Tag: furniture

As per your previous request

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I was asked after posting about my boneless sofa to remember to post a video next time. Today is next time! I now have a boneless sofa and a boneless chair in my classroom for my kids to sit in while they read.

They don’t read, mind you, but whatever. I’m an optimist, dammit.

Also, I’m not entirely sure why iMovie decided to change the aspect ratio of the video, but I’m not concerned enough about it to go back and fix it.

Meanwhile, I have survived my first full day of work for this school year without any particular drama or stress, although I do think the 2 1/2 hour faculty meeting we had this afternoon was, in a lot of ways, the wrong faculty meeting. In particular we had a dreadful half-hour or so where we got way too deep into the weeds about a hall pass policy that the seasoned teachers took one look at, realized it would never work, and immediately resolved to ignore; the less experienced teachers asked two hundred and forty thousand “well, what about this?” questions, causing no small amount of suicidal ideation among those of us who have been around the block a couple of times.

(We have new APs, and two of them are new-new, not just new to us; this has all the hallmarks of an idea put forth by someone with their heart in the right place but no sense of how an initially-reasonable-sounding plan might scale to a building with hundreds of kids and dozens of teachers. It’s kind of cute, in its way, and I can imagine our principal pushing back mildly against it a bit and then shrugging and saying “Give it a try and we’ll see,” knowing full well that a bunch of us were … well, gonna take one look at and resolve to ignore it. I’m not mad about the plan, necessarily, just that it led to a half hour of increasingly obvious hypothetical questions. Y’all have been in meetings, you know how it goes.)

Anyway. My wife and son both had to go out of town today to take my brother- and sister-in-law somewhere, so they won’t be back for a few hours; I’m gonna go play Wuchang: Fallen Feathers until they get back. I really will post classroom pictures tomorrow, I promise.

On setting my money on fire

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching3 Comments

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.

Secret Lab Chair 2: The Relabbening

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ReviewsLeave a comment

On the right, my five-year-old chair. Or the middle, if you’re counting the half of my wife’s inferior desk chair that you can see. On the left, the new hotness, ready for duty.

Again, I haven’t bothered to, like, dust, or de-cat-hair or anything like that, but the old chair is still in perfect shape, after five years of daily use. I couldn’t be happier with this company’s products, y’all.

Down, down, to Goblin town

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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.

In which I am masculine

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

The highlight of my day involved replacing a malfunctioning switch on my sectional, a feat that I was able to accomplish without swearing even once. We are not going to mention that this is a task that could be performed by a talented child. Just be proud of me, dammit.

Other than that, I’ve been reading and playing games. You?

Getting there (house update)

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

New sectional, sitting on the new carpet:

Former dining room now has comfy chairs in it, although it’s not quite ready for prime time yet:

You can see the shape of what we’re getting at here, I think, although there’s still work to do and not everything is in its final place. The chandelier is getting replaced with more appropriate lighting, the table in the corner is going away, we need to a rug and some side tables into the room, and many of the books will end up being moved to the as-yet-unordered new shelving going in the living room.

And what will eventually be the dining room:

This room needs a lot of work before it looks like a dining room, obviously, and a number of the things in here are going to end up in the former dining room, but again, you can get the idea we’re going for, more or less. This room needs the most work but I think we’re going to be really happy with it once we’ve moved beyond the “table in the middle of what is obviously not a dining room” stage.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. Prrrobably no post tomorrow,(*) although who knows, and there will definitely be no videos up at YouTube, because I’d have to have them recorded by now and it’s already 9:00. So see you on Black Friday.

(*)I’m sure I’m lying. Every time I say anything close to “I probably won’t post tomorrow,” I end up posting anyway.

A brief update on the status of my wallet

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

We put in new carpeting last week; you know that if you’ve been around much. Since then we have decided to radically rearrange all of the public-presenting rooms of the house; the former dining room has become a reading room, the “fireplace room” that we never really settled on a name for is due to become a dining room as soon as our dining table is no longer three feet deep in books, I have a meeting tomorrow with someone about custom shelving in the living room, and another meeting with someone else about some minor renovations in the former-dining-room-now-reading-room, and tonight we went out and bought a new sofa. We got it as a three-piece, so it’s a sofa with a chaise and not the wraparound sectional that you see there, but it’s in that charcoal color and I love it.

I may need a second job.

#REVIEW: Secret Lab Titan XL Gaming Chair, One Year Later

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading4 Comments

Just about exactly a year ago, I ordered a new office chair. Or, at least, it arrived just about exactly a year ago; the actual order was a couple of months before that. My old chair was starting to fail after ten years of daily use, and I figured it was time to upgrade, and given the fact that I was working from home and spending 8 hours in the chair every day, I figured dropping a decent chunk of cash and going for a Secret Lab chair would not be an unreasonable use of my money. I have now sat in this chair for hours, basically every single day, for a year; if I were to estimate 1000 hours of sitting time (keeping in mind 40 hours a week from the end of January through April, mind you) that would probably be a conservative estimate. That picture is without any attempt to make the chair more presentable; looking at it now, I probably could have cleaned off the seat a bit, but you get the idea.

And here’s the review: a year later, the $600 or so I spent on this chair was worth every dime.

Storytime: this post, and I swear this is true, was actually inspired by a dream I had last night, where I, no shit, realized I’d had the chair for about a year and decided to review it again, only to discover that the seams were fraying everywhere and all of the leather was starting to peel and my expensive-ass gaming chair was starting to fall apart. And I was unhappy! I do not want anything I own to fall apart, especially when I haven’t even come close to getting my money out of it yet.

(My dreams really are this boring. Yes. I dreamed about the blog.)

Anyway, you may see on your own where the dream diverged from reality a bit; the biggest way is that there’s no leather on this thing, fake or otherwise, and as near as I can tell if I took a few minutes to clean the cat hair and (ugh) beard dandruff flakes off of it it would effectively be indistinguishable from a brand-new chair. It took me a while to figure out exactly how I wanted to set it up, as every single piece of this chair can be adjusted, but once I got there it’s consistently been the most comfortable desk chair I’ve ever sat in, even if I still am absolutely unable to recline in it like they keep doing in all the ads. There are definitely examples of Expensive Things out there that don’t live up to the hype– as an Apple guy, I would know– but this is not one of them. I’m glad I made the decision to buy it, and I expect to be sitting in it for a long, long time.