I’ve blogged, like, ninety days in a row or something like that, and I had a streak of much longer than that going before a long day where I literally forgot broke the streak, and I simultaneously 1) don’t care about the streak, 2) have nothing to say (this digestive thing will not go away; all I’ve eaten today is a banana, a little bit of turkey and a sandwich) and 3) am posting anyway because apparently I do care? Except I don’t.
Anyway, it’s not 8:30 yet and I legit might be in bed in a few minutes, how are you?
Sure, WordPress, I’ll drop $36K a year minimum on analytics for my hundred hits a day and the no money this blog is making me. These advertising dollars were well spent!
(I pay $90 a year for the blog. Why the hell do they think this is relevant to me?)
I’ve got nothing today, really, but I’m about to go live over at YouTube for a little while so pop on over, say hi, and subscribe. 🙂
Or: how not to speak around middle school students.
I was walking down to the office to drop off some paperwork when I saw one of the new teachers in the building having a conversation with one of her students in the hallway. Because this is relevant to the story, I will reveal that she is a relatively new teacher– second or third-year, I think– and is of an appropriate age for that, so early/mid twenties or so. Seeing her reminded me that I’ve been meaning to email her about a mutual student we have for a couple of days and I keep forgetting to do it, so I thought I’d take a moment and just talk to her in person.
By the time I got to her room, she and the student were back inside, so I just stood in the doorway until she noticed me and asked a question, using these precise words, which would prove to be her undoing: “Could I borrow you for a sec?”
You might possibly already see where this is going. To her credit, she realized mid-sentence that she was in the midst of making a terrible mistake and just … powered through it like a damn champion, not breaking stride or stammering and joining me in the hallway, where we exchanged a glance that said we will never speak of this again, other than when I run to the rest of the math team and tell them, then tell the entire internet tonight, and somehow only a small number of her seventh-grade (thank God she didn’t have any of my 8th graders in the room) class seems to have noticed.
Because the exact words that she inadvertently chose to respond to my question, in perhaps the single most awkward exchange I have ever had with a young woman in my life, were “For you, Mr. Siler, I have all the secs you need.”
First, that it is 7:30 PM, and I probably ought to blog today;
Second, that I am officially closer to retirement than I am to college, even assuming I wait to 65 to retire;
Third, that my student loans are due to be paid off four years prior to said 65th birthday, which should be a crime;
Fourth, that even if the notion of living another 20 years much less teaching for that long is difficult to wrap my head around, I probably ought to take this retirement thing seriously since I have, y’know, a wife and child in the mix now.
In case you can’t tell, I met with a retirement … dude, of some sort, at work on Friday, and several mortality-confronty sorts of things were discussed, and then this weekend I managed to keep my shit together long enough to dig through the folder that I throw anything even vaguely investment-related into and find not one but two different investment-related accounts that appear to no longer be receiving active contributions; I did some strategic scanning and sent them off to The Dude with a note attached that basically said I don’t know any of the money words, please help and we will see if anything happens. I have never really believed in retirement, to be honest; not in the sense that I don’t want to eventually quit working– I want to quit working now— but in the sense that I suspect any money I “invest” in my “future” will be stolen or siphoned off somehow before I’m able to actually benefit from any of it.
Today also included mowing, putting all my laundered clothes away like a big boy, finishing a book, starting another one, getting my grading done, writing a number of important emails, and a couple of videos recorded for The YouTubes. All in all, not bad for a Sunday.
I don’t actually think that having posted 269 days in a row on this site without interruption is much in the way of achievements, but I must admit that having that streak interrupted because I wrote an “I am too tired to post” post and then forgot to hit publish and didn’t notice until the next day is kind of annoying.
My day began with an email from my boss, and that email began with the words “I don’t know how many of you remember …” and then the name of a man who I, in fact, did not remember. The email went on to say that this man’s partner had passed away, and then gave information about the viewing or the funeral or whatever.
You don’t work with me, right? Probably not. So use your reading skills and your thinkin’ brain, based solely on the small amount of information I have given you, and answer two questions for me:
Does this person still work at my school?
Was this person included in the email sent to the staff?
If your answers were no and no, respectively, congratulations! You possess at least a modicum of reading comprehension and common Goddamned sense.
So why the fuck did I spend all day deleting emails from the reply-all brigade expressing their condolences to Mr. So-and-So, who doesn’t work at our school any longer and has not in at least three years and furthermore could not possibly read any of the emails that you were sending to the eighty people on our staff??
And to make it worse, some of the people sending the emails joined the staff after I did, meaning they were sending their personal condolences to someone who not only was not going to see the message but they didn’t know.
How did I make it through the day without losing my shit? Am I going to get a reward for this? Please say yes. Because sooner or later I’m going to strike back, and the building will never be the same again afterwards.
I had this whole post planned that depended on a certain object arriving at my house today. That certain object did not arrive at my house, and as a result I managed to just … forget that because my previously planned post wasn’t going to work, I needed to come up with a whole new idea for something to post about.
Not my smartest move, in other words.
I don’t have much to report, honestly. I think Andrew Cuomo needs to resign, but that’s probably not surprising and also not super interesting, honestly. He’ll hang on for a little while longer, I imagine, but I suspect his remaining time as governor is best measured in days and not weeks. We’ll see, though, I suppose. I spent some time in my classroom again, and I finally have my bell schedule for next year, which is not the same as my class schedule, which I’ve known for a while. (The difference: I knew I had class basically from Advisory to 6th hour and then 7th and 8th are my preps. Today I discovered that that schedule means class from 9:30 to 12:56, then lunch, then class from 1:34 to 3:00. That’s a little later than I like my lunch to be, but I’ll be having breakfast every day, I think, so I’m not going to worry about it until I have to.
Tomorrow is one of several Last Days of Summer Vacation, as I think I’m probably not going to go into my classroom, which means it’ll be the last day that I get to spend at home all day playing Dark Souls II doing prep work and lesson planning.
At any rate, that’s what I’ve got. How was your Tuesday?
This is not a post about my stupid YouTube channel, although I’m not gonna lie: it’s related. Part of the reason I started the channel with Little NightmaresII specifically is that LNII is a game that isn’t especially challenging on either my PS5 or my computer. I wanted to start off with Sekiro, but I couldn’t get the Elgato and the computer to play nice with each other, and any time I tried to stream or record anything complicated it came off really blurry and ugly with tons of frame drops and stuff like that. Little Nightmares II recorded very smoothly, so I figured I’d start with that, and then I embarked upon this ridiculous stream of minor and major upgrades to my system to get everything working the way I wanted. New HDMI cables were the first move– I have learned so much about cables in the last two weeks that it’s flat-out absurd. I had already been looking for an excuse to upgrade my desktop’s memory, since it shipped with only 8gb, so I fixed that next, upgrading to 40gb. When that didn’t make any difference, I spent last night researching the USB standard.
And … Christ.
Long story short: there are a mess of overlapping standards for USB, both the ports and the cables, and then there’s Apple’s own answer to USB, which is the Thunderbolt standard, and even that has a couple of different versions out there. As it works out, my computer has a spare Thunderbolt port available, which supposedly can push 40gb a second? That’s … a lot, so I decided to upgrade the USB cable today.
And I don’t think the story’s funny enough to recount in full, but doing that required the following steps:
Ordering a proper 6′ cable from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
Ordering the same cable in 3′ length from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
Ordering a 6′ cable from Staples to pick up in-store, then buying it and noticing in the parking lot that it was clearly not the right cable, as it advertised “up to” 500mb per second, and I don’t know how much you know about computer measurements but 40gb is literally eighty times faster than that;
Deciding I did not have the willpower to return the cable today (I’ll do it tomorrow) and checking Target again to see if they had a specifically Thunderbolt cable, as I realized that that was going to be something completely different;
Getting a yes, according to their website;
Going to Target and discovering that 1) they did have the cable I wanted; 2) the cable I wanted wasn’t the cable I wanted, as Apple sells both a USB-C male-male cable that isn’t rated for Thunderbolt speeds and one that is, and that one of those is called a USB-C cable and the other is called a Thunderbolt (USB-C) cable;
Ordering one from the Apple store on the other side of town for pick up in-store, then realizing they want appointments for in-store pick up and calling the store to 1) make sure they had the cable before driving across town and 2) making sure that I can actually come get the damn thing before my appointment, because I was doing all this while the boy was at camp and the earliest available appointment was right when I’d have to be picking him up;
Driving to the mall and picking up my cable, and then getting home and having just enough time to make sure it worked and did what I wanted it to before having to go pick the boy up. I’m quite happy to report that it looks like I’m going to be able to stream and/or record basically anything I want now, although there’s still some weird color issues with Sekiro that I haven’t figured out yet.
Slightly separate issue: the Apple store also has curbside pick-up, and in fact has designated parking spots in the mall parking lot for same, but the Apple store itself is deep enough inside the mall that getting to it from (I think) the closest available external door(*) is a 5-minute walk. Not a lot in the long term, but I wouldn’t want to be the employee who got tasked with spending all fucking day lugging shit from the store to those two parking spots. Not without, like, a Segway or something like that. It’s not remotely as hot here as it is in a lot of the country (particularly the West Coast) right now, but it’s about as humid as I’ve ever experienced, and that would be an “I quit” moment real quick for me, particularly since you know those curbside pick-up people are going to be impatient as hell.
(*) I mean, it would have to be, right? That’s where the parking spaces were. Surely they wouldn’t put their designated curbside spots next to the second closest door, although that might be giving mall management too much credit.
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