I’m sitting alone in the office listening to the new Taylor Swift album, which I, being a man of intelligence, have not purchased yet, since she’s sure to release an extended edition with 2345 more songs any minute now.
Initial verdict is it’s okay. Not sure about the song about Travis Kelce’s dick. And apparently at least a couple of them that I didn’t pay close attention to the lyrics of are about Charli XCX and, instead of Taylor’s exes, one of Travis’ exes, which is an exciting new realm of petty for Taylor to move into.
I dunno. I feel like I should be doing something more significant than sitting in my office, listening to pop music, and waiting for a game to download, but it was an insanely long day (eight teachers out, so I not only covered a class on my prep, I doubled up my advisory too) and this might be the limits of my mental capacity at the moment. At least going to bed at 8:00 last night stopped my stomach from trying to invert itself.
That capital L was originally a typo, but I’m keeping it because it feels appropriate.
Tomorrow is my son’s fourteenth birthday, meaning that I left a building where I had been teaching 8th graders all day and came home to a house with four extra 8th graders in it. Tomorrow we are going to a local Renaissance festival, at his request.
I have officially had one of the best first weeks of school of my entire career, and am nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop. That said, if it’s coming today, it had better be fast, as I’m going to bed early as hell tonight.
Witness my latest addition to my classroom, a “boneless loveseat,” that shipped compressed into a very tiny rectangular solid and expanded rapidly into that once I took it out of the packaging. It can supposedly support 600 pounds of humanity; I can say that when I sat on it the back did not feel especially comfortable but the seat held me up just fine and I didn’t have trouble getting out of it. I’m considering a matching chair to go with it. Supposedly this thing needs 48 hours in order to completely decompress and it was almost unsettling to look at it after the first batch of expansion was done; the damn thing always looked like it was moving, but in this weirdly imperceptible way. I’m going to take another picture of it tomorrow from as close to the same angle as I can and see if it looks bigger.
This is, as you all well know, my greatest hypocrisy; I genuinely think that teachers should not spend money on their classrooms and yet I lavish hundreds of dollars on mine for fun new shit every year even before we get to the school supplies. Remember, I already bought myself a new Goddamn desk chair. That loveseat was pretty cheap as such things go, but still.
(Donated supplies have begun arriving, by the way; my deepest thanks to those of you who have contributed. The link is here if you haven’t yet and want to; if you don’t, that’s absolutely fine.)
In accordance with prophecy, our new textbooks have not arrived yet; at this point I’m fully expecting to not see them before October. I hope I’m wrong. We should’ve had the damned things before school let out so that we could familiarize ourselves with them over the summer. I wouldn’t have done it, mind you, but at least I’d have spent the summer feeling guilty like I should have and not waiting for the opportunity to feel guilty.
Anyway, I got my desk beaten into shape; tomorrow we’ll look at starting to get things up on the walls. I also got a bunch of clothes shopping done today, so I can stop stressing about that for a while. Whee!
Also, here’s what the loveseat looked like before I opened it up. Note the bankers’ box next to it, for scale.
And I’m putting this at the bottom because I’m hoping no one notices it. I’m also considering this, because I’m an idiot:
I’m not even sure where I would put it. I’m running out of floor and wall space at this point.
Logically, I was last at work just a couple of months ago, so it has to be true that I know how to exist in a world where I do not have access to a three-hour afternoon nap every single day whether I want one or not. I just don’t remember how that’s supposed to work, and I spend what feels like a huge percentage of my mental effort every day avoiding taking a nap. I succumbed today– the boy had a few of his friends over to play D&D, and I positioned myself where I wasn’t in their way but I would potentially hear if there were issues that might benefit from fatherly intervention– and apparently staying awake for that was all I was capable of today.
I have what I refer to as the “danger spot” on the sectional in the living room, but my stationary chairs in the library rarely betray me. That was not the case today, unfortunately.
So 5:30 to 8:00 just sorta vanished, and now I’m sitting here trying to remember if I had anything I needed or wanted to do this evening, and I don’t think there was, but … damn.
Forgive me a piece of drive-by literary criticism, but I’m rereading The Eye of the World again, with the end goal of eventually finally fucking finishing The Wheel of Time, and I don’t think it’s ever quite hit me just how comprehensive a rip-off the first fifteen chapters or so are of the Hobbiton-to-Bree portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, to the point where I halfway feel like Jordan had a copy of the book sitting next to him while he was writing to make sure he hit all the important bits. I’m still half-asleep and don’t really want to go point-by-point, but Christ, the number of commonalities are nuts.
There’s this weird thing going on with my incoming students where a ton of them have the same last names as people I either went to high school with or was otherwise friends with as a kid. I actually have never independently known a kid’s parents, or if I did I never had to have any contact with them.
Maybe?
That’s true, I think. Definitely never had to talk to any of them. Maybe I had one guy’s nephew, but he definitely never came to PTCs. At any rate, I’ve done a fair amount of cyberstalking this week and so far I haven’t uncovered any connections of any of these kids to anyone I know; that most likely means that there’s no relation, as none of the names are terribly unique, but I suppose I could have some distant cousins or something. I did find out that one of my mom’s oldest friends died at the end of April from breast cancer, and I’m in this weird place where I’m not actually surprised that the family didn’t get ahold of my brother or I, not least because I make it my mission in life to make myself hard to find on the internet (you can find my teaching license if you know my real name, but even that’s under a slightly unexpected combination of my name and initials), but also just because at this point I’m like a third-removed acquaintance of any of her kids and it’s just not reasonable to expect a call. I called her when Mom died, but I don’t think that necessarily transfers to them having to call me, y’know?
Anyway, point is, I’d have gone to the service. Which may actually not have happened yet, as the obituary says “at a later date.” Yeah, let me talk to you about putting “at a later date” in an obituary; it showed up in my mom’s and then Covid hit, and as of right now my mother has never had a funeral.
That, uh, isn’t quite where I meant this post to go, but sometimes the words do what they want.
Anyway, I’ve begun the annual Spending Money For My Classroom Unwisely spree, and there’s a surprisingly small box in my garage with a a vacuum-packed and possibly dehydrated Boneless Loveseat in it, and– amazingly, at my wife’s suggestion– I solved my desk chair conundrum by ordering a new desk chair for my office, with the plan to move the old one to my classroom once the new hotness shows up. I’m going to try to avoid ordering any new lighting this year, and I shouldn’t need any posters or anything, so hopefully these two big-ish purchases will be all I need this year.
(Teachers: don’t spend money on your classrooms. Don’t be like me. I make bad decisions.)
(The old chair is this chair, which I ordered a year before that post and I’ve now had for four and a half years, and if I took the time to clean the cat hair off of it, it would look brand fucking new despite me having spent at least an hour or two a day in it every day since I got it. So the new one is also a Secret Lab chair. They’re expensive, but fuck it; I’m clearly getting my money’s worth.)
(They also made my desk, which is this desk. I don’t seem to have ever reviewed it, but I love the desk too. These people own my soul.)
I finally beat Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last night, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to review it or not. I think I probably will do a full review, as the game’s failures are all of a very specific kind and I think it’s interesting. So maybe tomorrow.
We are out of town, and since my brother doesn’t want pictures of his kids on the internet, have a frame from Mega Shark Vs. Crocasaurus, which we are watching, because why not.
Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.
You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.
Anyway, point is, go do that.
Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.
Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.
(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.
EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂
… assuming, that is, that the Indianapolis police department doesn’t decide to turn the protests violent. I’m only a teeny bit worried about it; I bought the concert tickets well before the No Kings protests were a thing, and I’ll be traveling right during when most of them are going on, but I assume that particularly in a city the size of Indianapolis nobody’s gonna be super concerned with the official start and end time. I’ve never seen the Crows live, but I’ve downloaded a bunch of their shows and I’m expecting a really good show. And I’m planning on hitting the Lego store on the way home on Sunday, so Father’s Day is gonna be lit.
Last night I texted my wife and said that I wanted to go to an Italian place called Carrabba’s for dinner tonight. It’s a chain but they’re not exactly ubiquitous, so if you haven’t heard of them don’t worry about it. What you need to know is I didn’t actually want one of their entrees– they do a ridiculous carrot cake and I actually wanted some of that. Bek agreed and so the three of us headed off for Italian after she got home from work.
We walked in and immediately something felt off. We were seated immediately and made a sort of half-confused eye contact on the way to our table, then after being at the table for a moment she leaned over to me and asked if the place had seriously remodeled since we’d been in there last. I remembered the decor, but it wasn’t matching with what I had in my head. Then we got the menus and that’s when I realized it– we were in the wrong damn restaurant. So I’d said I wanted to go to Carrabba’s, and we’d gone to Carrabba’s, but what I actually wanted was Papa Vino’s, which is a much more local place (only three locations total, all within an hour of each other) that was a block away. The really ridiculous thing is that my wife was also thinking of Papa Vino’s, and had made the exact same mistake I’d had– when I said Carrabba’s, she heard that, and drove to that place, all the while expecting it to be Papa Vino’s when we walked in.
Anyway, we’re cowards, so once we’d been seated the notion of getting up and leaving was unimaginable, and it turns out the lobster ravioli at Carrabba’s is pretty good, but I didn’t get my God damned carrot cake. I mean, come on. Look at this:
So, yeah, we have to have Italian again next week, I guess.
