Tag: vacations

It’s really green

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

My wife is on vacation all this week, so we decided to cross off a project from our list and get the boy’s bedroom painted. It’s been this moderately awful straw-yellow color since we moved in, and it was time to fix it.

We decided to go ahead and let him decide what color to paint it, and immediately had to talk him out of a wild hand-painted jungle scheme that no one in the house has the remotest ability to pull off. We talked him down to green walls and a blue ceiling, with tree decals winging their way to the house via the internet. He did a fair amount of cleaning and decluttering and moving stuff out of his room yesterday and we started the painting today. I figure it’s at least a three-day job; we’re done for the day but tomorrow we’ll finish the painting and depending on when the decals arrive on Thursday hopefully we can get them up right away and be done.

At any rate, pictures:

What we started with this morning. There are also new curtains to be hung once the painting is done.

Preparatory taping completed.

I forget if this was after one coat or two of the blue on the ceiling, but I did that while my wife did trim and baseboards in the green.

We pressed him into service once we started actually putting paint on the walls. He was a bit sloppier than we wanted, but all in all he did a pretty decent job until he decided he was tired and retired to iPaddery in the other room.

And this is where we left it, considerably greener than I thought it was going to be, but whatever, it’s not my damn room. Tomorrow we’ll touch up the ceiling where we need it, pull the tape protecting the walls from blue, retape to protect the ceiling from green, get the edges and second coat as needed, and paint the door and the closet door. I will, of course, post additional pictures once it’s all done.

Y’all cain’t kill me, Chapter 16

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

How many years have I taught for again? Is this sixteen? Seventeen? I think it’s sixteen. At any rate: I have certainly had harder Last Days Before Winter Break, and I survived this one without any real stress or even any particular stories to tell.(*) My main problem at the moment is that I keep forgetting that, yes, I do have to go to work tomorrow for the teacher record day even if my grades are all already finished. I’ve got some stuff to finalize, some redecorating to do, and a classroom to rearrange as I’ve grown tired of my current layout. That should keep me busy through the district-mandated half day; I was already planning on leaving early as I currently work in a building whose principal isn’t going to be watching us, but they’ve officially announced that anyone who showed up for Parent-Teacher conferences can go home at lunchtime if we want.

And I do, and I will.

I have, as per usual, all sorts of plans for shit I want to accomplish over the next two weeks; we will see if I get around to any of it, and whether I’m much inclined to care about what I didn’t get around to at the end of the break. I’d like to get at least a little fiction written; I’ve been off of that particular horse for far too long and I need to either start writing again or start removing any references to being an author around here. It’s time, damn it.

Then again, maybe I’ll spend a week playing video games and sleep for an entire day at some point. That wouldn’t be bad either! Not bad at all.

(*) This is not quite true, as I distinctly remember at least one conversation with a student that led to me thinking remember this and blog about it later and as I sit here I swear to you that I can’t even remember the gender of the student I was talking to much less any actual content of the conversation. Perhaps it’ll come to me tomorrow, who knows.

PS: I am as startled as you are that I appear to have nothing to say about the impeachment of the piece of shit in the White House. It may be that I will have something to say about it soon, or this may fall into the same hole that the piece about Kamala Harris dropping out of the Presidential race fell into. We’ll see.

It’s still fall break

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… halfway through, or depending on how you choose to look at it the break part of fall break is over and I’m into the weekend. One way or another I’ve been reasonably successful at doing that thing I do where vacations are useless unless I get a lot of stuff done with them, as opposed to, say, relaxing, which I don’t really know how to do except in the context of basically monetizing it.

(I’m not being clear here. “Spend an hour reading” can be a perfectly cromulent way to “get stuff done,” provided that I intended to do a bunch of reading over the break. If “read a lot” isn’t on the list, it’s wasting time, not getting stuff done. There is no “relaxing.” If I can’t describe it, it doesn’t exist.)

Anyway. Point is, I finished the second-to-last, 660-page Throne of Glass book yesterday, leaving only the thousand-page monster that ends the series, and I’m taking a break to read something else in between Sarah Maas rodent-killers. I’ve been to both the dentist and the doctor. I beat my latest run of Dark Souls 2 and went back to Salt and Sanctuary, which didn’t catch on with me the first time I tried to play it and holy shit has it caught on on the second try. I have reclaimed the garage for my car, if not my wife’s; we’ve been parking in the driveway for far too long and we need to sell or toss a riding mower if we’re going to find a place for both cars in there again. I got one room in the house reasonably cleaned up and decluttered and I’m working on the office right now. Or at least I would be, if I wasn’t blogging, which still counts, because “blog every day” is definitely on the Shit to Do list.

But I got some decluttering done before I started blogging, so that counts. You can see the surface of a table in here that you haven’t been able to see for a while. Now if I can just get the floor cleaned up; it’s gross.

“Buy a feather duster” is on my list for this weekend, believe it or not. I don’t plan on feather dusting the floor, of course, but holy hell are the corners in the house getting troublesome. EDIT: Turns out we have a feather duster! I completely forgot about it, and found it just now while looking for the mop thingies for the “ReadyMop Mopping System” we have, which is basically just an oversized menstrual pad that can be rubbed on the floor. So I can dust tomorrow! Woo!

Yes, I just “Woo”‘ed dusting. I never said I was interesting. EDIT ENDS.

On the list for this weekend: my wife’s job has a family day/fun fair thing going on tomorrow, so we’re doing that; I have nothing at all to do for work, having quite sensibly prepared for next week before leaving on Wednesday. So the rest of the agenda is to get some shit going on Patreon, which has been languishing in October and is awfully close to becoming another free month. (I don’t charge my Patrons in months where I don’t feel like I’ve earned it. I don’t know that anyone would actually begrudge me the dollar or whatever they’re pledging, but it rubs me wrong.)

Oh: and the bathrooms. Gotta take care of the bathrooms, or at least the main one in the hallway. That’s Sunday sorted, right?

Sure.

On my other kid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Television4 Comments
Pictured: not my kid, my kid

I just dug through a month’s worth of posts from five years ago to determine that, probably because she was a minor at the time and isn’t actually my kid, I didn’t mention that a former student stayed in my house overnight before the last Washington D.C. trip I chaperoned way back in the day. Technically she probably shouldn’t have been on the trip, but she’d signed up before moving to Arizona and I literally had her mom assign me temporary legal custody of her and just didn’t tell anybody about it.

I took a picture of her sitting on my couch, and I remember posting it to Facebook with a caption something along the lines of “Why is this in my house?,” which entertained a number of her other teachers who I was friends with at the time.

She is 19 now, and is back in town again, and I picked her up at the airport last night, and she’ll probably be here tonight too before spending the rest of the week with other family and friends. And last night, as we were driving back from the airport, she got a text message from one of her friends directing us to visit her at her job at Arby’s. The friend is also a former student.

So were two other employees at that Arby’s, including another kid who had been on that same DC trip. All four of them were in the same class, which was hands-down the best group of kids I ever had. And I had them twice, first in 6th grade and then when they were 8th graders. So it happened that I, a grown man less than a month from his 43rd birthday, found myself in an Arby’s at 10:15 on a Friday night, after the lobby had closed, at least nominally hanging out with four nineteen-year-olds, three of whom were at least technically at work (and one the manager) and none of whom seemed to think it was remotely weird that 1) I was there in the first place or 2) I was the person who had been assigned the duty of picking this kid up at the airport, a job that one might think would have gone to, like, actual family, but we all have our priorities where they should be apparently.

And I spent about twenty minutes bouncing back and forth between this is at least a little creepy and hey, Hacienda is right across the street, do you guys want to go over there for a while after you get off work? Because age difference or not this really was a great group of kids and it turns out they have not gotten less interesting as they’ve aged into young adulthood.

And I’m just gonna leave that thought there, because I’m not sure I have anything else to add to it, but yeah: last night was kind of surreal.

(About the picture: the boy didn’t remember her from her last visit, which wasn’t surprising, but as soon as he discovered she was wearing Psyduck socks she became his favorite person ever.)

Still here

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Monday was a bloody nightmare. I didn’t get a single second of sleep Sunday night– little enough sleep that it would normally trigger my Required Minimum Sleep for Showing Up at Work rule, but I feel like I can’t follow that rule on the first damn day back after Spring Break. I spent the whole day as a zombie, basically– most of the time there’s a shot of adrenaline that gets me through the day even if I come in kind of run down, but there was nothing that was going to make me human yesterday– not my coffee, not a couple of periods teaching (oh, yeah, I’m back in the classroom for those two periods for real for real this time,) not nothing.

My wife basically felt the same way, and we were both in bed before nine last night. I still didn’t really get the kind of sleep I wanted; I’ll try again tonight, I guess. Today was a better day, complete with some nice classroom success– these kids are chatty but I’m still a big fan of my honors class, and I’m getting there as I figure out the mix of personalities in my other class. One way or another, though, there was no way on earth a blog post was happening yesterday other than maybe some sort of primal scream thing and I pretty much did that on Sunday so two days in a row seemed kinda excessive.

Interesting thing: I’ve gotten emails from two different agents in the last week offering me books and asking if I’m willing to review them on the site. This is very much a thing I’d like to encourage! I like books! If you happen to be someone with the ability to make these things happen feel free to get in touch and send me stuff.

Also, uh, if any of y’all wanna represent me, let’s definitely talk.

The itinerary, now that the trip’s almost over

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It has been a Most Satisfying Vacation, y’all, and it ends tomorrow.  I just realized I never actually said where we were or where we were going.  There are lots of words in my head but lots of exhaustion in my body, so just look at this and imagine all the driving:

  • MONDAY: Drive from South Bend, IN to Bloomington, IN.  Tour Indiana University’s campus.  Drive to Bedford, IN.  Locate family ancestral home; photograph it.   Drive from Bedford to Louisville, KY to visit one of my best friends and her family.
  • TUESDAY: Not a travel day.  Hang out in Louisville.  Visit the zoo, which somehow manages to be uphill no matter where you are or where you’re going.
  • WEDNESDAY:  Travel from Louisville, KY to Shawnee, KS, which is just immediately to the west of Kansas City, to visit wife’s oldest friend and her family.  Pass through, in the process, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky.
  • THURSDAY:  Not a travel day; hang out in KC/Shawnee.  Get a driving tour of Kansas City, including the very cool spot where Lewis and Clark looked out over the entire valley and went “Yep, America’s big.”  Note to boy that you can see rivers, an airport, a highway, a train station, and a highway from this spot now, which is kinda interesting.  Eat delicious barbecue.  Yes, burnt ends.  Go to a really cool independent bookstore and spend money despite not intending to.
  • FRIDAY: Drive from Shawnee to Chicago IL, or at least the North Northytown suburbs of Chicago, via Iowa, mostly just so that you can add one more state to the list of states you visited while on the trip.  Stop at a McDonald’s in a small town to feed and drain the boy and discover that every fucker in town has lunch at that McDonald’s on Friday.  Damn hear have a panic attack at being crowded into such a small building with SO MANY WHITE PEOPLE.  Assume that they can smell blood.  Wait nervously for someone to notice the Elvish tattoo on my left leg, assume it is Arabic, and start some shit.  Demand that we take the food to go and flee as quickly as possible.  Discover that Iowa has a chain of gas stations called “Kum and Go,” which is as gross as it sounds.  Resolve to avoid the state in the future.  Have dinner with brother and sister-in-law upon arrival in Chicago.
  • SATURDAY: Eat breakfast with brother and sister-in-law.  Lounge about in hotel in Chicago.  Hit the pool a couple of times.  Go to Rainforest Café for dinner, which is both more delicious and WAY less campy than you had been led to believe in the past.  Consider going to Ikea; change that plan upon remembering that it is Saturday.
  • SUNDAY: Meet friends in Evanston for breakfast,  Drive home.  Return rental car, collect cat from parents (assuming cat is still alive,) go to grocery, sleep, somehow be ready to return to work Monday morning, sell enormous amounts of furniture to compensate for the week you just had where you sold none.

Yay vacation!

SPRRIIIING BREEEAAAAAAAAAAAK!!!!!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting5 Comments

F3GtJe2eRHWG6YBNhefY_Brick THUMB.jpgIs it a sign of something wrong with me that I Google the words “spring break” to find an image for this post and the first thing to come to mind is Jesus Christ, am I glad I never had anything to do with that?  Because that’s totally what just happened.

Anyway: I’m unemployed, so depending on how you chose to look at it I either don’t get a Spring Break or every day in March and April is Spring Break.

The boy does, though.  In fact, he gets two weeks somehow, the longest Spring Break I’ve ever heard of.  So my current jobless status actually kinda works out for us, since the next two weeks can be Daddy Time and we don’t have to scramble to figure out what to do with him.

So far, after three hours of Spring Break, he has built a fort out of couch cushions and I have taken a shower.  So we’re living it up over here.

Anybody want to give any suggestions for what to do with a four-year-old for the next two weeks?  Other than mainline superhero cartoons, I mean.

For the record

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

BW-logorrheaI will be attending my cousin’s wedding in Michigan on Saturday, and will therefore be out of town for the next couple of days.  The fun thing is this has been an impressively busy week around here– it’s Thursday and I’m going to pass traffic from all of last week before I go to bed tonight, so it’s not like I’m sacrificing any Important Traffic Metrics– but do not be terribly surprised or alarmed if you don’t see me much in the next few days.

I know you worry.  🙂

(And you know me, and chances are I’ll find wi-fi at the hotel and post from my phone and do all sorts of things that make it not at all obvious that I’m not at home.  But just in case I disappear, don’t panic.)