I’m tired, kinda crabby, and not feeling especially well, and at 8:00 I just finished my first meal of the day.
Not really thinking especially clearly, either. Y’all be good. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Tag: life
Ok let’s gooooooooo
This furry little asshole sits in my lap while I read all the time, and this is the first time she’s decided to take a bite out of one of my books. There are literally teeth marks in the dust jacket now. Brat.
Anyway, I survived the field trip and the reward party, and now I have two days of ILEARN practice tests and a Goddamned data-collecting exercise that no one is going to actually look at but we sure had better have done by Friday or there will be UNSPECIFIED CONSEQUENCES.
Bah.
Gonna go finish the book now.
Blink and it’ll be over
I’ve got 300 pages left in A Court of Silver Flames, which means that I ought to be ready to start A Court of Splintered Harmony by bedtime tomorrow at the latest, so hopefully the damned thing shows up on time, as my luck with packages lately has been absolutely atrocious. This is going to be a really weird week; tomorrow is a relatively normal day but it’s a Tuesday after a long weekend. Wednesday the 8th graders have a field trip all morning and then the afternoon is going to feature a reward party for kids who got through the first quarter without being idiots or assholes. Thursday and Friday will be practice tests for the ILEARN, and then the first actual checkpoint is next week, after an election-related e-learning day. Maybe I’ll go to the training on Tuesday and get arrested! Maybe there will be civil unrest too! Who knows.
Oh, and we have parent-teacher conferences for the boy on Thursday and a meeting with a lawyer on either Wednesday or Friday. (Adulting stuff. Nothing to worry about, but one more thing in the context of the rest of the week.)
One way or another I’m hoping the next fourteen days soar by, and this week is going to be fast no matter what, I think. We shall see.
Still dying, sorry
Had easily the worst intestinal distress of my entire life this afternoon, to the point where I was close to summoning an ambulance, something I never thought I’d do for diarrhea. I have been in bed ever since. Parent/Teacher conferences are tomorrow so it would be a really bad day to miss work, but it may have to happen. Sigh. October has been kind of shit so far, no pun intended.
I’ve been napping all day
Did I miss anything? I’m going to assume not.
Two quick stories
I went to work today! I still feel like butt.
QUICK STORY 1 of 2: I walked to Bree! Sort of. Every so often an ad for this app called The Conqueror will scroll across some social media or another, and I finally decided to bite and try the first Lord of the Rings challenge they offer. The idea isn’t super complicated: walk 145 miles, over whatever time frame you personally desire. You get access to an app that helps you keep track of your walking and after 145 miles they send you a medal that says you walked from the Shire to Bree. There’s a little miniature ring inside that envelope on the back of the medal. There are several more of these, of varying lengths; the next one takes me to Rivendell, and eventually all the way to Mordor itself. There’s also one that lets you follow Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas’ road instead, or you can do all of them. I just signed up for the one at first, because there’s a cost to it and I wanted to make sure the medal felt like it wasn’t a piece of junk, and it’s not. It’s a decent little display piece, and it’ll look even cooler with seven friends on it. So: off to Rivendell!
QUICK STORY 2 of 2: I had my first real referral of the year today, for something I’ve never written a kid up for before: starting a fire in class! With a lighter he’d managed to kludge together by stripping some wires on a vape! I would be impressed with his ingenuity if it wasn’t being used in the pursuit of such sheer stupidity. He rolled up a piece of paper into what looked like a joint and lit that, so it wasn’t a big fire, but as it turns out that’s not an especially salient detail when you set a fire in a school. Even small ones are a problem! You’re not supposed to do that.
NOT A STORY BUT I’M INCLUDING IT! I’m reading this book right now, and this is easily the prettiest author signature I’ve ever seen:
I really want to see the fountain pen she used. That had to be a fountain pen.
Scammers make no sense at all
I always have the weird urge to fuck with people whenever I get a wrong number text message, and this was waiting for me when I got out of the shower earlier today. I almost responded with the literally true “No, I just got out of the shower” to that first message, and then decided I wasn’t in the mood to troll a stranger and just played it straight, expecting either no response or a quick apology and then radio silence. Instead, I got this interaction, which just gets weirder with every message.
Why did you send Emma a selfie of you already at the gym?
Why did you ask me to confirm I wasn’t Emma, when I’d already told you twice? Was there a chance that I was going to turn out to be wrong, and realize I had been Emma all along?
What’s the deal with “work” coming through as “wr ok” both times? And “numbver” twice?
And I made sure to include the timestamps on the rest of the messages, because the timing was so weird. There’s an hour between “How should I address you?” and “You haven’t answered my question,” and then another 40 minutes between that and Emma showing up, nearly two hours after the original message. Nothing about this interaction feels normal at all, which makes me feel like it has to be a prelude to a scam, but this is not the first time that I’ve felt like I was on the path to being scammed by someone and, bewilderingly, never actually got to the part where the scamming happened.
(Follow-up to that story: I did eventually get a response from the real editor on LinkedIn confirming that no, that message was not from her, and I got a whole different message from a different scammer a few weeks later which I replied to with total credulity, hoping something fun would happen. No response to that one either.)
Anyway, I dunno. Maybe Mia’s older than she looks and English isn’t her first language and she’s maybe friendlier than she ought to be and that’s why everything feels so off, but I kept waiting for the part where she hits me up for $500 for a picture of her tits or something, and instead it just sorta trailed off. If anybody has a good idea about what the hell was going on here, or wants to try to convince me that this was a normal interaction that I’m reading too much into, feel free.
On frugality
Just got back from an impromptu date night with my wife, which ended up, as I suspect many middle-aged date nights have, at Costco.
(Trigger warning: mild bragging, or at least a failure of humility)
The first thing you see when you walk into a Costco, of course, is the giant TVs. None of us really watch television, to be honest, and what TV is watched is generally done on a tablet; the TVs that are in the house are there for video games. But we glanced at the $2000 98″ set at the door and, as happens sometimes when encountering high-end electronics, I took a minute to reflect on how much better off we are now than when we got married.
“I could impulse-buy that TV,” I said. “Right now. Absolutely nothing bad would happen. We wouldn’t have to cancel anything or even cut back on anything. Just, fuck it, and buy a $2000 TV.” She laughed, we did not impulse-buy a $2000 TV, and we kept on walking. And, like, okay, there was no chance that we were buying a TV, but if we did, the actual problem with it would be where to put it, and not the cost.
Less than a minute later we walked past the saddest man in the world, some poor bastard who was trying to sell whole-house generators to random Costco people walking by. He greeted me, I said no as politely as I could, and then my wife surprised both of us by stopping and asking him what the basement price was to acquire such a thing. The hilarious thing was that it was completely obvious that no one had asked him anything during the time that he was there, as he took way too long to come up with an answer, which was ten thousand dollars, and then went straight into complaining about how two years ago it would have been five thousand dollars, and it was crazy how expensive his product that he was trying to sell us had gotten.
After we were done talking to him, my wife reminded me that we do, in fact, talk about having a generator installed every time our power goes out, which generally happens about once a year. So, okay. Ten grand, if we wanted to do that. Put that in the back pocket for now, though.
A few minutes later we were in the produce aisle, and I discovered they sold organic dates. The last time I had dates of any variety was in Israel, nearly thirty years ago. I would like to eat a date, I thought to myself, trying to ignore the fact that because we were in Costco the only real option would be to buy many dates and not just the one or two that would probably satisfy me, and then looked at the cost. $10, basically, for, I dunno, a couple of pounds of dates.
And I, the same dude who had just discussed impulse-buying a 98″ TV and had just had a serious conversation about a $10,000 home generator system (likely more than that, because remember, $10K was this guy’s floor,) almost put them back because the notion of spending $10 on dates was more than I was willing to do.
We bought the container. I look forward to throwing 95% of them out in a week or so. Or maybe longer. Hell, I have no idea what the shelf-life of organic dates might be.