Airbear is still not awake, because he is a bum. As I can't really put away any more of the random moving crap (due to the fact that the crap that's left is all Airbear's), I am not being responsible and proactive and working on my procert stuff or curriculum planning.
Instead I am making a cinnamon crumb cake. It will be delicious.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
85%
So last night was a pretty successful outing. We started at Industry Night, where I ate chicken strips & taters w/gravy (*insert choir of angelic voices*). We didn't hang out there too long, because there weren't a lot of people around and LaRue suggested we go to her favorite place in the universe, which is a dueling piano bar. Because LaRue is usually very responsible--indeed, one might even say abstemious--when she decides to go out I go along. Besides, you never know what might happen. She ended up getting hit on my some deutschbag(1) in a houndstooth fedora and the 85-year-old piano player. I'm really not kidding. The piano player was in a purple suit, too. But LaRue's boyfriend, the other piano player (who is fewer than 85 years old) wasn't there so before long we headed up to The Pub (TM). Obviously.
Once there, we met back up with Leo and one of his new coworkers. Now, I try to reserve judgement, but--wait, who the hell am I kidding. I never reserve judgement. Judgement is my specialty. This guy is a royal pain in the ass. He's dweeby, but that doesn't usually bother me too much. The thing is...he doesn't know he's dweeby. He is convinced that he is actually charismatic, witty, and Brad-Pitt-tastic. I can assure you that none of these things is remotely true. He made a bunch of not-funny quips at which he himself (and only he himself) laughed and at one point pulled me over. It's kind of hard to explain but I was standing, facing away from him, and he sort of grabbed my sides and pulled me backward so I landed on my butt on the booth seat. I wasn't hurt or anything but I gave a little surprised shriek and The Pub People looked over and I just was sort of embarassed instead of punching the guy in the junk like I should have. I think even Leo wanted to kill the dude. He sent an apologetic text message at 2am and Leo never apologizes for anything. So it wasn't just my usual intolerance, the guy really was a jackass :)
But I danced with LaRue and sang my head off at the piano bar, because that is what girls do when someone starts playing Bonnie Tyler. Leo and I also gave each other a bunch of crap in the pub, which always entertains me to no end, and my sweet, good Airbear not only went along with us two crazy broads to the piano bar but also (and not for the first time) gave LaRue cash to go up and give the piano players, because she never has any ca$h monies and they were playing shitty country music. (Not only can you pay them to sing, you can pay them to stfu.) What a good Airbear!
So while I did the perfect amount of drinking last night and was able to blow off some serious steam, I did not get to do the perfect amount of sleeping in because of my StupidFridayMeeting. I plan on remedying this situation posthaste.
P.S. Two blog days in a row, BLAM!!
(1) look at me sprecken'in ze deutsch!
Once there, we met back up with Leo and one of his new coworkers. Now, I try to reserve judgement, but--wait, who the hell am I kidding. I never reserve judgement. Judgement is my specialty. This guy is a royal pain in the ass. He's dweeby, but that doesn't usually bother me too much. The thing is...he doesn't know he's dweeby. He is convinced that he is actually charismatic, witty, and Brad-Pitt-tastic. I can assure you that none of these things is remotely true. He made a bunch of not-funny quips at which he himself (and only he himself) laughed and at one point pulled me over. It's kind of hard to explain but I was standing, facing away from him, and he sort of grabbed my sides and pulled me backward so I landed on my butt on the booth seat. I wasn't hurt or anything but I gave a little surprised shriek and The Pub People looked over and I just was sort of embarassed instead of punching the guy in the junk like I should have. I think even Leo wanted to kill the dude. He sent an apologetic text message at 2am and Leo never apologizes for anything. So it wasn't just my usual intolerance, the guy really was a jackass :)
But I danced with LaRue and sang my head off at the piano bar, because that is what girls do when someone starts playing Bonnie Tyler. Leo and I also gave each other a bunch of crap in the pub, which always entertains me to no end, and my sweet, good Airbear not only went along with us two crazy broads to the piano bar but also (and not for the first time) gave LaRue cash to go up and give the piano players, because she never has any ca$h monies and they were playing shitty country music. (Not only can you pay them to sing, you can pay them to stfu.) What a good Airbear!
So while I did the perfect amount of drinking last night and was able to blow off some serious steam, I did not get to do the perfect amount of sleeping in because of my StupidFridayMeeting. I plan on remedying this situation posthaste.
P.S. Two blog days in a row, BLAM!!
(1) look at me sprecken'in ze deutsch!
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Microwave Man
This post is going to have to be "in and out in a minute," a favorite euphemism of an old friend of mine, because I am about to leave and go eat some exquisitely terrible food and drink what I hope will be a giggle-fying amount of alcohols. Because it is Thursday and in the land of my school, Thursday = exhaustion.
Besides that, I am getting A Promotion (TM) and moving to the Seattle Campus. I thought I had a week to train my replacement, and then I would move over to Seattle and get trained for a week before the current guy leaves. Turns out his last week is NEXT week so I am going to do both training and being trained at the same time, including some free work tomorrow on my "day off" and who knows maybe even Saturday too. Oh, what I do to take care of the kiddies.
Their parents should buy me drinks for that!
Ha.
Anyway the condo is starting to feel more like home, I realized today as I came home and checked the mailbox. The mailbox was empty, but still. I have a mail key now, and I didn't before (because there was only one key at the old apartment). Somehow that makes it feel more like a home, because I can check the mail. I also did a load of laundry in our washer & dryer last night, and I know this is going to sound funny but the newness of having a W&D in our own place instead one giant laundry room down in the basement makes doing laundry seem more exciting than it really should be. Of course, our W&D is also not busted and does not require $145 in quarters to run. Hotness.
In unrelated news, LaRue is debating not writing in her blog because it's fall and she's going to be student teaching and she always gets paranoid at this time of the year. Like, ZOMFG, a parent might read my blog and find out I swear.
She really needs to understand this is a bad idea, because her blog is one of my primary sources of entertainment when I come home from work. I am too tired to read anything longer than a blog entry, and it is funny. I do not want to have to become one of those people who reads blogs about "politics". Gross.
If you know LaRue (and you should!), you should post a picket sign outside her house. Something like "Blog Free!" would be good. Red, White & Blue.
Oh! And also: feel free to either a) congratulate me on my new promotion (!) or 2) send me a bunch of advil and/or a flask for once I actually get there and realize what a 2.5x busier campus feels like :)
Besides that, I am getting A Promotion (TM) and moving to the Seattle Campus. I thought I had a week to train my replacement, and then I would move over to Seattle and get trained for a week before the current guy leaves. Turns out his last week is NEXT week so I am going to do both training and being trained at the same time, including some free work tomorrow on my "day off" and who knows maybe even Saturday too. Oh, what I do to take care of the kiddies.
Their parents should buy me drinks for that!
Ha.
Anyway the condo is starting to feel more like home, I realized today as I came home and checked the mailbox. The mailbox was empty, but still. I have a mail key now, and I didn't before (because there was only one key at the old apartment). Somehow that makes it feel more like a home, because I can check the mail. I also did a load of laundry in our washer & dryer last night, and I know this is going to sound funny but the newness of having a W&D in our own place instead one giant laundry room down in the basement makes doing laundry seem more exciting than it really should be. Of course, our W&D is also not busted and does not require $145 in quarters to run. Hotness.
In unrelated news, LaRue is debating not writing in her blog because it's fall and she's going to be student teaching and she always gets paranoid at this time of the year. Like, ZOMFG, a parent might read my blog and find out I swear.
She really needs to understand this is a bad idea, because her blog is one of my primary sources of entertainment when I come home from work. I am too tired to read anything longer than a blog entry, and it is funny. I do not want to have to become one of those people who reads blogs about "politics". Gross.
If you know LaRue (and you should!), you should post a picket sign outside her house. Something like "Blog Free!" would be good. Red, White & Blue.
Oh! And also: feel free to either a) congratulate me on my new promotion (!) or 2) send me a bunch of advil and/or a flask for once I actually get there and realize what a 2.5x busier campus feels like :)
Monday, August 6, 2007
Abbreviation
1. We moved into a new condo. It is teh awesome. We have put away the books, but there are still approximately 135 million things left to do. Among the fascinating highlights: the washer/dryer repair guy comes on Saturday (4th and hopefully final attempt), a giant Chinese wardrobe gets delivered on Saturday (since we went from 4 to 1.5 closets), and at least 14 miles of cable needs to be strung throughout the condo to hook up Airbear's electronic paraphernalia. But the condo is beautiful and is starting to feel homier. Even the kitties think so.
2. They are going to start doing curriculum/program audits every other week at all the campuses at my work. While this is good news, and ensures a higher level of educational quality (since our hyperbole-adverse but academically hard-assed ed. director will be conducting them), I nonetheless wish it wasn't starting on a week in which I have no time to go through and pre-audit the folders myself :) I did start doing it tonight though and got 8 of 26 done. Yes, that is only 30% (30.8%, actually), but it is still better than none, which is how many I had done this morning.
3. O.G. is coming to sub at my campus on Wednesday! Man, I heart that old guy!
4. I found out that Puritannica is having a bachelorette party on Aug 18 and I have to go, since I missed both the other two parties she got to throw for herself for getting married. Geez, how many parties does one person get to have?! The answer, apparently, is a lot. She better knock it off, though, because there is only so much of my time I am going to allow to be monopolized over this marriage. I can't complain too much, though, because so far I have avoided all the other parties. Ha.
5. I am trying to put together my campus schedule for fall. This is made slightly more difficult by the fact that I have no teachers. Well, one teacher. I hired another who can work for exactly 4 hours per week, and a second teacher who, although limited in subject range, at least allows me to once and for all get rid of the Texter. (And there was much rejoicing. Yaaay!)
6. I cooked my first dinner in the new place tonight. Sure it was only a quesadilla, but I used the oven and everything! Now if I could only find the pizza cutter.
More to come later :)
2. They are going to start doing curriculum/program audits every other week at all the campuses at my work. While this is good news, and ensures a higher level of educational quality (since our hyperbole-adverse but academically hard-assed ed. director will be conducting them), I nonetheless wish it wasn't starting on a week in which I have no time to go through and pre-audit the folders myself :) I did start doing it tonight though and got 8 of 26 done. Yes, that is only 30% (30.8%, actually), but it is still better than none, which is how many I had done this morning.
3. O.G. is coming to sub at my campus on Wednesday! Man, I heart that old guy!
4. I found out that Puritannica is having a bachelorette party on Aug 18 and I have to go, since I missed both the other two parties she got to throw for herself for getting married. Geez, how many parties does one person get to have?! The answer, apparently, is a lot. She better knock it off, though, because there is only so much of my time I am going to allow to be monopolized over this marriage. I can't complain too much, though, because so far I have avoided all the other parties. Ha.
5. I am trying to put together my campus schedule for fall. This is made slightly more difficult by the fact that I have no teachers. Well, one teacher. I hired another who can work for exactly 4 hours per week, and a second teacher who, although limited in subject range, at least allows me to once and for all get rid of the Texter. (And there was much rejoicing. Yaaay!)
6. I cooked my first dinner in the new place tonight. Sure it was only a quesadilla, but I used the oven and everything! Now if I could only find the pizza cutter.
More to come later :)
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Thank the Lord..
...this week is finally over.
Despite having so much to do (or maybe because there is so much to do), these few weeks are taking forever. There's been all kinds of draaaaamaaaaa at the fakeytown fartless office, because they have hired a Really Big Ho' (TM) to run the place in the midst of the sucking vortex created by the absence of its previous manager, your old friend and mine, Puritannica. The chaos resultant from Puritannica's departure has not, as a rational person would surmise, educated the moneybags owners as to her efficiency at making them shit-tons of money. On the contrary, they are rapidly trying to distract everyone from the aforementioned chaos by badmouthing Puritannica as much as possible. How rogue she was! How disappointed and embarrassed they were to discover it!
As another of my colleagues likes to say (to anything), whatever.
I also planned this training opportunity for my coworkers at my school about teaching certification information, professional/national board certification, and the No Child Left Behind Highly-Qualified Teacher (TM) requirements. (Yes, each one of those has its own separate "handbook.") Note that since we are a private school, you do not have to meet state or federal teacher requirements. Instead, you only need to meet whatever standards are set out by your school. As I may have already told you, our school does not actually have any standards. However, there are several people there that do have teaching certificates that they will at some point need to get renewed, and I thought it might be a useful exercise for us to examine our staff base and perhaps see things like what percentage of our staff actually is certified? What percentage would meet highly-qualified teacher requirements? That kind of data might be nice to have in order to either a) demonstrate the quality of your staff or 2) make obvious how you need to improve the quality of your staff. I also thought that since I had to go through all this work to understand this crap for my own procert program I would save other people the work and summarize it for them in a brief, clear, bullshit-free way. I am very good at taking things that are long, complicated, and full of bullshit and elucidating them. It's true. Just ask my uncle Herb.*
Anyway, no one in the company would go. This proves several things that we already knew:
1). Most of the staff at fartless school does not give a fart (!) about professional development.
2). None of the staff at fartless school is paid enough to justify going "above and beyond" the bare minimum teaching requirements.
3). Those select staff members at fartless school that do have/need to renew their teaching certificates are too lazy to do anything about it.
I'm really kind of disappointed (but not exactly surprised). So much for my "contributing as a colleague to the development of my school as a whole" procert goal. I'll have to find another way to meet that goal now. Jerks.
Maybe I'll make something up tomorrow when I am out being productive all day with LaRue. We have some serious productivity planned. And that's not even a dirty joke, it's true.
Just ask my uncle Herb...
* It's from Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. You should read it.
Despite having so much to do (or maybe because there is so much to do), these few weeks are taking forever. There's been all kinds of draaaaamaaaaa at the fakeytown fartless office, because they have hired a Really Big Ho' (TM) to run the place in the midst of the sucking vortex created by the absence of its previous manager, your old friend and mine, Puritannica. The chaos resultant from Puritannica's departure has not, as a rational person would surmise, educated the moneybags owners as to her efficiency at making them shit-tons of money. On the contrary, they are rapidly trying to distract everyone from the aforementioned chaos by badmouthing Puritannica as much as possible. How rogue she was! How disappointed and embarrassed they were to discover it!
As another of my colleagues likes to say (to anything), whatever.
I also planned this training opportunity for my coworkers at my school about teaching certification information, professional/national board certification, and the No Child Left Behind Highly-Qualified Teacher (TM) requirements. (Yes, each one of those has its own separate "handbook.") Note that since we are a private school, you do not have to meet state or federal teacher requirements. Instead, you only need to meet whatever standards are set out by your school. As I may have already told you, our school does not actually have any standards. However, there are several people there that do have teaching certificates that they will at some point need to get renewed, and I thought it might be a useful exercise for us to examine our staff base and perhaps see things like what percentage of our staff actually is certified? What percentage would meet highly-qualified teacher requirements? That kind of data might be nice to have in order to either a) demonstrate the quality of your staff or 2) make obvious how you need to improve the quality of your staff. I also thought that since I had to go through all this work to understand this crap for my own procert program I would save other people the work and summarize it for them in a brief, clear, bullshit-free way. I am very good at taking things that are long, complicated, and full of bullshit and elucidating them. It's true. Just ask my uncle Herb.*
Anyway, no one in the company would go. This proves several things that we already knew:
1). Most of the staff at fartless school does not give a fart (!) about professional development.
2). None of the staff at fartless school is paid enough to justify going "above and beyond" the bare minimum teaching requirements.
3). Those select staff members at fartless school that do have/need to renew their teaching certificates are too lazy to do anything about it.
I'm really kind of disappointed (but not exactly surprised). So much for my "contributing as a colleague to the development of my school as a whole" procert goal. I'll have to find another way to meet that goal now. Jerks.
Maybe I'll make something up tomorrow when I am out being productive all day with LaRue. We have some serious productivity planned. And that's not even a dirty joke, it's true.
Just ask my uncle Herb...
* It's from Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. You should read it.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Update
You may have noticed a bit of a culling has occurred around here. I haven't been posting much because things have been nuts at work and getting ready for the big move, and plus I just haven't really been in the mood to blog about my cooking adventures lately. To be quite honest, I haven't been having many such adventures lately. We've been trying to eat up all those meals so we have fewer things to move. (I also went through my books and tried to find some I could get rid of or sell back. Out of 13 bookshelves, I found 3 books I could part with. Ha. Oops.)
Anyway, I'm going to broaden my blogging scope a bit to include more than "pizza." The title of my blog, since it is clearly very catchy, will stay the same--you can just think of "pizza" as a broader metaphorical term, symbolizing all the relevant goings on in the world of nitza. And really, if you're looking for a juicy metaphor to represent Things of Importance, nothing beats pizza.
Except maybe "nachos," and that doesn't rhyme. Oh, and don't worry, I left the posts w/recipes ;)
Anyway, I'm going to broaden my blogging scope a bit to include more than "pizza." The title of my blog, since it is clearly very catchy, will stay the same--you can just think of "pizza" as a broader metaphorical term, symbolizing all the relevant goings on in the world of nitza. And really, if you're looking for a juicy metaphor to represent Things of Importance, nothing beats pizza.
Except maybe "nachos," and that doesn't rhyme. Oh, and don't worry, I left the posts w/recipes ;)
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