Spring Cleaning

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

So, do you know what happens when you renovate a bathroom, and said bathroom backs onto your bedroom?

Okay, a lot of things; that question could have been a bit more specific. The biggest one, though? Dust. Oh, my God, so much fucking dust.

But the bathroom is oh so very nearly done, and what’s left to do isn’t going to generate any more dust, or at least isn’t going to generate any more dust that makes it into the bedroom.

So today I put all my laundry away, wen through my clothes for Goodwill donations, took all the boxes that came out of what used to be a closet and is now our shower and put everything back into its new location, dusted every Goddamn horizontal surface in the bedroom, dusted all the furniture, swept, vacuumed, moved most of the furniture (the bed will be a day all by itself, and I’m not touching the bookshelves) and vacuumed under that, then mopped probably 60% of the floor, with the 40% unmopped being the area under and around the bed.

Now it’s raining and the bedroom looks much better and I have game recording to do, I guess, because YouTube is still happening, so go subscribe.

The end.

In which I guess it’s spring now

Luther M. Siler

This little guy comes up al by his lonesome every year right around this time, in the little patch of what used to be vines and is now a weedy hellscape right outside our front door. You can see that nothing around it is really alive yet, and none of the trees are budding (well, barely, maybe, a couple of them) and the grass is still basically dead. So this little flower– which, again, is all by itself and wasn’t planted there on purpose– is really the earliest sign of impending spring that we get.

Other than the weather, of course. It’s been gorgeous all week. Walks have been taken. This is a weird week around here; it’s the last week of the quarter, and I always try to reserve at least a couple of in-class days at the end of the quarter for my kids to turn in late work and improve their grades. There are no penalties at all for late work this school year– have I talked about this? Surely I have– because I have no real control over these kids’ time. I have heard far too many students tell me that they missed class because they were babysitting or their parents needed them to go somewhere or just whatever to be penalizing kids for late work right now. Go ahead, turn a quarter’s worth of work in in the last three days of the quarter. If you manage to get good grades on everything under those circumstances I don’t see a reason to penalize you for your timing. Screw it.

Anyway, point is I’m not doing a lot at work this week other than answering questions as they come up, which keeps me busy in some classes and means that I might as well be invisible in others; there’s no directed instruction going on right now, and there won’t be any until Monday. Friday is a teacher record day, which will be even less of a thing than usual. I typically regard TRDs as days off even though I go to work, and in fact I’m planning on heading into the building for a bit on Friday to do some stuff in my room. I have less of a grading load than usual because everything being online has made grading obscenely easy this year, especially with a couple of tricks I just learned about how Google Forms operates that have streamlined things even further.

I am, right now, tentatively planning on returning to work after Spring Break. I’ll need a letter from my doctor, which hopefully won’t be super complicated to acquire; it turns out that if your doctor writes a letter saying you shouldn’t be working during a global pandemic, HR wants another letter from your doctor saying my bad, never mind before they let you wander back into their buildings. My second shot is scheduled for the 25th, and Spring Break is the first week of April, so by the time that’s over I’ll be well past any side effects and all that delicious, delicious immunity will have kicked in.

I’ll have the flu in three days, I guarantee it. My immune system is shit under the best of circumstances, and what with having been home for a year I’m expecting to get the hell kicked out of me even if I don’t come down with Covid. Maybe continuing to be masked up will prevent it. Hopefully so; we’ll see. I haven’t been sick since I spent the entirety of last March sick; at this point it will probably qualify as a nice change of pace.

Good gracious, ass bodacious

Luther M. Siler7 Comments

nelly-hot-in-herreToday was a really nice day until around 12:30, when within the first fifteen minutes of my Algebra class starting the temperature in my classroom jumped twenty damn degrees and the weather outside took a serious turn toward hellishly humid as well.

Class didn’t go as well as it could have.

Entertaining fact:  Middle school students are idiots.  Justification: the exact same damn kids who refused to wear coats in the dead of freaking winter— and remember we lost several days this winter not to snow, but to cold— are now insisting on sweating through the armpits of their wool jackets because they don’t want to take them off.  The exact.  Same.  Kids.  Now, under normal circumstances, I’m perfectly comfortable to simply mock them from a distance.  Be an idiot; that’s fine.  But when I’m damn near choking on the funk in my classroom from your sweaty-ass bodies, and, worse, you’re complaining about the heat while you’re wearing that wool sweater… well, it may be that you may be chastised for expressing your opinion.

Mildly.  Lovingly.

Possibly with something heavy.  But maybe not!

And then the phrase “It’s getting hot in here, take off your fucking coat” floated through my head, with a certain cadence to it, and, well at that point I was done with teaching for the day too.

(Slight detour:  Teachers take a fair amount of crap for shifting toward a less academic, more movie-showey style toward the end of the year, and especially past standardized testing.  I would like to point out that that is at least partially because it is hot as a motherfucker inside these buildings and we hit a point where absolutely no one can concentrate.)

I have no idea how to contextualize my book sales so far in terms of “successful” or not except to say that I am tremendously gratified by the sales I’ve made and I still demand more.  I think I’ve got a goal of a hundred sales during the first month the book’s out.  I’m a complete unknown, obviously, so I figure that’s high enough to be a goal without being insultingly low.  Needless to say, at this point more people have “liked” the post announcing the book being on sale than have bought the book.  🙂

Point is: buy my stupid little book!  It’s $2.99 and way more entertaining than that amount might indicate!  I’ll buy you cookies!(*)

(*) I may not deliver them.  But they will be yours!

A tale of two pictures

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Picture One is my front yard.  Note the mostly clear deep blue sky and the snow-free, mostly-dry driveway.  It is nearly fifty degrees outside and beautiful.  The snow is melting as fast as snow can; it looks like it’s raining by the door to my back yard, where the eaves are not quite angled properly.

My phone just blew up about a “severe” winter storm watch due to begin at midnight Tuesday night.

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The second picture, I think, needs no explanation.  Other than, maybe, BAM.

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There is a note in the letter along with the check sternly warning me to have this deposited within five (5) business days.  Ha.  Are there really people who get checks this large and go Oh, I’ll get to that when I have a chance?

I may be rather quiet today, other than this; I did something horrible to the muscles in my abdomen sometime last night that the paranoid/hypochondriac part of my brain is insisting is, like, twelve hernias and the more sensible part of me figures is probably some sort of muscle pull.  At any rate I plan on spending the rest of the day lying down and continuing to mostly avoid the interwebs until I’ve seen True Detective tonight.  Note that if you’ve left a comment anywhere on the site I haven’t seen it yet and won’t until tonight.  Regular angry posteration should resume tomorrow as expected.