Tag: whining

In which I’m not complaining but I definitely am

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, life2 Comments

I am not big on the whole St. Patrick’s Day thing. I have been more strident in my dislike in the past, especially when I lived a life more likely to expose me to drunken idiots in green (ie, when I lived in Chicago) but I am not willing to even pretend to be remotely Irish, am definitely not remotely Catholic, and I don’t drink, and between those three things I don’t have any particular use for this holiday. This means that when my wife told me that we were getting together with her side of the family today, and that “brisket” would be involved, I was excited as hell– I never get brisket– and I did not even think to connect it to the holiday.

You can imagine my consternation when we got to the party and the “brisket” was corned beef, which yes, I understand is from the same part of the cow and is in fact a different preparation of the same meat, but Goddammit when I get to a party and I’m expecting brisket on a Sunday afternoon and instead I’m given a reuben I might start muttering under my breath and quietly sending pointed and slightly disrespectful text messages to my wife. Don’t misunderstand me, I love a good reuben, although my particular preference for brined meats on rye runs more to pastrami– but reubens don’t at all fit into the same headspace as “brisket,” dammit, and part of me still feels betrayed.(*)

The rest of me is stuffed full of corned beef, though, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

(*) I should have learned after seventeen years of marriage into this family that I should never assume I know what is going to happen when we go to her sister’s place for a meal, even when said sister isn’t responsible for the cooking, and most of the cooking for this particular event was done by her cousins. The last time we went there for Thanksgiving there were no mashed potatoes, which is a food sin of the highest order, and I absolutely left that particular gathering with my dis firmly gruntled. You can’t even call it Thanksgiving if there are no mashed potatoes. It may as well be Mashed Potato Day. There can be other potatoes too, I’m fond of au gratin and any form of sweet potato, but either way wrongs were committed against Thanksgiving in general and me in particular.

Here’s what I’ve got

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I really ought to re-embrace the notion that I don’t have to post every single day, but I’m absurdly close to a year straight without missing a day and only, what, 2/3 of those have been bullshit? That’s a pretty good record, right? January and February have been exceptionally heinous, I know, but between being constantly sick and actually (don’t tell anyone) having a pretty damn good year at work, I’m both lower on good material than I normally am and less inclined to talk about it than I might be otherwise. The main things going on in my life right now are shit I actively don’t want to talk about here, which leaves book reviews and the occasional picture of a pile of fountain pens.

(The purple one on the right and the coffee-colored one in the middle are my current favorites. I am trying my best to not buy any more, because if I do, I’m going to start edging into more expensive ones. The most expensive pen there was $52. I caught myself eyeing one for five hundred dollars the other day and am uncomfortably close to pulling the trigger one that runs $150. I can’t do this.)

Anyway, speaking of video games (just pretend), I’ve been trying to put 9 Sols to bed but I’m completely stuck– I actually turned the difficulty down on a boss that I’m certain I could have beaten but I didn’t want to take the time, and now I can’t figure out where to go next. If I can’t figure it out tonight I’m gonna hit up a walkthrough. The game’s a lot of fun but I feel like it should have been a 25-hour game and right now I’m pushing 30 and I don’t know how much game there is left– at least two more bosses and who knows how much exploration. I have like four games on my PS5 I want to get to and another on the Xbox, believe it or not, and I can’t play any of them until I beat this one.

Okay, I’m gonna go to work five days this week

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I spent yesterday light-headed and exhausted, taking a five-hour nap in the afternoon, and today featured Mounjaro Diarrhea, so I’m pretty sure I’ve been through every single symptom that exists in the last couple of weeks and I am ready to be healthy for a while. We are 1/6 of the way through 2025 and so far every second of it has sucked. I’m ready for March to reverse that trend.

And today…

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’ve still got a fever, so I called out for tomorrow already, the ear is still clogged, and now my teeth hurt. So life continues to be a barrel of fuckin’ joy over here.

Everything still sucks

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Went to urgent care this afternoon, to be greeted with more or less nothing more than a shrug; they’r calling in an antibiotic but I’ve been told to not expect much from it as, unsurprisingly, this is probably viral. My lungs are clear, at least, so it’s not pneumonia, which I pretty much already knew anyway. Adding to the fun is that my right ear is suddenly clogged as hell and I’m about to move to the “pour hydrogen peroxide directly in there” stage, which is always fun. I’ve used my ear wash thingy twice this afternoon and it hasn’t done any good.

I read the book pictured above, which did not suck, but I don’t have the energy to do a full review of it; needless to say there is very little chance that I’m not going to enjoy reading a pop-science account of why colonizing outer space is probably going to be a shitton more expensive and complicated than we think it is. I’d prefer the authors came to different conclusions, but them’s the breaks, and I think they’ve supported their opinions more than sufficiently for my expectations.

Oh, and the Pope’s gonna die, it looks like, and I’ve spent most of the day when I wasn’t coughing my larynx out or struggling to breathe contemplating political violence. Which probably isn’t super smart for me to write about but I’ve been shooting my mouth off on BlueSky anyway.

I’m gonna go to bed now, I guess, and I hope to hell I’m at least halfway human tomorrow.

FFS are you KIDDING ME

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

So the amount of snow in this image is not necessarily a guaranteed close, but I’m hearing that some places are predicting up to ten inches of snow tomorrow? And I somehow(*) didn’t find out about it until getting to the comic shop after school? I haven’t been able to verify that number, but that dark blue blob is directly over both me and my commute. I walked out of work today telling everyone who would listen that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was coming in tomorrow, because not only can I still not breathe but I got to play Fun With Alternating Chills And Fever all day long, while administering ILEARN to every single student I have, making this an absolutely stellar day from start to finish.

My son– have I mentioned this around here? Maybe not– has been sick for most of the last two months, and has missed a shit ton of school, and we had a meeting with his advisory teacher and the school counselor at 5:00(**), which I masked up for. Then I got home and took a combined Covid/Influenza A/Influenza B test, which was negative for everything, and then after that my thermometer told me my temperature was 98.4, so I’m about to fight all the medical technology in the house.

The question now is whether I go through with the original plan and just call in sick tonight, which gives me a chance of having a sub tomorrow rather than just hoping for class coverage, but if we get a delay out of the weather I may tough it out and go in, and if we actually get cancelled that would be fantastic, because I could just put up an assignment and then sleep all Goddamn day without taking the day off monitor my email and attend my office hours in case my kids need help. But if I wait until tomorrow morning I’m almost guaranteed no sub, and now that I think about it, if we have a delay, that’ll cancel the ILEARN language arts test that we currently have planned, which will change the schedule, which means what I’m planning on right now won’t work, which means …

… shit, even if I do go to work (worth pointing out: tomorrow will be a shitty day to drop onto a sub if we’re testing) I’m not going to be able to do any planning until I know what the day’s schedule is going to be. So no matter what I’m getting up at regular time and making a decision. And I’d prefer not to call in and then have to cancel the absence. That feels unfair to the hypothetical sub that I may or may not get.

Maybe I’ll just die tonight and then I won’t have to worry about it. Here’s hoping.

(*) This is nonsense, because I know exactly why; administering ILEARN all day meant I wasn’t allowed to have my watch or my phone with me, and monitoring testing all day meant no extraneous web surfing on my computer; I was effectively cut off from any source of information that might have given me this information, especially since I spent my lunch break photocopying work for tomorrow that I may or may not need.

(**) It should be made clear that this was heroic on their parts, because the meeting was so late because his advisor already had an after school commitment, and then both of them decided staying even later was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We weren’t done until nearly six. I would not have agreed to this meeting!

2025 continues to suck

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Pretty sure I have a sinus infection. I can’t breathe and generally feel like absolute shit. There is no universe where I can miss work tomorrow so I think I’m going to tough the day out and actually plan to not be there Thursday rather than make the decision Thursday morning. Also it’s 6:15 and I am planning on being in bed by eight at the very latest. Hopefully I can nip this shit in the bud but tomorrow is going to be a long day of talking and it’s unavoidable so I kind of doubt it.

Blech. Read anything good lately?

In which I’ve read this book already

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’ll call it 50/50 whether we have a two-hour delay again tomorrow; Michigan schools have already called it due to the cold. We won’t cancel; it’s not going to be that cold, but subzero wind chills during the walking/waiting for the bus hours are dangerous regardless. On top of that, I have what feels like the beginnings of a sinus infection immediately after getting over whatever the hell I had last week, which feels unfair. I absolutely cannot miss any days of work between here and Friday for schedule reasons and I would really prefer to not miss any more days in February at all, so we’re gonna cross our fingers and hope this stays at a simmer until next weekend.

I have written, more or less, that exact post maybe fifteen times in 2025. I’m deliberately avoiding writing about creeping despair, political authoritarianism, or my own slow decline into supervillaindom, which pretty much leaves video games, books, and musing about the weather and being sick. My “Presidents’ Recess” went pretty well, I suppose, and now we enter into the longest stretch of the entire school year with no holidays, as Spring Break isn’t for seven weeks.

It’s entirely possible that I might die. We’ll see.