shamefully not finished yet. We’re also planning on tearing out the disaster of a carpet in our bedroom, finally bowing to reality and crossing our fingers about the hardwood underneath.
This is the part where I pretend this might affect my posting schedule, as I haven’t missed a day in 2015 yet and I can imagine a world where I’m kept busy. This is nonsense, of course, because if we get anything done then the posting can be “take pictures of the shit we wrecked/fixed/put in.” What it is gonna screw up is the book-writin’ schedule, and tha’s not been going great anyway, so I expect to end the week even further behind than I am now, which is already Oh my god this will never get finished.
Still need to find a new job, too.
Wheeeeee Monday!
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