Tag: work

Freedom! It smells yummy!

Today was the last day of school for both students and teachers. (Well, for today to be the last day for teachers, we had to work until 7pm. But it’s worth it. Heh.)

One of the neat things we did today was get to take a tour of the building site for the new school building. I took lots of photos. Dunno when I’ll download ’em, but hey, photos!

This weekend is the Troy Strawberry Festival – I’ll be going with the folks on Sunday during the Heathen Hours – that is, when other folks are in church. (You meet the nicest people during the Heathen Hours. Heh.)

Productivity, thy name is trinalin

Wow, a productive day for me! Not in any order, today I

  • Roomba’d the place twice

  • Planted flowers in my window boxes (vinca aka periwinkle)

  • Talked with my sissy on the phone

  • Cleaned the bathroom

  • Did the laundry

  • Worked in the lab for 2 1/2 hours, getting it ready for the next experiment and backing up our test Acer Aspire One 10″ netbook (before I load new OSes onto it)

  • Went to Covington for BBQ chicken

  • Watched “The Fires of Pompeii” (DW season 4)

  • Talked with elsaf & judiang online

Needless to say, I’m worn out. Heh.

Digging in the Dirt

For the 2009 Newton Local School Groundbreaking Ceremony (held yesterday, March 27), I was chosen as one of the staff representatives to turn over some dirt. I was pleased to be chosen and I asked dad to come along to the ceremony. (Well, I’d’ve asked him anyhoo, but since I was gonna be in it, he agreed to come along.) And thankfully he brought his camera and took some photos. Yay! So now I subject you folks to photos. (I’ve chopped everyone else out of the shots since most of ’em are school age kids and thankfully in the first photo, all the kids’ backs were to the camera.)

Waiting for my 15 minutes of Fame (or something)
Waiting for my 15 minutes of Fame (or something)

I wait in line (well, a line of sorts) for my opportunity to turn some dirt.
Posing for photos
Posing for photos

I’m posing with several junior high and high school students for the ceremony. We were the third official dig group. (After board members and administrators.)
Digging in the Dirt
Digging in the Dirt

I dig my ceremonial shovel of dirt for the ceremony.


Electronica

Of late, I’ve been having a love/hate relationship with my electronics.

First, my DVD player, which wasn’t even a month old, had its HDMI port go kablooey. Bummer. I knew when I bought the Philips DVP5990 that some people were having issues with the HDMI port, but I really liked the idea of a USB port in my DVD player and some upconversion of my DVDs. And I usually have good luck with electronics. Still, this one decided to be a butthead and its HDMI port decided it liked the color pink more than any other color. I went to Philips unhelp site and did everything it suggested for the known issue (if it’s a known issue, Philips, why don’t you FIX IT?!?). It stayed pink. I e-mailed their tech support and they said I should phone ’em. Hell, I didn’t want to waste an evening talking to tech support. So I decided instead to switch to component cables and see how long that lasts. It’s not been a month yet, but so far, so good. Considering my TV maxes at 1080i anyhoo, and these are just upconverted DVDs not Blue Ray, the quality is good enough for me.

My second betrayer actually lasted more than a year – but not much more. The SmartParts digital frame which my folks gave me for Christmas in 2007 died. I did whatever I could think of to snap it out of it, but no go. But I’ve gotten used to having a digital frame in my library. So I decided to research digital frames to see what I needed. 7″ was sufficient and if it did 400×234 images, that was fine cuz I already had a set of images from the SmartParts frame. Although a remote would have been nice, it wasn’t a necessity. After seeing one in person at Staples, I decided that the Kodak EasyShare 720 was the frame for me. And best of all, I found it on eBay for $49.95 incl shipping. What I love best about it is that you can set the length of time between photos in the slideshow mode. I have it set for 30s now – I might go longer in future.

Although I’d had my eye set on an Acer Aspire One netbook, I kept getting disappointed when I couldn’t find the combo I wanted: 6-cell battery, SSD, Linux, a color other than black. So I kept my eye on other netbooks. I’d tried HP’s mini and liked the keyboard, but the battery size was only 3-cell and they were pricier than other brands. Dell had a linux version on SSD with a 4-cell battery, but it was initially way too expensive. And the only free color was black. But then Dell started to lower its price (as only Dell can). Eventually the 8GB SSD with 512MB RAM linux netbook was $249. It was tempting. But as I intended to get a red one and get at least 1GB of RAM, the price kept going over $300. And then came Tuesday… $50 off the linux netbook just for that day. I couldn’t wait to get home to buy it. (Hey, I was pricing them at work cuz I figure netbooks will be my future computer lab there!)

So when I got home, I called dad (cuz I’d called him earlier to let him know about the sale and caught him as he was ordering one – heh). While talking to him about his purchase (he went for the barebones one in white which, with tax and shipping, was around $220), I was busy on Dell’s site customizing mine. Although white was now a free upgrade, I decided I didn’t want black or white. Indeed, since I’d been to the site at lunch, there was now BLUE. It was tempting, but I went with red. I also upgraded to 1GB of RAM. Even with those two upgrades, the final price incl shipping & taxes was under $300 (around $280). Yay! Our netbooks won’t arrive until the middle of April or so.

In non-tech news, tomorrow is the groundbreaking for our new school building. At 1:30pm, the entire study body and community members will congregate near where the new building will be built. And lucky me gets to be one of the high school staff representatives to turn over some dirt – woot! I’ll see if dad can get a photo of me turning dirt so I can post it to my blog. 🙂 Keep an eye on the Newton New Building Updates page – there will eventually be a link to a video camera pointing to the job site.

Thinks

I’m nearly caught up with grading again. Always amazing how it seems to run away from me. But I stayed at work until after 5 yesterday grading tests that were beginning to smell they were so old. And I got a few other things graded today which had been molding. The trick is to now stay on top of things. (I think I should stop assigning round things since it’s harder to stay on top of round things than flat things…)

My latest DVD watching has been Into the Labyrinth. I loved this show as a kid and became a Ron Moody fan because of it. I always enjoyed the various “characters” he played in the series. It was a number of years later that I discovered that there was more than one season of the show. Thanks to the DVD set, I have begun watching season 2. Amazing to think that the visuals were even worse in season 2, but Ron still gets to dress in cool costumes, so I figure I’ll enjoy season 2. Season 3 doesn’t have him, but at least it still has Phil Church (one of the kids who help Moody’s character – and the cute one that I had a crush on as a kid). Oh, and Pamela Salem (Belor) will also be there to chew the scenery, so I’ll probably have fun with season 3.

One thing that I’ve decided is that it’s fun to watch early 80s British children’s television programming on a widescreen high def TV. Heh heh. (Almost seems a waste of all that high tech-ness, but I love the irony.)

I’ve been helping dad with some YouTube videos for Westar. So far I’ve edited two short excerpts and uploaded them, though I may have to work on the second one. The sound on it didn’t come out too well. Feel free to check out the clips. The first is of Elaine Pagels talking about the origin of Satan and the second (with the crappy sound) is Karen Armstrong talking about “what is religion?”

My superintendent had seen a neat animated clock on one of the other schools’ websites and asked if we’d be able to put a clock and/or weather thingy on our website. So I looked into finding standards compliant, handicapped accessible, ad-free (or non-obvious) solutions. And I think I got it. The clock is basically a live clock of your own PC rather than a world-time clock (those were all ad-laden that I could find). I found that Weather Underground had the least-obvious advertising weather stickie, so included that as well. (Their own page, like so many other weather pages, is chock-full o’ ads. If only the National Weather Service had widgets like that – they’re ad free.)

I’ve been busy and I hope to spend some quality time tomorrow working on college stuff. My task for tomorrow? Write about astrology and how it’s not a science. Should be fun. As per the assignment, I’m going to suggest feng shui as another example of a pseudo-science. (I love the Penn & Teller: BS episode on Feng Shui and bottled water.)

Even with the weather…

So, like, if you’re sick you say “I’m feeling under the weather.” But if you’re getting better, are you “even with the weather”? And when you’re well, are you “over the weather”? Curious trinas want to know.

At any rate, I feel like I’m getting even with the weather. Sunday night (after a fun time shopping at Crafts 2000 with my Aunt Becky and then supper at the Chinese Buffet) I suddenly got every cold symptom within a 15 minute period. Wound up going to bed on NyquilClone at 7:30pm. My day off on Monday was fairly wasted just battling the cold and avoiding real work. (I got a lot of videos watched which had been languishing*.)

Tuesday, I had a meeting at the Miami County ESC, so I had a sub already. After the meeting, I went to Meijer for more NyquilClone and then in bed by 7:30pm. One of the girls was impressed that I knew in advance that I was going to be sick (since I’d told ’em they’d have a sub Tuesday) – I hated to disappoint her by telling her I’d been to a meeting, but disappoint her I did. 🙂 Last night was another “bust” night of nothing useful accomplished. But I figured I could spent tonight grading tests and stuff – which I did.

Thankfully, tomorrow is Friday. If I have truly kicked this cold, I should have a more productive weekend than I wound up having last weekend.

*On Saturday, the parentals & I celebrated Valentine’s Day by eating out for lunch (Applebee’s) and then shopping at Best Buy and Kroger (the good one in Englewood). I bought a Philips DVP5990/37 DVD player which upconverts to 1080p (though my TV maxes at 1080i) and plays USB flash drives. I also bought an HDMI cable, which cost half the cost of the DVD player (and turned out to be too short – the DVD player is currently WAY back). No matter, I bought two 6-ft HDMI cables from Amazon.com for $.99 each – they’ll probably arrive soon. Anyhoo, thanks to the USB port, I can now watch my downloaded videos from a USB drive rather than saving to CD or DVD. Sweet. And it works. AND it’s easy to make region-free. The DVD player was $65 – and I’ve heard of it going for even cheaper in some places. 1080i is sweet. I love my TV even more than before (if you can believe that even possible).

Already behind…

It’s only a week into 2009 and I’m already 4 weeks behind. Heh.

I had a WONDERFUL Christmas break, but I managed to put off a lot of things that needed doing, especially for school. And this week hasn’t been my most productive. Still, I got chemistry tests (from before break) graded today. I am going to force myself to refrain from gaming on Saturday until I finish grading the catapult papers (from WAY before break). I hope to get somewhat caught up in order to game all day Sunday (my last true gaming day until summer, I imagine). So wish me luck on being productive this Saturday. Heh.

In other news – have you ever stubbed your toe in bed? The other night I was putting my feet under the covers, but because they were slightly sweaty (even when my feet are cold they sweat) they stuck to the sheets and my toe got stubbed. I was amused, despite the discomfort. Heh.

Oh, and perhaps this weekend I’ll get my 2008 book results posted. I read 65 books in 2008 – here’s for even more in 2009!

School’s Out!

Today was a LONG day. For the kids, it was pretty short – they were dismissed at 11am. Rather than have normal classes today, we had a series of workshops that kids signed up for on cool things they could do in the summer. Neat idea. I signed up to work in the room that Barefoot Canoes was doing their sessions on. I sat for the first two sessions and then the other teacher in the room let me go to the Brukner Nature Center workshop.

I liked the sessions I observed and the Brukner one was doubly cool cuz she had critters. She brought a snake, a salamander, a teeny little screech owl (adult size), and a juvenile possum. These were critters from their wildlife rehabilitation clinic – if the critters get back to 100% health, they’ll be returned to the wild. The snake isn’t an Ohio native (too cold in Ohio for it), the screech owl was blind in one eye, and the possum couldn’t smell, so I doubt if they’ll be returned to the wild. But they’re very well behaved critters, so they are great for the nature center for taking them around to schools.

After the kids were gone, the staff had a carry-in lunch. I brought brownies. Mmmm, brownies. I baked ’em myself! Lunch was tasty and it was nice to chat with co-workers.

I spent most of the rest of the day working on LPDC stuff. I’m the chair of the local professional development committee at work and we were having our last meeting of the year today. So I got all of the paperwork ready for the meeting and chased down a few people who really needed to get paperwork in today. Normally our LPDC meetings are 15 minutes or less. Today’s meeting was 45 minutes and we were all sore in our signing arms when we were done. Towards the end, I was getting my initials confused with dating and my signature. Sheesh.

I made copies of all of the LPDC paperwork of the day, filed stuff in folders, and returned originals to staff members. And then I finally had time to work in my lab. Our superintendent was great – he gave us the option of working til 6pm today and getting tomorrow off, or working a regular day today and working tomorrow. I left shortly after 6pm. Sleeping in tomorrow – woot!

I’ll pop into the school a few times this summer to work on lab stuff, but I don’t actually work this summer. My first summer off in years. Woohoo!

The First Lazing at the Lake for 2008

Ah, the sun is getting lower in the sky, the song birds are saying “night night!’ to each other, the geese are going “honk honk” as they pass each other on the Lake. Yup, it’s Memorial Day weekend at the Lake, 2008.

judiang‘s sleeping in the 3-season room. I’m sitting out by the fire (a very nice one I must say) typing on this. And poor elsaf is driving here from Detroit. She just can’t seem to buy a break today. Her intent was to arrive around 4pm. But we’ve received 2 e-mails and a text message, each stating yet another delay. Poor dear. She last figured 9:30pm. Hopefully that time will stand.

Judi arrived at the airport around 10:30 this morning and my folks picked her up. Since we’re into the last 10 days of school, by contract I wasn’t able to take a personal day even though, with the seniors gone, I don’t have students in the afternoon. Not a problem, since the folks were willing to help out, things went just fine.

They dropped Judi off at the school around 11 and I immediately showed off my Airliner tablet and the SmartBoard software. She was truly impressed and got a few lessons on optics. (She now knows the difference between diffraction and refraction.) I also showed her the current design plans for the new school building and my own plans for my chemistry classroom/lab. Then I drug her around the school so she could see some of the folks she went to Italy with. We couldn’t find Marcia, but she saw Jacki, John, Tammy, and Marcia’s hubby Gary (who gave her a big hug). We had a turkey sub from Indian’s Pizza (Jeff’s wife delivers to us every other Friday), some Munchies, apple slices and Pepsi. Tasty tasty. Then I drove Judi to my home, fixed her dessert (Betty Crocker’s new 150 calorie microwave brownies – very very yummy! Especially with whipped cream.)

I returned to work after I got Judi all nicely tucked up on the sofa. My brain was pretty much fried by then, so I helped out in the office moving boxes and stuff so they wouldn’t be in the hallway during graduation. It wasn’t until 2:30 that MJ remembered there was a calligraphy job she needed doing for the valedictorians. No matter, I grabbed my calligraphy kit and was done with the certificates in time to leave around 3. (We have 6 valedictorians this year. Out of a class of around 45-50. Before people shout “grade inflation” I’ll tell you this: 19 of the students are receiving various scholarships from universities – the total amount offered to those 19 kids is nearly $840,000. Eight hundred and friggin’ forty bucks! Sheesh, I wanted to get $160,000 to give ’em just to round it up to an even million.)

When I got home, I read the two e-mails from Elsa describing her late start and late arrival. So I didn’t rush us out the door as I had originally intended. Still, we got to the lake by 5pm, where upon I got the fresh fruit cleaned up (strawberries, peaches, blueberries) and made us amaretto sours.

Around 6pm, I started prepping for supper. I was going to surprise the girls with marinated shrimp on the grill. Well, Judi was surprised. Elsa will have to wait til she gets here to be surprised. And there’s shrimp left over which I can grill tomorrow for Elsa. I also had veggies to grill and some focaccia bread for the side. The veggies I bought were yellow squash, vidalia onion, red pepper, turnips (well, why not?), button ‘shrooms and shitake ‘shrooms (another new grillee for me), and marinated artichoke hearts. I skewered the shrimp & artichoke hearts and grilled the veggies in our vegging grilling bowl. The turnips and shitake mushrooms were a good idea. I’ll be grilling them again! I had also bought pineapple for grilling, but forgot to prep it, so we’ll have it later this weekend.

The shrimp and veggies were very tasty and I’ll have to make that shrimp marinade again. (It was garlic, rosemary, salt, and olive oil.) Indeed, I think I’ll probably use that marinade on other things.

So after I cleaned up the kitchen, I decided to get the fire going again and go sit outside. And that’s what I’m doing. Yay for my folks’ cottage at the Lake!

The First Week of School

Well, the first week of school was a good one for me. Yay! We didn’t have kids until Wednesday, so Monday & Tuesday were teacher work days.

Monday was meeting filled, but it was great getting the chance to chat with my coworkers again. Several of us ladies went to Bob Evans for lunch in plenty of time to get back for the afternoon meetings, except that the food never came. With 15 minutes to go before we had to leave, we spurred the waitress on and had her switch things from “here” to “to go.” The manager was nice enough to discount our meals since we had to rush back and not eat them in. Bob Evans is usually pretty good about getting lunches out promptly, but we don’t know what happened that day. Our principal was nice enough to let us eat during the meeting, so I had my (now soggy) fish sandwich while I meetinged. (I swear, I teach for free. They pay me to go to meetings and grade papers.)

Tuesday was a day for us to work in our rooms. However, I found myself helping out in the tech job some still. (Poor G, my replacement, has had quite a learning curve on this job. He’s doing great and I think he’ll be a fine addition to the school, but he’s definitely overwhelmed at the start. Funny, I seem to remember always being overwhelmed at the start of the school year too.) Still, a bit after noon, mom popped in to say that she and dad were there to take me off to lunch. We were meeting up with her brothers (and their wives and my cousin) for lunch. Yay for Applebee’s!

The place was packed at lunch. And interestingly enough, the music department for Troy was there in a group. We knew some of the teachers and chatted with them while we waited for our seats. We finally got a seat and had a nice lunch chatting and catching up on family matters. I wasn’t concerned about getting back from lunch since I was going to stay later than required anyway. Which I did.

I stayed late and then returned early that evening. We’ve taken to doing Open House the day before school starts. When I was a kid, Open House was where you showcased what the kids were doing in school. Now it seems to be a Meet & Greet between parents and teachers. And for once, I had some parents meet & greet me! Yay! During the open house, I got more of my room ready and when the evening was done, I felt pretty confident about how things looked for the first day of school.

The first day went off without a hitch. Looks like, as usual, I’ve got a nice bunch of students. It was nice seeing the seniors again – I think they’ll make a nice physics group. And I might even get some of the chemistry students’ names learned before Christmas! Woohoo!

The second and third days of school, OTOH, had an interesting development. See, on the first day of school, it was hot & shitty out. And thus, in our 80+ year old building, was even hotter & shittier inside. We had a few minor heat issues, but it was decided to avoid them during the next two forecasted even hotter and shittier days by having a 2-hour early dismissal for all students and staff. That was a welcome relief, to be sure. I’m one of the lucky ones with air conditioning (thanks to my computer lab) but even my room was pretty warm by the end of the day. And the folks on the third floor? Sheesh!

I know that judiang thinks we’re wusses for having an early dismissal. I know we never had ’em when I was in school (same building). But I told her that it’s all the fault of the lawyers. They’re so big on suing everyone about anything that schools can’t have kids fainting due to heat anymore. And maybe we can also blame Al Gore for inventing Global Warming. 😉

Anyhoo, tomorrow is the start of the second week of school. And it’s going to be tolerable in temperature, it seems. So hopefully no more early dismissals. And maybe it’ll be cool enough in the chemistry lab for me to do some straightening up in there this week. Here’s hoping the second week of school is as nice as the first was!