Friends?

It took my son to convince me that stuffed animals can indeed be cute.  I've been in denial by whole life but now, finally, I see the error of my ways...

Take good care of Hedgie, Opackway!

Twin Day

Today's Spirit Day Activity:
Twin Day
So, of course, I ask MC to twin with me.  He kindly obliged:

Participating or Protesting, Always a Nerd

    This week is "Spirit Week" at the High School.  It is a week designed to promote the kinds of things about high school that I avoided like the plague when I was a student:  School Spirit, Class Consciousness, School Colors, Decorating the hallways, pep rallies, etc. (As an adult my feelings may or may not have evolved, depending on the actual activity and my degree of snarkiness that day)

    Today is "Wear your favorite sports jersey to school" day. I, of course, own no such gear.  But Irene reminded me of one of my favorite nerd shirts:

Cardinal numbers are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the size of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. The transfinite cardinal numbers describe the sizes of infinite sets.

Aleph null is the smallest infinite number. It is the cardinality of the set of natural numbers.

Neither has anything to so with sports so far as I know (but then again I wouldn't know, would I?)

 

So, today I am walking around in this T shirt which I am predicting very few people will ask me any questions about.

Brown Sugar, Clumsiness, and Feeling Down

Years ago, when I was living in Houston, my Dad called one morning before work to tell me his own father had passed away.  It was expected but still, of course, a blow.  I remember eventually getting myself ready for work and then my car not starting.  "Great, of course my car breaks down on a morning like this..."

I called AAA and the guy tried starting it just for kicks.  It cranked right up!  He looks at me with a questioning face then shrugs and goes on his way...  Much later I realized that, because I was feeling down, I didn't even depress the clutch all the way down to the floor when starting the engine and that's why the car wouldn't start for me.

A few month back, my father-in-law was kindly checking in with me while I was grilling some food in his backyard about Irene and how she's holding up with all that she's dealing with this year(*).  I replied cheerily enough, but, a few minutes later, his serving platter slipped right out of my hand and shattered into a million pieces in front of me.

A couple of days ago, I stopped for a moment to collect myself on my usual walk home.  (There's a path that leads through a narrow band of woods from the high school to my backyard.)  Recently, Irene has been dealt yet another blow in a year of bad news for her(*) and I just needed a moment of silence in the woods to collect my thoughts.  Somewhat grim-faced, I ducked under a small tree that had been partially blown over in a recent storm (one that I have ducked under many times in the past weeks) and, instead, smacked my head straight into it hard enough that I was stunned for a couple of seconds and didn't realize I was bleeding until I got home.

The next day (yesterday), a couple of students 'in the know' brought me cookies(**).  Luckily for me, there were other students coming in and out of the room so instead of tearing up, I got to be my typical irreverent, goofy self when they insisted I eat them right away since they were still warm :
"Hey, let me do a degustation of these" (sniffs dramatically)
"Hints of cinnamon?" (nibbles dramatically)
"Ahh, some brown sugar?"
The students nod and laugh, recovering nicely from their confusion when they thought I had said "disgusting" instead of "degustation". (I always forget that some plain french words are super-fancy in english).

Much later, the students confess there was no brown sugar but they didn't want to ruin the moment.  I confessed that I should have said I 'degustated' hints of love in those cookies alongside of the nonexistent brown sugar.

Brown sugar is just white sugar with some of the sugar molasses that is usually separated out stirred back in.  Maybe clumsiness is my body stirring back into my life the emotions I try to separate out...


---------------
(*) If you are interested in Irene's battle with cancer, she maintain a very thorough blog here.

(**) Not the first time a student has brought me cookies when they found out.  Teaching may bring low pay, a lack of respect, and a lot of self-doubt - but it is not without its perks!

Getting Inside Their Heads...

Most days I love my job and have no regrets.  Some days, though, I'm filled with regret and self-doubt.  It's human nature to question yourself, I suppose, but I have a secret trick for my down days:

I think back on my own high school years.  I don't remember every single teacher certainly, but I do remember a fair number of them.  Some I can picture clear as day, standing at the chalkboard, making some clarifying remarks or holding forth on some topic.  Sometimes I just remember the tenor of how they talked and how they ran their classroom.  The point is, they are in my head.  In a way I carry them around with me all the time.

Then I think, others must also be walking around with some of their high school teachers in their heads too, right?  Now that I've been teaching for 18 years, that's like 1600 students that have spend a fair chunk of their youth in my class (some fools even sign up for a second year of Rideout in AP Physics or Astronomy!)  That means at least some of them have me in their heads for the rest of their lives, right?

After, having used this secret trick, I go back the next day into the classroom and do my thing.  And, guess what, that regret and self-doubt gets to take a hike for a while...

First Day of the Season below Freezing...

... and it's time to heat the house with the wood stove and make couscous stove-top:


Pro tip:  Freeze the bones from the last time you had lamb chops and flavor your couscous stock with those bad boys!

You look like... (?)

So, I've been confused with Mr. Krasnoo, Mr. Delaney, Mr. Keaney, etc.  Not too surprising - middle aged white dudes - we are all pretty interchangeable...

However, picture, if you will, confusing me with a 17 year old girl.

Once, long ago, when I had long hair, a waitress came up to my grandmother and I at a restaurant (she approached our table from behind my chair) and said "Hello ladies, what can I get you?"  The victorious, mischievous smile my grandmother (who disapproved of the long hair phase) wore after that remark is one of several reasons I cut my hair a few months later. That incident is probably the closest I've come before today of being mistook in such a major way.

Today, AA was looking for me, glanced into the science office and saw me seated at my desk.  She walked in and came up to my desk only to find her female classmate AT seated at my desk instead.

To help her out in the future, I created this handy Venn Diagram, I was quite surprised that the common intersection outweighs the differences.  So, don't feel bad AA - I'm actually surprised more people haven't made the mistake: