Got home from work.
Made a pot of coffee.
Drank a large cup of coffee from my Rasta Lion mug, which is my favorite.
Immediately fell asleep in my chair.
I am not kidding when I say I am immune to caffeine.
Tag: life
I can’t believe I don’t know this
To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.
I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.
Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?
I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.
I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.
(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)
Because kids are dumb
Remember how, when we were kids, getting sent to bed early was a punishment? And now going to bed an hour earlier than normal is absolutely the greatest thing that could happen?
Anyway, guess what I’m doing.
That can’t be right
Not that my immediate family is that large, but I’m done with all Christmas shopping for my immediate family, and everyone else is pretty much gift card people. My brother will send me a list for my niece and nephew, who are too young to get mad at me for buying the wrong thing anyway, and the basement goblin will likely get cash. The tree went up after Thanksgiving and I’ve been changing the lights every time I walk into the living room just because I can.
(Seriously, Govee lights are amazing. Ignore the price; order these. They’re absolutely worth every dime.)
Anyway, what this means is that everything’s going to show up broken, or not show up at all, or I’m suddenly going to realize four days before Christmas that my wife and son don’t actually like any of the things I got them for Christmas and I’ve somehow accidentally ordered a ton of stuff for me instead. This is actually a bit of a risk with the boy; he and I have enough tastes in common that I actually rejected a gift I was thinking about for him this year because I decided I wanted it and not him. He’d have liked it, I think, but it was a little too expensive for “he’d have liked it, I think.”
I have one thing left to do for my wife, which is going to involve Doing Art, and which will be a funny joke even if I completely fuck up Doing the Art. She looks at the blog kind of irregularly, so I could probably get away with telling y’all the plan, but … nah.
How’s your shopping going?
Not today, Satan
Realized last night that I was developing a sore throat. It was worse this morning, and the winter storm meant a two-hour delay for every school district in northern Indiana and southern Michigan, so I decided just to stay home and stay in bed today so that I don’t lose a day that matters later in the week. I did find out today that we don’t have to give a final in 8th grade Math after all, which is awesome, but I’ve already got too much scheduled for the … (checks watch) … two and a half weeks I have left before Winter Break.
Still kinda feel cruddy, but I’m hoping if I go to bed soon and get 8-9 hours of sleep tonight I’ll be able to make it through the rest of the week. We’ll see.
In which I refrain
I did not buy anything this Black Friday,(*) not because of any particular moral stand or distaste toward capitalism, but mostly because nothing really crossed my radar that I wanted to buy. I did check lego.com this morning to see if there were any deals I was interested in; there were not.
I did manage to talk myself out of buying something; my wife and I have been talking about how we don’t want to get each other any Useless Crap this Christmas, and we mostly want to avoid getting the boy any Useless Crap as well. I have had my eyes on the odachi in the image above for a couple of weeks now, and I believe that I’ve successfully convinced myself not to buy it, and for the most ridiculous reason imaginable: an odachi is the kind of sword you use if you need to cut a horse in half. They are so big that there is apparently a school of Japanese historians that believe the swords were never actually used in combat at all. This particular one is 78″ long– six and a half feet.
My house has eight foot ceilings. My wingspan, fingertip to fingertip, and yes, I just went and measured, is right about 70″. There is, in other words, virtually nowhere in my house where I could unsheathe this giant bastard without worrying abut breaking things, and resheathing it afterward under any circumstances would be a challenge. Now, none of my little goofy-ass pile of weapons is ever going to see combat, fake or otherwise, so it’s not like I’m going to be doing sword practice in my living room or something like that, but if I’m gonna buy a sword that’s eight inches longer than my actual height, I’d like to be able to take it out of its sheath and swing the fucker around once in a while, and that would be absolutely impossible to do inside my house.
Which would require me to go outside carrying a six and a half foot long sword, and swing it around like a dork in my back yard, and while my lawn is fairly private, that’s not something I’m going to allow even a chance of someone else seeing. So, as sad as it makes me, no odachi for me.
(Given the price point, the sword in question is likely junk anyway, but again: I’m not buying these things for combat.)
Fun fact: the largest odachi ever forged is the fifteen foot long, 165-pound Great Evil-Crushing Blade, probably forged in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
I suspect I can’t afford that one.
(*) Upon reflection, not quite true– I impulse-bought my son an inexpensive Christmas present from what I believe is a small business. So I guess I spent, like, $15 on Black Friday, without leaving the house. Or did I do that yesterday? Hell, I don’t remember.
In accordance …
… with our most ancient and cherished traditions:
Our Thanksgiving plans got cancelled by Michigan weather, so we’re having lasagna today. I was actually looking forward to seeing a couple of people, but I’m pretty sure I’ve had worse holidays.
This again
I took a shower a few hours ago, my first since Saturday, and since my son got sick at school and had to come home early, I left the house for the first time since Friday. I have no symptoms other than “headache and sleepy,” but God, the sleepy part has been hitting like a truck. I joked a few days ago on some social media site or another– hell, it may have been here(*)– that I had a student with mono and was pretty sure I hadn’t gotten it from him, but I can’t think of anything else other than changing brain meds whose main symptom is can’t stay awake. And the brain meds have not changed.
I’m going to work tomorrow. I have to go to work tomorrow, if only because missing three days in a row will cause the children to burn my room down, and I can’t have that. But I’m going to have to find a way to make it a low teaching day, because I’m still brain-dead and somehow I feel like ten hours more sleep between now and then isn’t going to fix that.
(Pause for enormous, jaw-cracking yawn)
Yeah. Taking my clean self back to bed now. Blech.
(*) Yup.
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