Odds & Ends
and anticipate they'll shrink.
If I buy them
with a slightly bigger waist than what I have,
the inseam will shrink and the waist won't.
Buy pants a little long,
and the waist will shrink.
Do both, and they won't shrink at all.
It never fails.
And try to find a cotton/polyester blend of jeans
that are designed not only not to shrink,
but are designed to be permanent-press.
Impossible to find nowadays.
= I would love to try a real taco.
Real tacos are not just a shell filled with ground beef.
From what I understand,
real tacos have very little (or no) meat
and are mostly vegetables and beans.
I haven't been
to all the Mexican restaurants around here,
but "people in the know" tell me
that none serve real tacos.
Taco Bell, are you listening?
= So far, so good with my garden.
My snow peas are doing well.
All the tiny light brown specks? Maple tree seeds.
I'm hoping most won't sprout...
For some reason the green onions aren't.
But nothing has ever grown well
at that end of the garden (?!)
even though I've augmented (I like that word)
the soil with some really good stuff.
Maybe radon gas is leaching up from underneath.
Or they're growing on Indian burial ground
and the spirits don't like it.
The rest of the garden
- bush beans, peppers, pumpkins and squash -
was all planted recently
and I haven't expected anything yet.
Especially after 10 straight days of cool, rainy weather.
= I had a teacher bring her kids to lunch
2 minutes early the other day.
and found the classes before her hadn't arrived yet.
Two minutes mean quite a bit there at lunchtime.
Everyone is supposed to follow the schedule precisely.
"Where are they?
I'm supposed to be here at 11:56, and it's 11:56!"
I looked up at the clock.
"It's only 11:54", I said.
She had a very puzzled look on her face,
then said..."Oh".
It reminded me
of something that happened ten years ago:
I worked with a fourth-grade teacher
who could not read a clock.
She had a decorative clock on the wall in her classroom
and had me replace it with a clock
that had a traditional clock face
with numbers and lines because...in her own words,
"I need the practice. I never learned to read a clock."
"Um...how were you able to get through college?"
"With an LCD watch."
I told a few trusted people I knew about this
- people I knew wouldn't repeat it
and get me in trouble
for embarrassing the school system.
I was curious to see
if this sort of thing was common.
They wouldn't believe me
and insisted she must've been joking.
But, I swear...it was no joke
and what I said was 100% accurate.
You had to be there.
She's now a principal at another school district.
posted by t @ 3:48 PM
11 comments
11 Comments:
I love it when you write like this. The maple seeds are just now falling here. They'll be brown in a couple of weeks. But this weather can't go away soon enough. The seventy dollar hydrangea that we bought isn't even coming to life yet. I don't know if it's dead or just late.
Oh, boy.
It might just be late. Everything here seems to be coming out late. But when something that expensive dies, that hurts. Did you buy it last year? You plant and care for it all year, tending to it's every need and it dies over the winter.
I'm hoping that doesn't happen to the $90 Japanese maple I bought and planted.
I hope your hydrangea makes it OK.
It won't be long before people in authority no longer have the ability to write. They will only be able to type.
Good luck with the garden. Perhaps some vengefull pet was buried there and it's spirit will allow no further plant to take seed in that foul and haunted soil.....
oh my gosh i can't believe you were able to plant all that stuff so early. and we live in the same state! we had frost warnings here last night. not that i've planted anything. but you give me motivation to get out there and get my hands dirty!
I've heard tales that some districts will "promote" certain members of the administration just to get them away from teaching the kids. They're usually so ineffectual that they become counselors or vice principals so the more effective teachers can do their jobs properly. I have a sinking suspicion that this happened to a geography teacher I had in high school. The man was an utter ass and he was cruel to any student that wasn't an Honor student or higher. They weren't worth his time. I was a smart kid in high school and I think he liked me as a student, but I hated him. He was pretty mean to my older sister when she went through high school, but I doubt he even bothered to remember her name. A year after I took his class, he was transferred to another school in the district and was given a promotion. I still hate him and I never thought he was particularly intelligent. (He gave us maps and wanted us to measure distances, but he wouldn't give us rulers. We had to measure using our fingers.)
Ultra;
I remember a co-worker telling me 10 years ago that it wouldn't be long before books are gone, that all print will be electronic.
So far, at least that hasn't happened. There's something to be said about carrying around print on paper. It'll always be there and won't crash and vanish like e-text.
We do bury our pets on our property, but we never buried any of them there.
It's definitely a mystery.
Patricia;
So far, the only stuff growing is peas and onions (barely). And they're both crops you plant in April (if the ground is workable) as opposed to beans, corn, melons, etc...that you plant mid-May or later. We just had frost warnings last night but peas and onions are both frost resistant. I did have 2 tomato plants and 2 pepper plants I covered up and we didn't get a frost anyway. Nothing else is coming up yet.
Doug;
I've known teachers like the guy you described, but none quite that bad.
The kids that he didn't treat well - the ones who weren't brilliant - were the ones who needed to be treated well, as part of their problem might have been lack of confidence and/or self-esteem.
I can't imagine why he wouldn't give you rulers and made you use your fingers, unless he was teaching you to improvise.
For example, American paper money is almost exactly 6-inches long.
Something good to know in a pinch.
But it sounds like he was just being an asshole.
Your theory makes sense.
A principal I used to have was the head of the science department when she was a teacher, but always confused a comet with a meteor. She was a very nice person, just...um...not real knowledgeable about science.
I could give her the benefit-of-the-doubt and say
"Well, no one can know everything about science",
but the differences between a comet and meteor are pretty straightforward.
Two words about teacher's inabilities...'no wonder'. I come from a teaching background, my mom was a teacher, ALL of my mom's friends were teachers. My fiance is a teacher. I wasexpected to become a teacher. That being said, I still know many teachers that for a lot of reasons should not be teaching, AT ALL. I do think the majority are there for the right reasons and have wonderful skills, but I personally know a language arts teacher that cannot spell a lick. Scary.
Eek!
Scary!
LinF;
There's clunkers in every profession. But I wonder if they're spread out evenly or if there's more in some places than others, because sometimes I think I've just worked with more than my share. Maybe just seems that way because I've worked in the same place for so long.
Ultra;
Indeed! And then you have to work with people who's mental state is in question...and they're around kids all day!
An art teacher I used to work once came up to me with a dead bug in one hand and a roll of masking tape in the other.
"Look at this dead bug I found. Any idea what it is? Here, look."
She felt she wasn't able to show it to me well enough in the palm of her hand, so she held out the roll of masking tape flat and dropped the bug through the center of the tape roll as though it were a plate.
Of course, with the center being open, it fell to the floor.
She acted very confused as to why that happened.
Perhaps she was making some great artistic statement about continuity; The dead fly, representing the finity of life passing through a void that cannot exist without the circle of the infinite plastic tape.
uh..
Maybe she was just crazy and wanted to twist your melon.
Ultra;
She was about 52 or 54 at the time, talked very slowly and deliberately and always acted a little twitchy.
Everyone considered her a real flake.
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