Tag: stories

I am never fixing anything again (clap, clap)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

Pictured, top left: the new, correctly installed Fluidmaster 400A toilet fill valve in the toilet in our hall bathroom, which is not the one that we just renovated for the second time– this is the one that we still need to renovate for a second time. Swapping out a toilet fill valve should not take any more than twenty minutes. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself as I started doing the job earlier tonight. It took, I think, about two and a half hours– because the original fill valve was fucking cemented in place, and required a literal Dremel to remove. Then I didn’t notice that a washer had fallen out of the fill tube until after we turned the water back on and I got an involuntary shower out of it, and then there was the general fuckery with tiny, molasses-like leaks that happens every single time I ever try to do something involving water.

Now, about the pronoun “I” that I used several times in that sentence– let me make it clear that my wife did at least half and quite possibly more than half of the work, because she fits into the tiny space between the toilet and the tub better than I do, and also the killing rage took over faster than it usually does. If I use the word “I” up there, I mean it– I started the job, and it was definitely I who did not notice the fucking washer, as my wife was in the basement turning the water back on and, I think, enjoying a few seconds of me screaming before turning the water back off.

“But Luther,” I can hear you saying, “doesn’t your toilet have a shutoff valve at the wall?” Yes. It does. And it is as old as the house, and it didn’t budge when I tried to move it, and the last time we tried to shut off the water with one of these valves it snapped off, and thank God it was a plumber and not me who broke it. We weren’t fucking with that valve.

But why the quick onset of the killing rage?

Because this was not the first thing I had attempted to fix today.

We have a sectional in our living room. That sectional has a chaise on it, and the back of the chaise reclines. Or, at least, it’s supposed to– it stopped returning to vertical forever ago, and because I never sit on the chaise, it was not high on my priority list. But I told myself at the beginning of the summer that I was going to take care of it, and there are precious few days of summer left– I am backish as of Wednesday, I think, so it needed to get done. So I pulled the chaise off, flipped it over, cut a big hole in the cheesecloth underneath it, and fiddled around with things. This is the problem:

I didn’t think these things could really fail; this one has. And can I replace it? I cannot. Removing it was a piece of cake; diagnosing the problem was a piece of cake; putting this one back will be a piece of cake. Finding a new one? It is to laugh. I spent far too much time this afternoon trying to find a replacement. I could not. I put Reddit on the case. Reddit could not find a replacement either, although they were able to confirm that it is called a “gas spring.” Which helped but not as much as it should have.

MEANWHILE! My teaching license has been renewed, but because God forbid I do anything right, it’s been renewed through 2036, not 2038. I assumed that since they were letting me renew my license two years early that meant they’d add the ten years to the expiration date, not from the renewal date. Is this a huge deal? No, not really. Eight years is eight years. Renewal isn’t onerous. It’s NBD. But there was also no reason I couldn’t have waited and gotten the full ten years out of it, and I’d have quietly set the paperwork aside until then if I’d known they weren’t going to give me the full ten years. Sigh.

MEANWHILE MEANWHILE! It’s that time of year again! Want to contribute anything to my classroom? I would greatly appreciate it, as classrooms are expensive. You can also contribute cash if you use CashApp; I promise any funds received that way will be used for classroom stuff. As always, anything at all is greatly appreciated, by me at least, if not by my dork-ass students.

Monday, June 27

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I had a doctor’s appointment today, and after the doctor’s appointment, I had to run over to the post office to mail a couple of packages. You will note that the post office is closed on Sunday, and while it isn’t impossible, doctors that have regular appointments on Sunday are few and far between. However, since today is Monday, neither of those things were a problem for me today.

I got a call yesterday(*) that a medication was ready for me at my local pharmacist. On the way back from the post office, I drive past my pharmacy, and I did not turn into the parking lot of the pharmacist to retrieve my medication, because it was Sunday. No more than five minutes after leaving the post office.

I’ve been talking about renewing my teaching license; I decided to go ahead and get myself set up with my required CPR certification today, since I had discovered (unsurprisingly) that I do, in fact, need to have an in-person training where I interact with a CPR dummy and can’t do the whole thing online. So I need a class, and that’s probably best done before school starts. Conveniently, there was one available next week on Wednesday, on June 29, which seemed good, so I paid for it and then opened up my calendar to put it in my schedule.

And it was good that I did that, because it is, in fact, the 27th, and typically on the 27th of any month it takes two days and not nine before it is the 29th.

EDIT: You will notice that the headline for this post says “June 27” and not “July 27.” I swear to you that I did NOT do that on purpose, and now I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in. My doctor should perhaps have checked for recent head injuries.

(*) JESUS, YESTERDAY WAS ACTUAL SUNDAY. THIS HAPPENED ON SATURDAY, TWO DAYS AGO.

Dangit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I feel like I’ve been on another run of too many “taking the night off” posts lately, but … damn. I had a good day at work, went to the comic shop, came home, did a bunch of grading, and I’ve literally been sitting here staring at the screen for ten minutes trying to come up with something even remotely interesting or witty to talk about. This is the best I can do. This happened on Sunday:

Yes, that’s two Amazon vans, both at my house at the same time, suggesting that Amazon’s logistics aren’t maybe as good as they’ve always been cracked up to be. The packages were even both for the same person, so they don’t have that excuse. The second driver to arrive spent a few minutes either angrily venting or yelling at the first driver, waving his hands (and the package) around and hollering loudly enough that I could hear him from inside my house, although I couldn’t quite put together what he was saying. The other guy never got back out of his van and I suspect he was not enjoying the conversation one way or another. Then after a few minutes the first guy drove away, leaving the second guy in his pit of vitriol, and he brought the package to my porch and drove away, never to be seen again.

It’s not much of a story.

The end.

Crisis averted

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Yesterday’s issue is resolved, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to have to commit any crimes, justified or otherwise.

This will be another short post, but let me tell you a fun story about teaching 8th graders: one of my boys fell asleep in class yesterday, farted loudly enough that it woke him up, and then, not realizing that the uproarious laughter taking place in the room was at him, joined right in on laughing so that it didn’t look like he didn’t know what was going on.

“Did you just fart yourself awake?” is not a sentence I ever expected to say to anyone at work.

On narrative consistency

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Okay, look, McDonalds. This is bullshit.

Nobody believed your asses two years ago when you said that the McRib was on its “farewell tour” or whatever the hell you called it. Absolutely no one. We all knew that the McRib is always a seasonal or at least short-term item (length of term: however long it takes for pork prices to rise again) and it’s going to go away and come back. Everyone knew this. You fooled no one.

But yeah. You had to make a big Goddamn deal about how no, really, this is the last time. No more McRib, forever, and all that shit.

And now it’s 2024, and the fucking world is ending, and you bring this bullshit back … and you dare to just not acknowledge that you insisted it was never coming back? No mention of it at all? What, are you just hoping we don’t remember?

Call the motherfucker Son of McRib and put it on a round bun for a while or some shit, I don’t care. Slap a little mustard on it (no, really, think about it) and pretend it’s not the same sandwich. I don’t care. But, shit, can we pay a little attention to worldbuilding around here? All I’m asking for is some Goddamned consistency. This ain’t comic books. You can’t reboot the menu. Or at least you can’t reboot the menu and pretend you didn’t do it.

Do not assume that just because I just ate two of these sonsofbitches because I am sad that I didn’t notice what you did here, Goddammit. I see the Hamburglar in my neighborhood anytime soon I’m slapping him.

Okay, fine, I’ll do the math

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I have removed the Second Skin from my new tattoo, and the itching is absolutely maddening, so I’m going to distract myself with math. Because that’s why you come here, right? As a reminder, this is the original image, and the question is the ratio of the inner square to the outer square:

The first thing we’re going to do is draw the two diagonals of the inner square. These are, by definition, perpendicular to each other, and they are also equal to the circumference of the circle. Let us define the radius of the circle as x:

What we have now is four right triangles inscribed inside the circle. Pythagoras tells us that the sum of the squares of the two legs are equal to the square of the hypotenuse, which is the line on the left of the square there. Therefore, defining the hypotenuse as Y, we get:

x2 + x2 = y2
2x2 = y2

Take the square roots of each side, and we get:

√(2x2) = √(y2)

And therefore:

√(2x2) = y

Which means that all four sides of the inner circle are equal to √(2x2), thusly:

To get the area of the inner square, all we have to do is multiply √(2x2) by √(2x2), which, conveniently, just gets rid of the square root symbols. The area of the inner circle is 2x2.

Now, we need to realize that since the radius of the circle is x, the diameter of the circle is 2x, and that the diameter of the circle also equals the width and the height of the outside square. So that outer square is 2x high and 2x wide:

Therefore, all we have to do to get the area of the outside square is multiply 2x by 2x, which gives us 4x2. Which, conveniently, is exactly twice the area of the inner square, which was 2x2.

The outside square is therefore twice the size of the inner square, and the ratio of the inner square to the outer square is 1:2.

Or, y’know, you could just rotate the fuckin’ inside square, which makes it visually obvious.

Whoops, I forgot

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Local radio managed to really irritate me during the drive in to work this morning. I’m not going to get into the details, because I’ll just get all het up again, but let me just say that there was some major performative piety bullshit going on on the radio channel I listen to this morning, and I just absolutely was not willing to deal with it.

But this story isn’t about that, this is about how weird my brain is, and it’s nonetheless necessary to include here because it establishes that I was fully aware of the date when I arrived at my destination this morning– which was not the school I work at, but another one, because I had an early morning departmental meeting for all the middle school math teachers and it wasn’t at my building.

As I pulled into the parking lot for this other school I got a text from another math teacher at my school, apologizing and saying he was going to be late because of car trouble. I texted him back, still in my car, and let him know that I’d seen the message. “Don’t forget we’re at <other school> today,” I said, and then hit send.

And then I immediately realized something: that it was September 11, not September 18, and that my meeting was in fact not today, but next week. And that, further, I had managed to go through the last several days holding the following two contradictory thoughts in my head: one, that the date of the meeting was the 18th– I am convinced that if you asked me the date of the meeting on Saturday I would have gotten it right. Nonetheless, the second idea that I was holding in my head was that the meeting was today, regardless of the fact that the week between the 11th and the 18th hadn’t happened yet. It was Schrödinger’s meeting, happening simultaneously today and next Monday until I actually arrived at the meeting, at which point the waveform collapsed and I found myself late and at the wrong fucking school at 7:30 in the Goddamn morning on a Monday, not how I intended to start the week.

The punch line: I was not the only teacher on my team to make this mistake. Apparently three of us went to this building, two realizing in the parking lot that they were wrong and the third managing to make it into the building and have conversations with a few people before the fact that she didn’t work there got brought up.

The guy with the car trouble managed to beat me to work.

Great fuckin’ start to the week, that.

Something coherent

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I was in bed before 9:00 last night, and probably dead to the world before 10:00, and as a result spent the day feeling much more human. I even got home still feeling human, which is a definite improvement over the last several days. We’ll see how long it lasts; I have plans to play Armored Core VI after finishing this blog post and hopefully once I start I’ll be able to tear myself away after a reasonable amount of time.

A brief (very brief) tale about today, one of those sorts of stories where the lead-in takes way longer than the actual story. I have talked, in this space and many others, about how Kids These Days don’t give a damn any longer about shit we, meaning The Olds, used to think of as private. I had a kid straight-up introduce themselves to me last year with “Hi, I’m <name,> I’m an asexual lesbian.” Like, that was the first sentence. Shit, I’m straight and there was no way that I would have actually admitted I liked girls to a teacher when I was in middle school. The Internet is fond of school bathroom discourse, and one of the frequent arguments of people who think we should let kids go use the bathroom at any time and for any reason(*) is that Girls have Periods and how dare you prevent her from doing whatever her teenage menstrual cycle might be demanding at any given moment just because she’s so embarrassed to admit it’s happening.

It is to laugh, because teenage girls do not give one single shit any longer about telling anyone and anyone who might have even the slightest claim to such information that they are on their periods. And while I’ve been teaching middle school long enough to have amassed a fair-sized stash of stories involving menstrual nonsense in some way or another, today was the first time a student looked me in the eye and volunteered, entirely unsolicited, that she needed to go to the bathroom so that she could change her underwear. The answer was going to be yes. It wasn’t even going to be “can you wait a few minutes?” Straight-up yes. And I got to find that out about her anyway.

As a reminder, this kid has known me for twelve days.

Teenagers are a lot of things, but they are absolutely not shy any longer.

(*) We will not be engaging in this discourse in this space at this time; suffice it to say that these people are Wrong.