I’m back (also, I left)

Luther M. Siler4 Comments

I actually missed a day of iLEARN on Friday, as my wife’s aunt passed away; funerals are genuinely just about the only reason I can see myself taking a standardized testing day (especially a math standardized testing day) off, and, well, it happened. Yesterday and today I was in Chicago at my nephew’s birthday party. I have discovered something about my brother that has changed since he married his wife: if he describes something as a party, I am to take that shit seriously, and assume that it’s not going to be six family members I’ve already met. It’s gonna be twenty people and a bunch of kids and since I officiated his wedding they’re all gonna come up to me and go hey, nice to see you again, how have you been? and because I’m a social coward I’m not going to look any of these epos in the eye and dare them to produce my name.

(Everyone was perfectly nice, to be clear; her family is great, as far as I can tell; my brother married very well. That said I was not prepared for a ton of loud noise and adult mingling.)

Anyway, the point is my ass is tired, and on top of all this there’s some other shit going on where either I am a colossal idiot or my doctors have been seriously misleading me. All of this has eaten up all available headspace that I’ve got at the moment, and I still need to put lesson plans together for tomorrow, and after that I’m going to bed. My own bed. Granted, hearing the phrase “We’ve upgraded you to the presidential suite” Saturday night was pretty cool, but not cool enough that I took any pictures, and my bed is always better than a hotel bed.

So, yeah. I’m home. And I’m tired. How’re you? Anyone want to recommend any low-carb meals by any chance?

Just shove me underneath my desk

Luther M. Siler

I discovered last night that there are some major drawbacks to my CPAP machine; namely, now that I’ve gotten used to the fucking thing I can’t live without it. The power went out last night around 9:00 PM, interrupting a blog post and half a dozen other things because I was not ready for bed at nine. I read for a little while (not a problem, actually, as I generally wear a reading light around my neck and charges last forever) and then tried to go to sleep, only to be met with a dream about not being able to swallow, which … is not the key to a restful night.

And then at about 1:00 in the morning, wham! Every fucking light in the house goes on at once when the power comes back on, including the ones that were off and we accidentally turned on while turning “off” the lights, and including the ones that we didn’t realize were on when the power went out, including every single fucking light in our bedroom for some reason. So I got about four hours out of my CPAP after maybe three hours of massively un-restful sleep and I was a fucking zombie all day as a result.

Every single class today started with me telling my kids that I was half dead and in a tremendously bad mood and that that part was not their fault but how they reacted to it would be, and I got gentler behavior than usual from all but one class. I am still, hours later, a mess, and only a vast amount of work that needed doing has kept me from going to bed early tonight.

Oh, and apparently one of my subs yesterday just, like, passed out in front of the kids. He was back at work today, so I guess he’s okay, but man, everybody wanted to tell me about it. Maybe my room’s cursed? I dunno.

Free advice

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

If, after a reasonably relaxing six-and-a-half hour sleep cycle, you nearly die on the highway on the way to work because 1) somebody parked their car in a really shitty place on an offramp and oh also 2) you’re honestly fighting falling asleep for basically the entire drive, and then you get to work and, bleary-eyed and brainless, try to open your classroom door with your keycard badge, which, uh, doesn’t work on those kinds of doors, just go home. The day is not going to get better.

I also screwed up solving a problem on the whiteboard for my first hour class, only not only could I not find my error, neither could the entire class, and we sat and stared at it as a group for probably ten minutes. Turns out that, while 1.5 is half of three, that doesn’t mean that 3/1.5 equals 1/2! It equals two.

One grown adult, fifteen honors students, and it took me until lunchtime to figure out what I’d done wrong. I definitely should have given up and gone home after first hour.

Not tonight

Luther M. Siler

I am absolutely and undeniably going to die if I’m not asleep within, like, two hours at the most. Today was not a bad day by any stretch of the imagination but it’s been a minute since I’ve had to get up and actually do anything, much less something starting at 7:30 in the morning, and I am about ready to fall down. Have yourself a lovely evening; I’m going to go learn some Arabic and read a little bit and then it’s 8 hours of sleep tonight or bust.

(Remind me to talk more about the CPAP, btw. tl;dr it’s going well.)

Here it comes

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

We’re expecting up to a foot of snow, starting tomorrow and continuing through Saturday, and tomorrow is the last day of school before Winter Break. No one will be there and it will be fine. And then God will dump a ton of snow on my house so that no one can come talk to me for a couple of days at least, and possibly moving our planned Saturday Christmas dinner to Sunday, which is actual Christmas, which would suit me just fine.

All I need is to get home before the snow starts tomorrow. No problem, right?