As per your previous request

I was asked after posting about my boneless sofa to remember to post a video next time. Today is next time! I now have a boneless sofa and a boneless chair in my classroom for my kids to sit in while they read.

They don’t read, mind you, but whatever. I’m an optimist, dammit.

Also, I’m not entirely sure why iMovie decided to change the aspect ratio of the video, but I’m not concerned enough about it to go back and fix it.

Meanwhile, I have survived my first full day of work for this school year without any particular drama or stress, although I do think the 2 1/2 hour faculty meeting we had this afternoon was, in a lot of ways, the wrong faculty meeting. In particular we had a dreadful half-hour or so where we got way too deep into the weeds about a hall pass policy that the seasoned teachers took one look at, realized it would never work, and immediately resolved to ignore; the less experienced teachers asked two hundred and forty thousand “well, what about this?” questions, causing no small amount of suicidal ideation among those of us who have been around the block a couple of times.

(We have new APs, and two of them are new-new, not just new to us; this has all the hallmarks of an idea put forth by someone with their heart in the right place but no sense of how an initially-reasonable-sounding plan might scale to a building with hundreds of kids and dozens of teachers. It’s kind of cute, in its way, and I can imagine our principal pushing back mildly against it a bit and then shrugging and saying “Give it a try and we’ll see,” knowing full well that a bunch of us were … well, gonna take one look at and resolve to ignore it. I’m not mad about the plan, necessarily, just that it led to a half hour of increasingly obvious hypothetical questions. Y’all have been in meetings, you know how it goes.)

Anyway. My wife and son both had to go out of town today to take my brother- and sister-in-law somewhere, so they won’t be back for a few hours; I’m gonna go play Wuchang: Fallen Feathers until they get back. I really will post classroom pictures tomorrow, I promise.

Taking tonight off

And I listen for the voice inside my head
…nothing?
I’ll do this one myself

We put the tree up

I recommend books and music and video games all the damn time, but I don’t stray into other products all that often. Let me say that you could spend as much as you wanted on Govee Christmas lights and they would be worth every dime:

They have a feature where you point your phone at the tree after you put the lights on, and then the app maps where the lights are, which allows you to pull off effects like this, which come from the center of the tree:

Just fucking awesome. There’s literally hundreds of preset patterns even before you get to the user-customizable ones or, y’know, just colors, and it’s all kinds of fun to sit in front of the tree and just fiddle with the app.

Meanwhile, we’re expecting 4-7″ of snow tonight, so if y’all want to start doing the Dance of Two-Hour Delay, that’d be great. I don’t actually want a snow day tomorrow because that makes the rest of the week really fucking complicated but a couple of hours of extra sleep in the morning would not be looked askance upon.

Also, yes, that’s a stuffed quetzalcoatlus as a tree topper. My son’s idea.

Classroom tour!

I am probably 95% done in my classroom. I have to put some things in closets and do some cord management and things like that, but if school was starting tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be terribly worried about it. Since I have a week, we’re absolutely all good, and I can start focusing on curriculum.

Want a tour?

Pivoting to video

This conversation has been all the rage on TikTok recently, and I figure I just went to the trouble to record a long video, so why bother retyping everything? Enjoy:

Music post!

I’ve done several things today, but other than hanging a picture on the wall that I’ve been meaning to get up for a long time I don’t know that any of the things I’ve done are going to be anything anyone else living in this house is going to notice. At any rate, not much to say today, so I’m passing on a great cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car that someone recommended to me on Mastodon. It’s great, you’ll love it:

Okay, I can do this

I have a day of professional development on Wednesday, so this is how the next couple of weeks are going to go:

  • Two days of work, one of which was today and is therefore done
  • A day at home on Zoom, away from children
  • Two days of work; the second day is payday
  • A weekend
  • Three days of work, one of which is the PSAT and then “Shut up, leave me alone, and finish your missing work”
  • A teacher record day
  • Our four-day Fall Break

That should be manageable, right? I make it through tomorrow and, no matter what happens tomorrow, I don’t have to see any of the kids on Wednesday– not the ones I like or the ones I don’t. Sure.

In other news, I spent the day being smug about having nuked my presence on Facebook while everyone else freaked out about the outage, and … well, everything else is misery and despair, mostly.

Okay, maybe not everything. I like this video game a lot, and it looks like a Pixar movie, so you should go watch me play it:

That’s what I’ve got. Gonna go curl up with a cat and a book.

Little Nightmares II Let’s Play Pt. 3

I promise I’m not going to get into the habit of doing this a lot, but I figure early on it can’t hurt: we’re up to Day 3 of our Little Nightmares II playthrough, with new episodes being posted at noon EST daily until I’ve beaten the game. You can subscribe to the channel here, and really, you should go do that even if you don’t use YouTube. In fact, especially if you don’t use YouTube, because then my silly vidya gaemz videos won’t even annoy you.

More later, by which I mean “I’m going to start writing the post now, so this isn’t a bluff.”