Tag: busy

Blink and it’ll be over

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’ve got 300 pages left in A Court of Silver Flames, which means that I ought to be ready to start A Court of Splintered Harmony by bedtime tomorrow at the latest, so hopefully the damned thing shows up on time, as my luck with packages lately has been absolutely atrocious. This is going to be a really weird week; tomorrow is a relatively normal day but it’s a Tuesday after a long weekend. Wednesday the 8th graders have a field trip all morning and then the afternoon is going to feature a reward party for kids who got through the first quarter without being idiots or assholes. Thursday and Friday will be practice tests for the ILEARN, and then the first actual checkpoint is next week, after an election-related e-learning day. Maybe I’ll go to the training on Tuesday and get arrested! Maybe there will be civil unrest too! Who knows.

Oh, and we have parent-teacher conferences for the boy on Thursday and a meeting with a lawyer on either Wednesday or Friday. (Adulting stuff. Nothing to worry about, but one more thing in the context of the rest of the week.)

One way or another I’m hoping the next fourteen days soar by, and this week is going to be fast no matter what, I think. We shall see.

An unfairly busy day

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I had to get to work half an hour early, because I had a ton of shit to bring into my classroom to get ready, burned my entire prep on getting ready for a meeting after school, said meeting lasted an hour and a half, left work and drove directly to my son’s band concert at his school, carefully threw McDonald’s down my neck so as to not aggravate either my tooth hole or the sore that has developed in my mouth from a bad reaction to the numbing shots (super fun), spent over an hour on working on stuff for class tomorrow since I’m being observed during 2nd hour and she wants lesson plans for some reason, like, ma’am, I’ve been doing this for 22 years and it’s all muscle memory by now, I don’t write lesson plans, and now it’s 8:44 and I’ve written a single-sentence blog post and I’m going to go talk to my family for a few minutes and then go to bed.

Oops

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I damn near forgot to post today, what with doing all sorts of accident-related adulting early in the day, my son having a friend over for the whole afternoon, and then a Trunk & Treat at Hogwarts filling up my evening. I also managed to squeeze in some reading, my Arabic, and finally putting Black Myth: Wukong to bed, although I think I’m going to play for a bit longer to get the platinum on it. I’ll probably do a full review, but the short version is “It’s pretty fucking awesome and you should play it.” That said, the reports of insane difficulty on the final boss and the final optional boss are a little overstated. Erlang took maybe half an hour and The Great Sage’s Broken Shell maybe an hour, neither of which qualifies as enormous difficulty in my book, especially since the strategies needed became clear pretty quickly and it was just a matter of putting everything together.

Just, y’know, forgot the website until 9:00. Sorry!

Not tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

Writing tomorrow’s lessons took a thousand years, and I still have to do postcards and Arabic tonight, so … yeah.

Wanna watch a Pearl Jam show?

EDIT: Well, shit. They haven’t, like, blocked me specifically despite what the statement says. Just click through, it’s a good show. 🙂

In which life has other plans

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Got home at 4:30, wrote a practice test, went to a thing for my kid’s school until 8, now I’m home, with one more test to write before I can sleep, and today was a heavy teaching day. Tomorrow will be too, and so will Wednesday. On the plus side, after Wednesday, I’m effectively done with teaching for the year, although there will be a few more days of school left.

So yeah. This is what y’all get tonight. Hugs!

This one’s not my fault

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Did I mention I was a union rep again? Well, I am, and I had a meeting after school, so I didn’t get home until after 6, and then I had to eat something because diabeetus, and then we had to go pick my car up and hey did you know that the Kia Soul apparently has some sort of funky battery that doesn’t jump the same as other batteries and also costs a hell of a lot more, and if you’re thinking “Hey, Luther, that sounds fishy, you should look into that!” then you’re absolutely right I’m going to do that, and then I had to grade some tests and write some assignments and some emails, and now it’s 9 goddamn 13 and I’m going to bed so I can do it all tomorrow and Christ am I tired.

Not making that mistake again

On By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

Lots to do today: some recording, some putting-together of furniture, moving around other furniture, some minor bits of shopping, every item of clothing I own has been washed in the last couple of days and needs to be put away, four days of lesson planning (lucky for me, I got caught up on my grading before leaving work on Friday,) a loose plan for the weeks between now and ILEARN because I feel like as soon as I actually internalize when ILEARN is it’s going to start causing panic attacks and I need my numbers to look good so I probably ought to start getting ready, and whatever the hell else it occurs to me to do to procrastinate about starting all of that. Also eating, showering, and the various other tasks necessary to keep my shambling mass vertical and non-odoriferous.

Also I think I’ve decided it might be time to redo the look of the site. I like this one a lot but I’ve been using it for a couple of years at least and it’s time to freshen things up a bit.

What are you doing with your Presidents’ Day? (Probably nothing, I realize this. It’s a dumb holiday.)

In which I don’t have time

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I’m teaching myself Arabic, finally fulfilling a promise I made to myself when I dropped out of the class a couple of weeks into my freshman year of college. I’ve been using Duolingo fairly religiously and I just bought a “basics” type of textbook, and looking at the image above I can almost parse some letters? Regular Arabic writing is complicated enough for the unskilled Westerner; Arabic calligraphy is a level of insane that I am not yet remotely prepared to deal with. I am aware that English calligraphy is probably harder to decipher than regular English print, but Arabic doesn’t have print, and each letter has three forms depending on where it is in the word, plus the several letters that English has no equivalent for in the first place, so I feel fairly confident in asserting that there is a real difficulty difference here.

I mean, it’s not Russian cursive, which is apparently not a hoax, somehow:

I mean … come the fuck on. I believe Arabic calligraphy is words. I don’t know that I can really convince myself that that shit is legible script to anyone, Russian-speaking or not.

Anyway. Point is, between lesson planning, blogging, eating dinner, learning an extraordinarily difficult foreign language for no Goddamn reason, trying to record a little bit of YouTube video, and, oh, right, interacting with my family, my evenings have been feeling unreasonably stuffed lately, which I think has been a major contributing factor to 1) how brief my posts have been and 2) how late my posts have been, as it’s currently 8:30 PM and I’ve just stopped writing to stare at my phone for ten minutes. I’m not complaining, as I’m still more or less enjoying all these activities and it’s not like Winter Break isn’t right around the corner, but … man.

There’s a lot going on.