My internet has melted, and has been at best intermittent throughout the day, so lemme just throw up a quick proof-of-life before it goes down again: it was brutally hot outdoors today; I think the heat index reached somewhere in the 105-110 range, with tomorrow expected to be just as bad. Amazingly, though, it wasn’t nearly as humid as I was expecting, meaning that outside was unpleasant but not the immediate death I was planning for. We spent the evening in the pool. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.
Something is happening!
I am told that this will eventually be a pair of owls; I don’t really know what I’m going to do with a pair of owls but at least the printer hasn’t burst into flames or fallen off its table or anything like that yet. It is currently 14% finished with the owl printing and has been printing owls for probably forty minutes if I leave out the time it took for everything to heat up. It’s a bit louder than I wanted it to be without being super annoying; that said, it’s occurred to me that trying to do game recording with this thing running could potentially be an issue.
Speaking of the channel: I’m now something like 10 days into the hiatus that was started by catching Covid, and I’m thinking regular programming will resume this weekend. I’ve had absolutely no brain space left for anything lately other than getting through the end of the school year alive, and now that I’ve mostly managed that– the 8th grade recognition ceremony was today, so those kids are gone-gone, and everybody else’s last day is tomorrow– I think I can redirect my attention to, y’know, important stuff.
Fifty-eight minutes including heating, so probably 50 minutes of printing, and we’re at 20%. I can see owl feet now! S’cool.
I have more to tell you, but again: brain space, and May is somehow not fucking done with us yet, so more regular programming around here will be resuming soon enough too. I’m so close to summer break I can taste it. A day and a half more. I can do this.
Some recent developments
I listened to Down With the Sickness and Fuck Dying on the way home from work two different days this week.
We have recently discovered that not only is Fatima deaf, or at least very close to it (at least one ear appears to be completely bollixed, which I’m pretty sure is the medical term) but she may have been so for her entire life. How no one appears to have noticed this until now is left as an exercise for the viewer. How this will affect her ability to learn English, however, remains my problem for at least eight more days. I would love to say that I’ve been able to help these kids adapt to living in America, but … not so much, I think. If I stay in education, I do plan to spend some time this summer learning at least a little bit of Pashto, because I don’t think these families are going to stop coming anytime soon.
In other news, I covered for one of the 7th grade teachers yesterday afternoon, and without realizing I was doing it, I did myself a big favor. One of the problems with working in a school where you don’t know all of the kids (and I don’t know any of the kids below 8th grade, nor do I know all of the 8th graders, although I’d bet I’m at 90% or so) is that the only kids who are visible to you are the shitheads. I’m pretty sure I can identify at least half of the 7th grade shitheads at least by their faces, although I don’t know a lot of names. The good kids? They’re invisible, because they don’t fuck up in the hallways (they’re mostly not in the hallways in the first place) and so you never notice them. It was the same thing as when I worked at the grant coordinator at the school before I quit– I was working in the office. Who gets sent to the office? Shitheads! Whose names do you know? Shitheads! So it’s easy to assume they’re all like that.
Well, one way or another, I got lucky and landed on what turned out to be this particular teacher’s favorite class. And they were fun! It’s not like we did a lot of academic stuff or anything like that but I sat and chatted with several of them for a while and just in general interacting with all of them was pleasant. There’s always a lot of trepidation in covering kids you don’t know in a class you don’t know, because who the hell knows what kind of shit you could be getting yourself into, so this was helpful. At least I know a few who might actually be nice to have in class next year.
If, y’know, I lose my mind and come back again.
It begins, pt. 18
Because capitalism, let me begin by reminding you of two things: that I have a new book out and that my YouTube channel is going strong and could use some more subscribers. The game we’re in now, A Plague Tale: Innocence, is particularly narratively strong and I think would probably be quite a bit of fun to watch. It’s a game where you’re occasionally called upon to feed Inquisition soldiers to rats! You’ll love it.
(Why “Pt. 18,” in the headline there? This is year eighteen of teaching. Eighteen fucking years. Madness.)
School has not started yet, and won’t for nearly two weeks (two weeks from yesterday, I think, is the kids’ first day) but my rosters showed up today when I went looking for them, and I was greeted with smaller classes than I thought I was going to have (alarmingly small, honestly; I can imagine a world where if some of these kids don’t show up they collapse a section on us) and an organizational change that will make grading and record-keeping a lot easier, at least once I get done redoing the planning that was predicated on things working like they did last year. I am fighting off the urge to go to Target tonight to do a touch of supply shopping for stuff I know I’m going to need, and I will be in my classroom for the first time this school year tomorrow. I likely won’t be there much longer than an hour or so– long enough to take a quick inventory of what I want to do with the classroom now that I’m actually decorating it (remember, I’m in the same room I was in last year, but I never really decorated last year) and figure out what I might need to buy over the weekend.
I will be in my classroom Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week doing setup, Thursday and Friday are all-day meetings downtown, Monday the week after I’ll be in my room, then Tuesday is the first day for the teachers and the kids are back Wednesday. So this is the last weekday of summer, basically, since I’ll have Job Stuff every weekday from here on out.
So, yeah: here we go.
Let’s see, what else? I have a Family Thing this weekend; not one as extensive as last time, just for a day– but it’s for my wife’s side of the family, and I don’t know any of them especially well. Unlike my own family, I’m also not a hundred percent sure I can trust the vaccine status of everyone who will be there, a lot of whom I won’t know at all, and while I like my wife’s cousin and her kids, her cousin’s husband is still … I’ll say a potential danger spot in terms of his and my mutual ability to get along with each other. I have, as of yet, no concrete reason to distrust the guy beyond vibes, but we haven’t seen each other in a couple of years for obvious reasons and in general the people I might be interested in staying away from seem to have gotten worse at hiding their bullshit since this all started. I will do my damnedest to be a good guest– or, at the very least, I will make damned sure that while we’re driving home angry after leaving early, it won’t be because I was the asshole.
This is where my life would be easier if I was capable of talking about sports, by the way. Sports is a great thing for men to talk about when they don’t want to talk about other things. That said, talking about sports right now is pretty much talking about politics anyway, so even that refuge may be gone. Hopefully what happened last time will happen again– that the teenagers will decide to hang out with me, and I will thus immunize myself (heh) of any accusations of refusing to socialize while still insulating myself against stumbling into a Don’t Want None Won’t Be None situation with anyone else.
It’ll be fine, but cross your fingers for me anyway.
In which I don’t know what’s going on
It has been one of those days— and, I suspect, this is going to be a pattern that’s not going away anytime soon– where never at any point was I really sure what day it was, or what, if anything, I’m supposed to be doing. I’m going to have an extra child in my house all day tomorrow, and two days after that I have a sleep study, then I’m out of town for three days, and the week after that I have a three-day work thing, then a couple of one-day work things the week after that, and then it’s August and pretty much the second August 1 hits I’m off to the races, because school starts the 11th, I think, and I have stuff to do nearly every day of August before then.
All of this is just to say that I spent today either in the pool, finally framing my wife’s Christmas present, or recording myself playing the vidya games, and other than never being quite sure what day it was, I am perfectly content with how the day went.
I have an enormous amount of stuff I want to accomplish before Child 2 arrives tomorrow; anybody want to take bets on whether I get any of it done?
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