Why I love Fark

I love Fark. Fark is my friend. Just finished reading the coolest article. It's about Paris and the catacombs. Read it. I promise it's cool.

So it's fifth period

And I just finished a stint as signpost directionmaster. The 100 building is shaped like a V. I stood at the point and students shouted out room numbers as they rushed like chickens with their heads cut off. Several of my former students (from Rogers even) who are seniors and juniors were also getting lost. It's scary to think of my little 8th graders who are no longer little.

My ELD 1 classes are small... too small. Hoping fanatically they give them some time to fill up. I have two Cambodian students and they are going to try and put them in the same classes so our single college aide can help them both.

I pulled out my ELD flashcards and went over the alphabet. One of my former students could even alphabetize the cards... in Spanish even. I mean the things have little color codes on them as well, and he still needed help. Yikes.

I have one more conference period and then my reading classes. Hoping not to have a trio of annoyance as in last year's class.

Whoah

Just got a serious case of Back to School Googlies. That's where your stomach tightens and you can't sleep. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to get the rest of my stuff done and have a smooth opening day on Weds.

Today we avoided the heat... not as hot as yesterday though. We started off at Barnes and Noble before heading over for DAMN! I just realized I left my CPK in the car! Shit.

Yeah, well after CPK we headed over to The Pike, the new entertainment complex over by the Aquarium of the Pacific. We saw Princess Diaries 2, which was seriously cheesy, and not half as good as the original, but I liked it.

After that we headed over to Color Me Mine and painted the two things I'm missing in the kitchen... a spoon rest and a napkin holder. We get them back on Thurs, so I'll let you know then how they turned out.

Right. So soon we will have everything a kitchen needs, including a long handled lighter so we don't set our polished finger nails on fire. And yes... I did... right before I realized Liz had purchased said lighter. Rather scary to see your nail aflame. Anyway.

Severe Weather Alert

I'm sincerely peeved. I heard the weather man say it was going to be in the low 80's today. NOT EVEN CLOSE!!! It was bloody 98 degrees today! That would be 36 degrees to all you C people out there. Right now it's only 29... that's 85 for the F people. And it's nine o'clock.

Liz and I decided to beat the heat and left for Long Beach Town Center where we went to Ben and Jerry's (spilled chocolate ice cream totally down the front of my white shirt) Ross, (where I bought a pretty new dress and a white shirt to change into) Petsmart, (where I bought a big ass bag of catfood and a scratchy toy thingy for cats) Barnes and Noble (where I was good and didn't buy anything except an ice tea) and a movie - Napolean Dynamite. It was cute, but not spectacular.

We thought about ribs, but had too much popcorn and soda to be hungry.

Now I did skip over the beginning of the day unpleasantness. Started off nicely. Woke up, played a little Playstation, ate a bagel. Then I decided I wanted to finish my book and about 20 pages from the end, the room started spinning like majorly in an anticlockwise direction. So I went to lay on my bed, but it got worse. After I threw up, I took a long shower and felt a bit better. The googly feeling in my stomach wasn't quite gone, but the room stopped moving. Liz got home from marathon practice and we watched a movie about a photographer who like young screwed up girls... and as soon as he got them to be less screwed up and they became independent, he couldn't handle it, and dumped them. It was called Guenivere. I liked it.

So that was my penultimate day of freedom.

Yup.

Athene19 joins the club!

So you'll notice to the right a new link... I'll post it here too... just in case you're blind.
This is Athene19's coolio new blog!

Right.

Bedtime now. Gotta get used to going to bed early to rise at ungodly hours for the dredgery called a job.

Other Stuff - Like Wil Wheaton

Yeah, I know I promised to relate some events of coolness. I'm going to try now...

Think all the way back to August 15. Just as I was grabbing the phone to ask for directions... Liz calls me and tells me she told me the wrong address for the bookstore... it's on Sunset, not Hollywood and Vine. By the time I get myself turned around and going in the right direction, I manage to pull into the parking structure right after Liz. After a yummy lunch of Baja Fresh, we walk next door to the bookstore to wait around for an hour or two until the book signing.

By this time I was really starting to do a pee pee dance and was really annoyed when I couldn't find someone to give me a bathroom token. After traversing the bookstore from end to end, I was successful and then went off to hunt down a Guide to Literary Agents. Liz was hunkered down in a chair so I then offered to go get our books from the cars. Liz had to buy her own copy of Dancing Barefoot, as she'd "stolen" mine and read it while we were waiting for HP3 to start.

Side tangent: I get really impatient when someone is sitting there laughing at a book. I want an explanation, dammit! especially if they are reading something I wrote. It's like torturous hell sitting there waiting while someone is reading your material and you aren't sure if it's funny where it's supposed to be funny.

Moving on. Wil Wheaton was cool. He seemed very modest and unassuming, even nervous. It gave him a sort of unpolished charm. He is an excellent reader and his little asides and sort of "yeah right" stares back at the audience were perfectly timed. He'd finished reading from Just a Geek when a guy wanders through the area and pauses to ask the ultimate question from his book. "Didn't you used to be an actor? Weren't you on Star Trek?" Despite just spending the past half hour describing how much this question drove him nuts, he was gracious and didn't miss a beat. The audience giggled and we all shared the in joke as we rolled our eyes in tandem.

Again Lizzie manages to have a longer and more interesting conversation with author at signing than I did (re: Jasper Fforde). She wore her Team in Training bracelets and they talked a bit about marathons. I just got tongue tied and asked if he'd met Neil Gaiman yet. No, he hadn't, but he wanted to. Trying to think back to Neil Gaiman signing in Canterbury... come to think of it, Mel had a more intriguing conversation with him too. Boogers.

Precarious Posters

So, like the Olympic marathoners, I was tempted to kiss the ground after finishing my latest task of hanging posters... though I didn't... shiny as it is.

There are times when being 5 inches taller would be nice. I'm not asking for a Clare boost here, just enough to let me hang posters easily without standing on a stack of books on a chair ontop of a table.

In case you didn't know, the Walls of Wilson are stucko-concrete painted with a (I swear) teflon beige coating. NOTHING sticks to these walls. Masking tape, duck tape, scotch tape, poster tack... you name it. I even tried my British Blue Tack... which is just another kind of poster tack, but works so much better than our American stuff. During the year (usually right in the middle of class) things randomly fall off the walls.

I have found something that sticks fairly well. The 3M command adhesive hooks stay on pretty well, as long as you don't abuse them. I've invented a system where I literally string a clothesline across one wall, supported with a hook at either end. I did this in Grace and Judy's room two years ago, and theirs are still hanging. Mine from last year unfortunately fell down... of course right in the middle of class.

This year I decided to put my fun posters in the back of the room rather than the front... mostly because I need a ladder to reach the other side. I put a third hook in the middle of my new line, hoping for a longer staying time.

I'm sure this is all fascinating to all of you, but I'm quite proud of myself. So there.