In which that was the right move

On April 18, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

My CPAP still isn’t working properly, so last night I stuffed earplugs in my ears, took three Tylenol PM and slept so hard that somehow at some point during the night I pulled the hose out of my mask and didn’t wake up. I would have called that impossible before yesterday, as it’s both loud and suddenly even more difficult to breathe than normal, non-CPAP-assisted prone breathing is. And I slept until nine, which hasn’t happened in long enough that I don’t remember the last time I slept in that far. And then I spent the entire day hanging out with my son and reading, and I’m currently at peace enough with the world that my district sent out the internal transfer list and I only very briefly glanced at it, which I would have done anyway, because that type of thing is always fun.

We need way, way too many math teachers in my district right now, and I have a sneaking suspicion I’m going to end up with another Goddamned overload next year. Which I’m of two minds about. It means another year with no breaks– remember, I walk into my classroom at 8:00 AM and I’m supervising kids until 3:20 with no pauses of any kind– but it also immunizes me against getting asked to cover anyone else’s classroom on my prep period, which I absolutely hate doing.

But whatever. There’s six weeks of school left– and the next two ought to fly by, since we’ve got state testing– and then I’ve got summer break to recenter myself. I needed today. Hopefully I can go into Monday with a better attitude.

As little as possible

On January 13, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Today’s activities included:

Far Cry 5;
Reading King: A Life, the newest biography of Dr. King, which is real interesting so far (I’m 100 pages in, which more or less covers his life up until marrying Coretta.)
Dassit.

Tomorrow will feature clearing the driveway of snow and Lego, hopefully in that order.

Spring breeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaakkkkk

On March 29, 2019March 29, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I expect to spend 80% of the next nine days in this chair, and if I have to leave the house more than, oh, four times I will be upset.

Too tired to think right now; reg’lar bloggery resumes tomorrow.

On doing nothing of value

On June 15, 2018June 15, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Stuffed-Animal-VACATION0616 I’ve actually stayed pretty busy the last couple of days– I had the classroom portion of my CPR renewal class to attend yesterday and spent most of the rest of the day scanning dozens of documents and uploading them to the Indiana Department of Education’s slow, overworked server so that I can get my teacher licensure renewed. This is the first time I’ve ever had to do this, as moving to Indiana meant I could let my Illinois licensure expire and my Indiana license was a 10-year.

This doesn’t change anything, mind you; I still have no plans to return to the classroom, but letting my license expire still seemed like a kind of terrible decision anyway. I’m waiting for a bunch of recalcitrant ducks to get themselves lined up properly at the moment so that I can finalize everything, but in between now and then there is the World Cup to distract me– I’m sitting on my sofa with my laptop and watching soccer right now– so I’m pretty content.

I am taking next week off from work. I am not doing this for any particular reason other than five things managed to piss me off in the first half hour of my day on Monday and I get two weeks of paid vacation this year. I looked at the calendar, this upcoming week hadn’t been claimed by anyone yet, and so screw it– mine it was. I’m actually going to go in for a few minutes Monday morning after dropping the boy off at day care because I have a pre-established appointment that is going to result in a (possibly somewhat sizable) sale, but after that I’m not going back in until the following Monday. And frankly, with Sunday being Father’s Day, I don’t plan on spending a lot of time at work on Sunday either. So I basically have a full shift tomorrow, part of one on Sunday, and maybe an hour on Monday and then I’m off for a week.

Plans include Dark Souls, working out a short story that is trying to pound its way out of the inside of my skull, soccer, and … that’s it. At some point the family and I will go see Incredibles 2, which I’ve been eagerly anticipating for years. But that’s all.

I’m pretty psyched about it, to be honest.

On palate cleansing

On April 14, 2017April 14, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Television2 Comments

I went back to bed after I got home from dropping the boy off at school– for several hours– and I’ve spent most of the time since then binging the first season of Into the Badlands.

I’m content with the world at the moment, in case anyone was wondering.

Some random thoughts and also I build a toy

On July 28, 2016July 28, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories2 Comments

Stayed up last night and livetweeted the convention up to the point where Tim Kaine’s speech finished; I’m always amazed that I don’t have a ton of unfollows during these things, as I tend to tweet a lot when I’m watching anything remotely political. But no! Only six people all day yesterday, which is a perfectly normal number. I ended up liking Tim Kaine more than I thought I would– a thought that I think my Twitter feed shared. There was a lot of making fun of him going on but it felt affectionate, if that makes any sense, and dude has succeeded in making his stupid Donald Trump impression worm its way into my brain– meaning that every time the idiot says “believe me” again, people are going to hear Kaine doing it. He’s like Ned Sanders, but with a really sharp knife, the kind where you don’t realize anyone cut you until your head falls off. I still would have preferred several other options, but I’m starting to think I can get to like this guy.

Anyway it’s my day off and I decided to build the Millennium Falcon. Legos have gotten fucking complicated, guys.

That’s a lot of bags. They are labeled 1-8, but several numbers have more than one bag, some of the bags have other bags inside them, and one bag has no number on it at all. There’s maybe 12 outer bags. That is one big-assed instruction manual. I got through about 90 pages of it before deciding I’d had enough for the morning.

This is the part where I realized I’d screwed up for the first time, as you really need to pay attention to the colors in the instruction manuals and the right pieces were inexplicably in the unlabeled bag. At any rate, you start by building the superstructure of the thing and I made mine too short.

There, that’s better. As it worked out, this was my only big mistake, or at least the only one I’ve noticed so far. The engineers for these things are crazy people and the people who make the manuals are crazy geniuses.

Adding the floor.Finishing the first step of the build with some work on the underside. This is crazily complicated already. All of this was the first bag, by the way. On to the second bag. We’re making progress! The end of Bag Two, which was mostly furniture and detail stuff. Also, I got to put in some decals.

The end of Bag Three. Which, weirdly, doesn’t look all that different from Bag Two at first, until you look a little closer.

And here’s the end of Bag Four, putting me halfway through the build. At this point I realized my eyes were bleeding and decided to be done for a bit. There are at least two more minifigures in the bags somewhere, because I haven’t found Rey or BB-8 yet. The first four bags took about two hours, so I’ll probably end up finishing this tomorrow. Whee!

A roller skating blog named Saturdays

On July 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Let’s see. It’s 11:19. Meeting my family at the zoo at noon, birthday party near the zoo for one of my wife’s co-worker’s kids at one, work at OtherJob at five, need to cram a couple of meals in between now and then… I need to get just over four thousand words written today and tomorrow to not fall farther behind than I was at the beginning of the week… oh, and theoretically we’re going to start tiling soon.

It, uh, may be a quiet day around here? A quiet weekend? Maybe I’ll post some pictures from the zoo.

Have I mentioned that The Benevolence Archives, vol. 1 is only ninety-nine American pennies now? You should check it out, either at Smashwords or Amazon.