Kieflies!

On November 29, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

A word that, I discover, I have no idea how to spell. But I’m makin’ ’em.

The most important thing you’re going to read all day

On July 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

JellyBellyBeans Let’s talk about jelly beans.

You may recall from a couple of days ago that we just coated the tub surround in RedGard. This is a waterproofing membrane; it goes on like paint although it has a slightly thicker consistency, and dries to a rubbery membrane. It’s supposed to be put on at a certain thickness to be effective; we lack the tool (a wet film thickness gauge) to properly determine how thick the RedGard is going on the wall and thus have been using “paint it until you can’t see the words anymore” as a handy Internet-suggested shorthand.

Six fuckin’ coats of this Pepto-Bismol lookin’ shit later, I’m ready to say fuck what the internet thinks and that this has got to be thick enough by now. Take a look at the size of the bucket in the middle picture, here. That bucket’s almost empty and every bit of that shit’s on the walls right now. The tub’s not that goddamn big; hell, I’ll do the math if I need to to figure out how thick it probably is.

(Hmm. Maybe I should just do the math…)

(Just not right now.)

Anyway. Jellybeans. There’s an Ace Hardware near our house; we tend to try and frequent them whenever we have any sort of tool/hardware/home improvement needs because hey, local business, and also because they tend to have employees who know what the hell they’re talking about and are nice about finding out if they don’t know.

We’ve had to go to Ace a lot lately because this stuff is waterproofing material and thus doesn’t really do being rinsed out of brushes very well. And we keep having to add surprise coats, thus two or three trips to Ace in just a few days to buy more brushes and rollers.

Our local Ace Hardware keeps a giant rack of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans right by the cash register.

They are demons, Ace Hardware. Demons, I tell you. Because the Jelly Bellies… I cannot resist them. And so every trip I have made to Ace Hardware for the last several days has led to me scarfing a bag of jelly beans on the way home, because why the hell would I try and wait until I was actually home? Who does that?

Anyway, on the way home on the most recent trip it hit me that jelly beans are really the perfect food of the future. I don’t know what kind of Nazi-inspired demon-magic taste thaumaturgy goes into these fuckers, but any time you hand me a little nugget of gelatin small enough to fit in my nose and I eat it and I can taste every individual element of the best cheeseburger I’ve ever had in my life, you have either solved all of the world’s problems or doomed it; I’m not sure which.

Next task is to figure out how to pack a day’s worth of nutrition into one of these little bastards and once you do that I swear I’ll never eat anything else ever again, I promise. Food pill, Jelly Belly people. Get on that.

On the marihuana

On June 5, 2014June 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics9 Comments

hqdefault Because that’s totally the more fun spelling.

Actually, personal health note first: got my bloodwork(*) back today. Everything was normal. So I’m… fine? I suspect the doctor is gonna fall back on stress as the cause, but I haven’t talked to her yet and, again, there’s nothing anyone can do about it because fuckit there’s only four days of school left.

So. That’s out of the way, let’s talk about weed. You have homework first. I’ve been involved in a minor Twitter kerfluffle about this article, which is itself about this article, which is made fun of even more in this blog post. Actually, “kerfluffle” overstates the point; it’s maybe eight posts back and forth between me and two other dudes and right now is entirely civil, but “kerfluffle” is fun to say.

You didn’t click on any of those links, so lemme sum up. Maureen Dowd, who writes for the New York Times and is therefore not very important, went to Colorado and bought herself, on purpose, a THC-infused chocolate bar. She ate a piece of it. Nothing happened, so she ate the whole thing. She then spent somewhere between eight and ninety-two hours begging for Jesus to save her from the flavor monkeys that were trying to share the couch with her. Turns out she was only supposed to eat a square of the candy bar, and she just hadn’t waited long enough for it to kick in. The candy bar had sixteen squares.

(WAIT. No, that’s not quite right. The candy bar was supposed to “be cut into” sixteen squares; I was picturing something pre-scored, like a Hershey bar. Not the case.)

Everybody else is making fun of Dowd. Whose name sounds like “Dowdy,” which means “fat and boring,” basically, so it’s like she got named just to get mocked for writing something inflammatory about weed. Basically Dowd thinks that, well, if we’re selling this shit, maybe we ought to put some labels on it or something.

“You dumbass,” everyone else is saying. “You should have done your own research on this before cramming sixteen times the safe dose of the marihuana into your mouth and brain-parts! Who doesn’t know to drink a lot of water to come down from a weed high, anyway?”

Here’s the thing, y’all. As much as I don’t like defending people who write for the New York Times, and especially as much as I don’t like defending people who are named Dowd… she’s kinda right on this one.

Weed is legal in Colorado.

Motherfuckers do not do research before they eat legal shit.

And a candy bar is a goddamn single-serving snack, and I will punch anyone who claims otherwise. If you serve me a candy bar and say “eat this to make things happen!” I am going to eat the whole thing. If I am expected to go to the entirely counterintuitive trouble of cutting my single candy bar into sixteen squares so that the weed won’t turn me into Ralphie May after a cup of Cuban coffee…

…well, then I’m not gonna have a good time, am I?

What’s going to happen now (what is already happening now) that Colorado has legalized weed is that a lot of people who might have otherwise never tried weed are going to try it, in some form or another. Candy bars are safe. I don’t smoke; I don’t know how. I know how to eat a goddamn brownie, though. Here’s how: eat the brownie.

Non Drug People are going to start making this mistake a whole hell of a lot if the dispensaries don’t start being very careful with how they package and dispense this stuff, especially comestibles. If it isn’t being sold as a single-use (I’m picturing, like, a Halloween candy sized piece; if I find out MoDo ate two pounds of THC chocolate I’ll retract this whole thing) then it needs to be really prominently labeled.

THIS IS ENOUGH WEED CHOCOLATE TO GET YOU HIGH FROM THE MARIHUANA FOR LIKE A WEEK IF YOU’RE A LIGHTWEIGHT. SNOOP DOGG CAN HANDLE THREE DOZEN OF THEM.

Just saying.

(Note: I am not a Weed Person; my experiences with weed are minimal and with other drugs nonexistent. I can totally imagine myself doing exactly what MoDo did here. I’m not going to do research before I eat a candy bar. Because that’s dumb.)

(*) Really, WordPress? You autocorrected “bloodwork” to bloodworm?

Sweet to death: spherical Oreo things!

On December 17, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking4 Comments

We’re all bringing treats to work this week; this was the experimental dessert I alluded to the other day. The recipe claims these are called “Oreo Balls;” I’m partial to “Reindeer Shit” myself. Super easy instructions:

1) Smash the hell out of a package of Oreos.
2) Fold in a package of cream cheese.
3) Roll them into tiny little balls (these are probably too big; this dessert is incredibly rich)
4) Place on wax paper on a cookie sheet; freeze for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, melt a package of chocolate chips.
5) Use a spoon to dip the balls into the chocolate, then put them back on the wax paper and back into the fridge. Eat.

One package of each thing made 30 of them and they were probably too big; I’d shoot for 40 in a batch. They were gone quickly. Good stuff.

In which I am a professional

On November 20, 2013November 20, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching4 Comments

Had an awesome couple of minutes as an educator this morning. I was up at the front of my classroom (which is at the opposite end of the room from the only door) teaching my kids during first hour when one of the 7/8 language arts teachers skipped (literally!) into the room and grandly waved a gift at me: a McDonald’s apple pie. I smiled and nodded and she left it on my desk and then skipped back out again without saying a word. I mentally filed “eat tasty treat” away on my List of Shit to Do and went on with my class.

Skip ahead forty minutes or so and my kids are (mostly) seated and (mostly) quiet and (mostly) working on their homework/end-of-class assignment and I decide that it would be a good time to eat my tasty snack treat, which was probably still warm and thus should be expected to be edible.

Allow me to pause here: as a reward for doing well on a test we took last week, one of the paraprofessionals in my classroom has agreed to bring Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to the kids in my room. He has produced said Cups this morning; the kids know they are on my desk and have been told that they will be distributed closer to the end of the period.

(If you are inclined to now begin a conversation about whether Rewards with Candy are appropriate for the middle school setting, be aware that I hear you, and that at the moment I don’t much care. This is the least of my various inappropriatenesses. Which is a perfectly cromulent word.)

I pick up my apple pie and slide it out of its cardboard box (all good food comes wrapped in cardboard) and take one single bite. A student sees me do this and asks me, rather loudly, why they don’t all get apple pies and why I get to eat in class.

I have my back to the door.

“Because I am better and more important than you, my dear,” I say. “It is my great specialness that entitles me to this tasty treat. Watch, while I eat it right in front of you.”

(Yes, I talk like that. Not always, but when the mood strikes me.)

And then I turn around.

And discover that the director of math instruction for my corporation has somehow ninjaed her way into my classroom, is standing right the hell behind me, and has a giant, shit-eating grin on her Ph.D-havin’ face.

My kids, by the way, have no idea who she is; they have about as much understanding of the higher echelons of our corporation as you did at that age. They just know an adult has busted me. Now, I’m not in trouble, mind you; I have a good relationship with this person and she wasn’t in the room to bust me or anything like that. But it was a lovely “Oh, you have got to be kidding me, November” moment to add to the tree that killed my fence and my mother-in-law’s stroke and my cat nearly dying. November fucking hates me, people, and getting fired for mocking my kids while eating preservative pastries woulda just been the icing on the cake.

She thought it was hilarious.

We talked for a few minutes about the various things she’d come to talk to me about, and then one of my kids interrupted us to ask when the hell he was getting his damn candy (okay, he didn’t swear, but it came across in the tone) and well that didn’t help either, now, did it? And since my Big Lord High Muckety-Muck Boss was in the room (as opposed to my regular boss, who I will happily threaten children in front of) I couldn’t really do anything about it.

Let me remind you that I am literally on a committee that helps retrain struggling teachers on how to do their jobs right, because I am a professional.

Oh, also I was wearing jeans. Which I do every day, but still.

Sigh.

(Later that day, during third hour, my assistant principal also managed to ninja her way into my room without me noticing. I had a better excuse this time, as I was crouching next to a kid helping her with something, and wasn’t doing anything embarrassing this time, but I seriously thought about hiring Sven again.)

In which it sucks how much this sucks

On October 31, 2013October 31, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

First things first: sent the summer teacher grant application off today, meaning that I’ve applied for nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of grants in 2013, which seems kind of ridiculous. Now we get to move into my favorite thing: waiting to find out if people will be giving me money. Cross your fingers for me, ‘k?

I’m in my office right now, hiding from Trick-or-Treaters because they’re too much of a pain in my ass to deal with.

I hate Halloween. There, I said it.

This hasn’t always been true– in fact, for most of my life Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays if not my actual favorite holiday. It was great when I was a kid, and there have been scattered moments of greatness in my adult Halloweens as well– dressing as Darth Maul right around when Episode One came out was certainly a highlight. But I am officially too old and too crotchety to enjoy this shit anymore– working in a middle school, for one thing, has ruined Halloween for me, because it turns my kids into such huge pains in the ass– and on top of that the cultural shift where “slutty _____” has become the default costume for every girl over ten years old everywhere has turned me into a goddamn puritan.

Not everything has to be about fucking. Halloween isn’t supposed to be about fucking. There should not be any such thing as a “sexy cat costume.” Cats aren’t sexy! No one thinks cats are sexy, and if we find someone who breaks the rules and does we lock them the fuck up and feel good about ourselves for it!

(Which… huh. I don’t appear to know how to link to Google Images sites anymore; Safari just puts the damn search term in the address bar. Ah, there we go, it works in Chrome: None of these women look like goddamn cats. This is what Mardi Gras is supposed to be for, goddammit, not Halloween. You wanna have a holiday called Dress Like A Stripper Day? I’m in, and I’m willing to insist that guys dress like Chippendales for it too. That’s not a cat. It’s a stripper with stupid ears.)

Also, and this is more of a personal thing, we have two huge dogs and neither of them are terribly great about strangers, meaning that we have to do whatever we can to keep the doorbell from being rung all night. We currently have our candy in a bowl on a picnic table in the driveway to keep the kids away from the dogs. Many of the children, unsurprisingly, are not bright enough to notice it– some of them will literally walk around it on their way to the front door, which I’ve done my damnedest to make look uninviting And it’s raining, which means that even if they were wearing cool costumes, and most of them aren’t, they’re covered up in raincoats and umbrellas and hoodies and shit. Sacrifice for your art, goddammit. Get some bloody waterproof makeup and show off the damn costume. Assuming you’re actually dressed as something, that is.

(Huge ruckus outside; I prepare to actually literally go tell some teenage kids to get off my damn lawn.)

(Ruckus ends abruptly as it started; I think the neighbor’s Rottweiler tried to eat someone. Good.)

Note the following: I will drop at least some of my objections to Halloween as soon as local jurisdictions acquire some goddamn sense, drop this October 31 nonsense (not one person in a hundred can explain why Halloween is October 31) and bloody move the holiday to the last Friday in October. Halloween during the week is idiotic for a wide variety of reasons, not least among which is going to be the spike in suspensions at schools across the country tomorrow.

Bah. Humbug.

In which homonyms are complicated

On October 4, 2013October 4, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Under ordinary circumstances, I’m not really the type to bribe my classes with candy. I hand it out now and again, certainly, and will use it as a minor incentive for minor stuff that they would be doing anyway. For example, we write every Friday morning; I give the kids who read what they write a Jolly Rancher. Sometimes I give them two if whatever they wrote manages to entertain me. I used to do a trivia question every week that was due Thursday; kids who got it right got a piece of candy on Friday. (You may be seeing a theme here.)

I’ve been trying to give away the same container of Jolly Ranchers for a while now, to the point where I thought they were getting old– at least to the extent that it’s possible for Jolly Ranchers to get old– and I decided that today I was finishing off the container no matter how ridiculously contrived the reason for handing out Jolly Ranchers was. Making this easier was the fact that most of my knuckleheads in first and second hour are suspended right now, so the kids were much more likely to behave than normal.

“Work on this assignment,” I declared grandly, “and I shall reward those of you who do not annoy me with these Jolly Ranchers. Perhaps more than one, if you please me greatly and are not otherwise foolish.”

(Yes, those exact words.)

Fifteen minutes later, they were noisy. “Remember, folks, Jolly Ranchers are at stake here,” I said.

…

One of my smarter kids– I swear, one of the smarter ones– puts her hand up.

“Is you sayin’ you gonna give us steak, too?”

(I’m reproducing her words precisely. She actually generally doesn’t talk like this; her speech gets more slangy when she’s expressing surprise. True story.)

For a moment, this confuses me.

“No. What? Jolly Ranchers. No steak.”

The students go insane. There is a chorus of complaints. I remain bewildered.

“You said Jolly Ranchers and steak!”

Sigh.

There has to be a factory somewhere that’s actually hiring, right?