Fall’s over, apparently, after a delightful couple of weeks; there’s a winter storm scheduled to roll in tomorrow that in theory could deposit as much as a foot of snow. We got our annual “Here’s how we handle snow delays” email from the boy’s school– and, as he’s an 8th grader, had a moment of reflection as we realized we were never getting another one after eleven years. We’ve been parking both cars in the driveway since March as the garage has gotten filled with bullshit, so the big task today was to de-bullshitify said garage and make it able to harbor motor vehicles again. The snowblower and mower have switched positions for the season.
You may remember that we had a synchronous e-learning day recently so that we could basically rehearse for snow days; I am entertained that one looks at least distinctly possible if not likely (“Hazardous conditions could affect Monday morning commutes” is a danger sign in a winter storm alert) and absolutely no one was warned to bring devices home over the weekend. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.
Tomorrow I am hanging the new curtains if it kills me. I will not go another day with the general public being able to see into my living room, God damn it. This may sound like it’s not much of a project, and it genuinely shouldn’t be, but I can’t believe I’ve been staring at these boxes on my dining room table for this long.
It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.
This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.
I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.
Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.
Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.
There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.
Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.
This has been a massive mess of a mental health day. It started off absolutely wonderfully, with the literal first thing I was greeted with upon turning my phone on being that Dick Cheney had died, but then featured a lunchtime panic attack that led to me calling off for the rest of the afternoon (it was all meetings, not teaching, but still,) getting home all full of piss and vinegar about getting a couple of things done while everyone else was out of the house, then doing none of that, and ending with one of my more unshakable depressive episodes lately, as I sit here watching election returns and dealing with a shitton of possibly-misplaced family and work-related guilt.
Part of me is blaming DST again. It was pitch-black before 6 PM and my mood just fell apart. Seasonal affective disorder is not usually a problem I have, and it’s worth pointing out that my day was shit when the sun was out too, but I’ve had a hard time this week for some reason.
Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.
It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.
Today? Dead quiet.
We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.
I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.
This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.
After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.
You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?
And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.
I’m going to finish the Chernow book if it kills me, and while I really don’t think it’s going to, I feel like I’m still tired from yesterday and pre-tired for tomorrow and Friday, so every time I sit down to read my brain is turning to mush.
The book is still five stars. Twain himself may have lost a star now that I know more about him.
In retrospect, I should have kept the tooth, or at least gotten a picture of it. I did ask to see it, and I was surprised at how small it was for some reason. One would think I would know how big my own teeth are! I do not.
That said, despite finding out that I was also scheduled for a filling on a tooth that I had thought the doc said we were just going to keep an eye on, the procedure was quick and more or less completely painless. I want to say something like “the shots were the worst part,” but the shots weren’t even enough to qualify as bad, since they start with numbing gel anyway, so I barely felt them. The drilling for the filling (heh) seemed like it took less than a minute. There’s been no pain post-removal, at least not yet. I’m supposed to be super religious about soft foods for at least another couple of days, so hopefully nothing dumb is going to happen between now and then.
One weird thing: we very nearly had to cancel the extraction because of my blood pressure. I also had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and my blood pressure was a reasonable 120/83. The first two readings in the dentist’s chair, despite me not feeling either especially nervous or, really, any emotional or physical symptoms at all, were an absolutely insane 173/120 and 171/123, both of which are alarmingly close to get to the hospital right now levels of hypertension. They did the filling and tested me again and it was down to 136/87, still high, but not what the fuck high. It’s crazy to me that my blood pressure can get that high without me feeling any particular sort of way while it’s going on, but had it hit that a third time they’d have had to reschedule me with an oral surgeon who could put me completely under instead of doing the extraction in-office.
Weird.
I’ve spent the majority of the day since getting home blasting through Dungeon Crawler Carl VI: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride on my Kindle; I’ve probably read over half of it today and I’m getting progressively more and more angry about how fucking good this series is. It’s absolutely unfair that something this ridiculous has this much emotional heft to it. Somebody should be in jail. It doesn’t have to be anyone affiliated with the book, as I doubt Matt Dinniman could finish the series from behind bars, so we may have to pick someone else. The President, maybe.
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