Odds and ends (mostly odds)

I was going to post something intelligent and meaningful today, but I just don’t have the enthusiasm at the moment. Instead, I offer these musical highlights from my bizarro-world life:

1. My department chair and I are standing in the hall at school today, keeping an eye on the kiddie-poos to make sure they don’t kill each other between classes. Hip urban teenager (a boy, I might add) comes sauntering down the hall and into the department chair’s class just before the bell, singing — loudly, and with great feeling —

“HER NAME WAS LOLA … SHE WAS A SHOWGIRL….”

Dude … I so did not see that coming.

2. The kids in my fourth hour class are supposed to be making a video to teach other classes a vocabulary word. A pair of oh-so-avant-garde girls decided to set the definition to music. Their melody of choice?

The Time Warp. Complete with dance moves.

I swear to everything that’s holy I did not put them up to this.

3. I went to the Rock Cafe tonight for dinner. On the way home, I was listening to the radio, and someone called in to request “Here I Am.”

The DJ mentioned that she’d introduced Air Supply at a recent concert and that they were “just as wonderful as they ever were.”

Probably so … which is exactly why the Red Fork Hippie does not feel the need to attend Air Supply concerts.

Emily

Snowed under

Sorry for the silence all week. I didn’t fall off a cliff or get run over by a bus or anything — just overbooked my schedule (trig homework Monday, trig class Tuesday, Drillers game Wednesday, all-city football tournament Thursday) and haven’t had time to blog. I promise to have something intelligent to say in the near future. Stay tuned….

Emily

Sugar buzz

I made this tonight from a recipe on Grace’s Red Kitchen blog. It’s pretty good, but I’d definitely take Grace’s suggestion and cut the frosting with real cream cheese if you make it with something as sweet as Porter peaches. (OK — that is a lie. I would not do any such thing. I would suggest that you cut the frosting with real cream cheese. But what I would do is buy a tub of that Philadelphia cheesecake filling and spread it on there in place of the frosting next time, because I am lazy.)

I’ve spent this evening cooking things to eat later in the week, because I do NOT want to spend my whole school year eating stuff that came out of a paper wrapper. I’ll let you know how everything turned out when I sample it. 🙂

Emily

Baby pictures

While I was taking pictures of my literature rack yesterday, I realized that I’d forgotten to post the photos I shot of Jamie and Hazel while I was in Illinois a couple of weeks ago.

I’d hate for you to miss out on your recommended daily allowance of Vitamin Cute, so here they are:

Jamie absolutely adores Hazel.

He’s trying to teach her all his rotten tricks — like shouting at the top of his lungs just to see whether anybody’s paying attention.

He’s even showing her how to react when someone else shouts too much.

Hazel, meanwhile, seems disinterested in the lesson. She is completely focused on her rubber duckie, which has LEDs inside that light up in random patterns when you touch the electronic contact points on the bottom.

Duckies are fun to chew on. Nom, nom, nommity — what? Are you lookin’ at me? Are YOU lookin’ at ME?

Happy family: Mom, Dad, Hazel, and cousin Jamie.

Babies are great therapy. 🙂

Hope you’re having a good Sunday afternoon, wherever you are.

Emily

Nice rack.

I wandered into my principal’s office the other day to ask how he liked my chances of getting a literature rack for my classroom to hold college catalogs, Route 66 magazines and brochures, etc. He told me to find one I liked and write a proposal describing how I intended to use it, and he would try to get it for me.

I got online and looked at all sorts of racks, but the size and type I needed were ridiculously expensive — like $200 apiece and up — and I just couldn’t see blowing that much money on something I was pretty sure I could make for less than 30 bucks. (I am very cognizant of the fact that as a school employee, I am spending taxpayers’ money all the time — when I make copies, when I ask for materials or equipment, etc. — and I try to make sure any expenditures related to my classroom are sensible and responsible.)

This is what I came up with:

Here’s a side view I shot while the paint was drying:

I still have to paint the base, fix one of the little cords (which I tied on unevenly and didn’t notice until after I’d shot the picture), and screw a couple more 1x2s to the back side of the rack to keep the pegboard from warping under its own weight, but it’s basically finished.

Lumber ………………. ………………. .. $12.71
Hardware ………………. …………….. $ 5.35
String ………………. ………………. …. $ 1.00
Paint ………………. ………………. ….. $ 5.98
Saving taxpayers $175 ……………… Priceless

Hope your Saturday was full of fun excuses to play with power tools, too. 🙂

Emily

Belated Folk Thursday: Paul McCartney

Sorry I missed Folk Thursday last night. School is absolutely great thus far, but it’s also absolutely exhausting.

Paul McCartney played this song when we saw him Monday night at the BOk Center. The sound in this video (from Coachella) is a bit dodgy, but you get the idea:

I like how he starts with the ukulele and then the band comes in later.

Emily

Countdown

Our new school year starts tomorrow morning. I think I have everything ready to go. Haven’t tested my PowerPoint presentation about the syllabus, but that’s a minor matter; if it doesn’t work, we can do without it. My two big priorities for this evening were hall-pass coupons (468 of ’em, printed 36 to a sheet and cut apart) and business cards (200 of ’em, printed 10 to a sheet and punched apart), which took way less time than you might imagine. 

All my activities are ready to go, all the instructions and objectives are written on the whiteboard, I figured out how to use our new gradebook software today (I think; we’ll see if I got the hang of it when I actually have to take attendance tomorrow), and the room is as thoroughly decorated as it’s going to get. Our tech theatre teacher loaned me a ladder so I could spend part of today hanging little cardboard road signs and shiny blue stars from the ceiling with monofilament, and my awesome new principal rattled enough cages to get somebody to come out and fix my air conditioner, which quit working sometime this summer and hadn’t been reliably operational in at least a month. Barring any unforeseen last-minute disasters, I think we should be in good shape tomorrow.

We have a football scrimmage Friday night. I’m really looking forward to it. I hope our team does well this year, and I really hope people come out and support the kids. I was pretty disappointed with the turnout for the games last year. I know we didn’t have the most successful team in town, but these are local kids, and they work hard, and they deserve to have somebody come and cheer them on.

Emily

A case of The Mondays

If this were a typical Monday, I’d hate weekends. Highlights:

1. Theme of superintendent’s speech at mandatory convocation: Route 66. Really.

2. Meet the new boss: Zaphod’s replacement may be as funny as he is. Not as caustic, but funny.

3. Paul McCartney was awesome.

Hope your Monday rocked.

Emily

Indie Tulsa

I’ve gotten several requests to update my Indie Tulsa blog, which I haven’t had time to fool with since I started teaching. I’m willing to do it, but with work, a trig class, and marathon training to juggle this semester, I’m ONLY willing to do it if people will meet me halfway. Full explanation is here. 

Emily

Birds

I saw about a kajillion birds flying across Route 66 today as I was coming home from running some errands in Midtown. It was kind of awesome. That is all.