10 minutes on a Sunday afternoon

On March 30, 2025March 30, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized7 Comments

I think today was the closest I’ve ever come to telling everyone in the house to head for the basement without an actual tornado warning. The top video is out my front window; I saw the first tree across the road fall almost immediately when the wind started, and missed the second one. My wife saw the tree fall in our back yard (second picture) which is the second time that our neighbors behind us have had a tree fall into our yard, thus becoming, by Indiana law, our problem.

The final picture is from maybe 20 minutes later, rain still falling, as every Hoosier-ass dad in the neighborhood and their dogs went outside to wander around and look at the carnage. I may hop in the car soon and see how the rest of the area looks; supposedly there are a lot of power outages nearby but we’re fine.

Yikes.

Chainsaw 2: the destructinating

On July 5, 2014July 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Perspective: my dad is six feet tall. Yesterday was my place, this is theirs.

This giant sumbitch ain’t going anywhere:

Well, whatever works, I guess…

On December 6, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching8 Comments

I have a handful of severely autistic students. One of them in particular has been a major behavior issue as of late– he’s been running out of the classroom, throwing things, saying crude sexual insults to the girls, and trampling people in the hallway. We are trying, for a variety of reasons, some good, some not so good, to keep him in our building and not have to move him into a residential placement of some kind somewhere else. His issues generally begin when he gets into the building, amplify during Success period, and by the time he gets into my room for Math he’s completely uncontrollable and acting out.

I met with the corporation’s autism consultant on Thursday, and she was in my classroom observing me/him/us today. (Sidenote: all three of my classes killed their math tests this week; I’m super happy about how they did.) We’ve been working on solving two-step equations and linear equations for the last few weeks, and so they’ve been hearing me say the phrase “work backwards” or “do the opposite” over and over and over and over again. (In other words, 4x = 12 is a multiplication problem; you need to do the opposite, division, in order to solve it.) Well, everybody but this kid has; he’s spent most of his time either sitting in the hallway or in the main office or the counselor’s office.

He had to take the same test as everyone else, so the autism consultant and his usual paraprofessional worked with him in the back of the classroom. I heard them repeating my instructions and going over procedures to solve problems, mimicking the language I’d been using. The kid actually did pretty well.

For the last ten minutes of class, the autism consultant and the paraprofessional disappeared for some reason and left the kid in the room with me. I noticed after a minute that every time I gave the class an instruction he was doing something else. Oh, great, I thought; last thing I need is a meltdown when the two people who are here to observe him have left for two minutes.

“What are you doing, Jim?” I asked. (Jim, obviously, isn’t his name.)

“The opposite,” he said. “They said I’m supposed to do the opposite of everything you say.” Big, shit-eating grin on his face.

Parts of my head screamed at other parts of my head.

“Stand up,” I told him.

He sat in his seat.

“Make as much noise as you can until the bell,” I told him.

Complete silence.

“Don’t do any of your missing work, at all,” I told him.

Out comes his math workbook.

Ah, autism. Every day can be Opposite Day from now on.

The broken tree is gone. All hail the broken tree! The guys did such a good job they even took away the broken branches from the last big storm we had, over the summer, which I had hauled off into a corner of my yard and not bothered to finish bagging up and curbing. The company is called, believe it or not, Skeeter’s. If you’re in northern Indiana, you should use them the next time something falls down around your house.

(Sidenote: there’s a good lesson in why internet reviews can be a shitty idea here, where someone who perhaps should not be allowed to have an opinion appears to believe that tree doctors are a cabinet company. Uh, no.)

In which I dodge a bullet

On December 5, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

Had a bad moment with the boy the other day.

He’s been throwing things lately. This, in and of itself, isn’t such a big deal; toddlers throw things. We encourage throwing when it’s a ball, so long as he’s throwing to and not at, and discourage throwing just about everything else. Generally, something along the lines of “Don’t throw things!” or “We don’t throw books” or “You’ll hurt the dog” has been good enough to get him to stop. Rarely– I mean, it, rarely— we have had to tell him twice.

He is almost 2 1/2, just for the record.

The other day, he threw his fork at dinnertime. This earned a sharper reprimand than usual as throwing a metal fork is somewhat more dangerous than throwing many other objects. We picked it up off the floor and gave it back to him and he threw it again. This time, he missed my head by maybe an inch.

I… reacted somewhat strongly. Verbally only, mind you, but more severely than perhaps he’s used to. He was done eating anyway, so we washed him up and then told him to walk around the table and pick up his fork and give it to me. Which he did– mostly. He walked around the table. He picked up the fork from the ground. I held out my had for him to give it to me.

And he gets this look on his face.

Oh hell no, boy. Don’t you even think what you’re thinking right now, because goddammit I’ve never spanked a kid in my life and I swear to god I may not be able to stop myself if you throw a fork at my face right now.

Out comes the teacher voice.

“Give. The fork. To me. Now.”

He very clearly spends a moment considering his options, and hands me the fork.

Which… good, because I really didn’t know where I was going after that, and heading into a potential You Really Need to Understand I’m Serious Right Now moment without a game plan is never a good idea, either in my classroom or in my house. I’m ambivalent about spanking right now; I don’t see that in general it’s going to do much good with a 2-year-old who wouldn’t know what “I’m going to spank you if you do that” even means, and in general I’d prefer to never hit my kid. But given a choice between hit my kid and have him believe that throwing sharp things in my face is okay… well, I’d prefer to dodge the issue altogether and not have to face that choice, actually.

I may need to spend some time reading up on discipline with toddlers.

You remember the tree that came down in the storm, right? Our insurance company estimated the cost to have it cut up and hauled away at $700, which doesn’t hit our deductible. The first estimate we got was two grand, and even getting that guy out to look at our shit was a huge pain in the ass because of all the much-more-important bigger jobs that were available all around the northern part of the state.

I’ve got a guy coming out tomorrow who will do the job for $575. Which is nowhere near $2000, and makes me very freaking happy.

Cue the normal concerns that you have when you get lowballed, of course, but if they do the job well I’m going to be recommending the guy to everyone I know. I may knock down other people’s trees to drum up more work for him.