The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
These four Tana French books are a completed trilogy and a standalone novel, and you will never guess which one is the standalone novel, and I want to have a quick sit-down with whatever filthy jackanapes were involved in making cover decisions over at Viking.
You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.
I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?
Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.
Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.
Christ.
Guess what’s happening later this week?
Let’s see. I promised a real post today, after several days of brief whines about being tired, only … really, all I did today was clear out my closet. A little bit of shopping for my son’s birthday later in the week. And I put together my parent contact log for this year, which, damn it, I’m going to use, and I’m going to use it because I’m going to be better about contacting parents.
I’ve been saying this for 22 years and it hasn’t happened; I hate talking to parents. This will be the year, though, I swear. I also dug into discipline data from last year and it turns out that my current group of kids had considerably fewer office referrals than either of the other two grades last year, which was an interesting thing to find out. Tomorrow, in between– ahem– some bouts of demolition work, I need to do lesson planning, because it turns out I do actually have to teach this week. And so it goes.
That probably doesn’t count as a real post. I guess it’s good that this is my blog and it’s up to me. 🙂
I spent my first few hours of the new school year working in my room today; as per previous practice, we don’t actually start getting paid until next week, but if I wait until the days I’m supposed to be there, there’s not going to be anywhere near enough time to get everything done that I need to get done. Adding insult to injury, Open House starts at 1:00 in the Goddamn afternoon on our second day of the three we have before school starts, meaning that the real deadline for when our rooms need to be presentable isn’t even the day the kids come back, it’s a full day and a half before that.
I made two promises to myself at the end of last year, which were that I wasn’t going back into the building before school started, and I wasn’t going to spend a ton of money during the couple of weeks heading into school, and I’ve thoroughly broken both of those promises. (Want to help me out with supplies? My Amazon wish list is here.)
We got emailed a document a few weeks ago about the district’s new expectations regarding classroom decor and classroom furniture. I’m probably not supposed to post the entire thing, but I’m really, really tempted to do so. Needless to say, it bans several things I already have in my classroom, and I’ve already purchased, as in during previous years, specifically for use in my classroom. Shit that I not only have nowhere to put at home, but is too big to fit in my car to take home even if I had somewhere to put it. I’m not joking when I tell you they apparently want me to just throw away hundreds of dollars of shit I’ve bought for my room to make it more comfortable for my students. Hell, I decided I wanted to grab an end table we weren’t using at home (it’s been living in the garage for a couple of months) to put my iPad charging station on, and technically, I can’t even bring that in.
The policy basically boils down to “You are only allowed to use the furniture we give you, and we have no intention whatsoever of furnishing your room appropriately, so suck it.” The teacher chair from the district that I replaced with my $600 SecretLab chair was broken when I got it. Is somebody going to reimburse me for all this shit I already bought, that was perfectly fine in previous years?
Yeah, I know.
I don’t think most people realize just how bare a classroom looks when it literally only has the things in it that the school district paid for. They’ve even gone so far as to ban various kinds of flexible student seating (I don’t have them any more, because the kids popped them, but I’ve had fidget seats in the room before) that are commonly used in IEPs. They’re supposedly going to have the maintenance crew go through the buildings and mark the level we’re supposed to keep our lighting at on the switch plates. The maintenance people come through every single night and set my lights to the maximum before turning them off, a level of harsh overhead lighting that I absolutely cannot tolerate. We aren’t supposed to use staples or thumbtacks to attach things to the walls any more. Our walls are specifically constructed to take staples! They did that on purpose!
(My room didn’t even get fucking vacuumed over the summer, by the way. Everything is exactly where I left it at the end of the school year. I had no reason to put anything away.)
Anyway, my AP walked into my room today to say hello, and I’d moved my couch to a spot where it is clearly visible from the door, the same couch I’m not supposed to have in my room any longer, and she didn’t say a damn word about it. I’m not sure how much of a stink I’m willing to make about this, but I’m absolutely not complying with anything until my boss specifically tells me to, and I’m trying to decide if I’m petty enough for malicious compliance to kick in if that happens.
(The document also bans, believe it or not, cast iron bathtubs from being in classrooms. Specifically. There has to be a story behind this. I want to know what it is.)
Pictured, top left: the new, correctly installed Fluidmaster 400A toilet fill valve in the toilet in our hall bathroom, which is not the one that we just renovated for the second time– this is the one that we still need to renovate for a second time. Swapping out a toilet fill valve should not take any more than twenty minutes. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself as I started doing the job earlier tonight. It took, I think, about two and a half hours– because the original fill valve was fucking cemented in place, and required a literal Dremel to remove. Then I didn’t notice that a washer had fallen out of the fill tube until after we turned the water back on and I got an involuntary shower out of it, and then there was the general fuckery with tiny, molasses-like leaks that happens every single time I ever try to do something involving water.
Now, about the pronoun “I” that I used several times in that sentence– let me make it clear that my wife did at least half and quite possibly more than half of the work, because she fits into the tiny space between the toilet and the tub better than I do, and also the killing rage took over faster than it usually does. If I use the word “I” up there, I mean it– I started the job, and it was definitely I who did not notice the fucking washer, as my wife was in the basement turning the water back on and, I think, enjoying a few seconds of me screaming before turning the water back off.
“But Luther,” I can hear you saying, “doesn’t your toilet have a shutoff valve at the wall?” Yes. It does. And it is as old as the house, and it didn’t budge when I tried to move it, and the last time we tried to shut off the water with one of these valves it snapped off, and thank God it was a plumber and not me who broke it. We weren’t fucking with that valve.
But why the quick onset of the killing rage?
Because this was not the first thing I had attempted to fix today.
We have a sectional in our living room. That sectional has a chaise on it, and the back of the chaise reclines. Or, at least, it’s supposed to– it stopped returning to vertical forever ago, and because I never sit on the chaise, it was not high on my priority list. But I told myself at the beginning of the summer that I was going to take care of it, and there are precious few days of summer left– I am backish as of Wednesday, I think, so it needed to get done. So I pulled the chaise off, flipped it over, cut a big hole in the cheesecloth underneath it, and fiddled around with things. This is the problem:
I didn’t think these things could really fail; this one has. And can I replace it? I cannot. Removing it was a piece of cake; diagnosing the problem was a piece of cake; putting this one back will be a piece of cake. Finding a new one? It is to laugh. I spent far too much time this afternoon trying to find a replacement. I could not. I put Reddit on the case. Reddit could not find a replacement either, although they were able to confirm that it is called a “gas spring.” Which helped but not as much as it should have.
MEANWHILE! My teaching license has been renewed, but because God forbid I do anything right, it’s been renewed through 2036, not 2038. I assumed that since they were letting me renew my license two years early that meant they’d add the ten years to the expiration date, not from the renewal date. Is this a huge deal? No, not really. Eight years is eight years. Renewal isn’t onerous. It’s NBD. But there was also no reason I couldn’t have waited and gotten the full ten years out of it, and I’d have quietly set the paperwork aside until then if I’d known they weren’t going to give me the full ten years. Sigh.
MEANWHILE MEANWHILE! It’s that time of year again! Want to contribute anything to my classroom? I would greatly appreciate it, as classrooms are expensive. You can also contribute cash if you use CashApp; I promise any funds received that way will be used for classroom stuff. As always, anything at all is greatly appreciated, by me at least, if not by my dork-ass students.
I had a doctor’s appointment today, and after the doctor’s appointment, I had to run over to the post office to mail a couple of packages. You will note that the post office is closed on Sunday, and while it isn’t impossible, doctors that have regular appointments on Sunday are few and far between. However, since today is Monday, neither of those things were a problem for me today.
I got a call yesterday(*) that a medication was ready for me at my local pharmacist. On the way back from the post office, I drive past my pharmacy, and I did not turn into the parking lot of the pharmacist to retrieve my medication, because it was Sunday. No more than five minutes after leaving the post office.
I’ve been talking about renewing my teaching license; I decided to go ahead and get myself set up with my required CPR certification today, since I had discovered (unsurprisingly) that I do, in fact, need to have an in-person training where I interact with a CPR dummy and can’t do the whole thing online. So I need a class, and that’s probably best done before school starts. Conveniently, there was one available next week on Wednesday, on June 29, which seemed good, so I paid for it and then opened up my calendar to put it in my schedule.
And it was good that I did that, because it is, in fact, the 27th, and typically on the 27th of any month it takes two days and not nine before it is the 29th.
EDIT: You will notice that the headline for this post says “June 27” and not “July 27.” I swear to you that I did NOT do that on purpose, and now I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in. My doctor should perhaps have checked for recent head injuries.
(*) JESUS, YESTERDAY WAS ACTUAL SUNDAY. THIS HAPPENED ON SATURDAY, TWO DAYS AGO.
That’s not a sticker.
I made multiple attempts to acquire this book through physical retail channels– I’m not sure why, but I really wanted to buy it in person– before noticing it was like 60% off or something like that on Amazon and giving up and ordering it, and it shows up with that … thing on the spine. I’m genuinely considering returning it and just reading it on my Kindle, because that’s going to bother me every single time I look at the book for the rest of time.
Maybe I’ll go to Half Price Books tomorrow and see if they have an earlier edition.
It’s been a weird damn day. I’m definitely in Okay School Can Start Now mode, and as of right now I basically have two more weeks of break. I’m going to try to not live at work during the week before school starts like I usually do, and I’m going to try to not spend much, if any, money on my classroom in the next couple of weeks either. I’ve spent most of the day obsessing about money and trying to figure out the best way to get rid of lots of my possessions. I’ll spare you the details; bog-standard Anxiety Brain at work, and for no good reason. There’s nothing bad going on; I’m genuinely in the best financial shape of my life right now (knocks on wood) but I’m going through another one of those occasional phases where I’m obsessing about The Next Car, and I accidentally figured out yesterday that I can technically afford The Next Car right now, which is not part of the plan, and I’m sticking to the Goddamned plan, which is to wait until the boy gets his license, give him the Kia, and then either lease or buy myself a new car.(*) That’s a little over a year away. I have a target in mind for my down payment; I’m halfway there, and I don’t think pulling together the other half in the time I have will be difficult– and even if it doesn’t happen, it’s not like there’s a hard deadline for something like give my son my car.
Further complicating things: he’s commented more than once that he’s not sure he wants his drivers license, which is a startlingly common affliction for kids of his generation. God could not have stopped me from taking my driving test on the first day I was legally able to. Also a potential complication: I think my dad’s car is probably on its last legs. It might turn out to be more sensible to give him my car, but that’s not something that’s going to happen on my timetable.
Forgive me; I’m thinking out loud, obviously, but hopefully typing this out will calm my brain down a little bit. I got a few things done around the house, took a shower in the new shower finally (it works!) and read about a third of the thousand-page book I started yesterday with the parts of my day that weren’t dedicated to kvetching. Tomorrow I plan on fixing the toilet and a ceiling light in the other bathroom, and hopefully I can get that done without electrocuting myself (unlikely, as I know how to turn the power off to the bathroom) or breaking the shutoff valve for the toilet … which is a bit more of a concern. I’m perfectly capable of swapping out the guts of a slow toilet, but our shutoff valves are, by and large, Not Good, and replacing those is beyond my skill. So if that fucker snaps off in my hand we’re going to have to cut off the water to the whole house and call an emergency plumber.
Cross your fingers for me, will you?
(*) Spare me, for now, any opinions on which is a better idea, although keep them in your back pocket for the inevitable moment when I have to actually make that decision, because we all know I’m going to ask for advice. It’s kind of a pointless conversation until I know what loan rates are looking like when I actually get the car.