any time of year

today was my first day of teaching at both the high school and one of the colleges i'll be at this fall. the morning was spent at the high school... the highlight of which was watching the students receive the combinations to their lockers, then stand in front of them while the resident priest blessed them. them being the lockers. just in case there was any sort of demonic locker possession going on. and then he sprinkled them in the face with holy water. them being both the students and the lockers. in the face. outrageous.

one of my classes at the college had a whopping three students in it. one of those students is the type that likes to correct everything you say and try to lead the lecture. we're not going to be friends. he also made sure to let us know that he's really good at both english at math, that he's memorized most of the fractions as decimals, and that he's good at drawing trees at any time of the year. i am unsure if that means that he's good at drawing trees in december as well as july, or if he's not thrown by those crazy shape-shifting oaks and their sneaky seasonal morphing. it's probably both. he seems really talented. ugh. i also made sure to tell my other class (this one having 21 students) to be sure to come to class because the rumor is that i'm super awesome. no laughing, no nothing. just blank stares. fantastic.

by any means necessary... including posters

so i have come to discover that the high school i am teaching at has some issues with cultural sensitivity. and by cultural sensitivity i mean racism. teachers have relayed to me some rather outrageous and terrible things students have said in class, or in response to a woman having pictures of her family (with African American members) on her desk, but that type of intolerance seems so 1964 that it's hard for me to comprehend. on friday, the librarian showed me the latest instance of this sort of behavior: obama's face on a newspaper with monkey-type drawings added to him. when she showed me i gasped out loud. a loud gasp, especially for a library. she'd been having scolding sessions with every class that came in there.... i get that kids can be racist, and in vermont it's that weird kind of racism where the kids have probably never even been in contact with a person of color... the kind of racism that exists in my midwest homeland. but damn. for real? i'm just hoping that no student of mine says something during class because i will lose it. and they are getting absolutely INNUNDATED with pictures and anecdotes and everything having to do with people of color. i've got more posters up about civil rights and malcolm X and the dalai lama than these kids will know what to do with. my room is going to be COVERED in color. and black people.

prepare for the robot attack

tomatoes!!!!! they're as tall as i am. granted, that's nothing to brag about, but for a tomato plant it's pretty impressive.

i started work at the high school i'm teaching at this year. and wow. wow. wow. it's a very small school (~80 students) and they are NUTSO about sports. relatively outrageous, especially considering their records of recent years are not too winning-like, but they're busting with all kinds of history of the sports times of old. it's all oldie-time male faculty members want to talk about. and do they talk about it. constantly. all the time. when they're not talking about how they pummeled so-and-so twenty years ago, they're handing me catholic prayer books. awesome. but the most INSANE thing had to be the faculty in-service conversation surrounding books online and getting our students comfortable and familiar with using online organizers and things like that. you know, bringing them in the 21st century. the math man sitting to my right (the man who, during my interview, after exclaiming that he thought i was a new student, leaned in and sneered at me asking "so what do you know about graphing calculators?) was getting really worked up about "that internet" and went on a three-minute rant about how "you can't get everything off that internet! you need books to do real work! you're either organized or you're not and i'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater! if we want the internet books so bad why don't we throw all our books out now?! and if books are so unimportant, what are we sitting in here for?" (we were in the library) i just put my head down and wished it would all be over with. i was waiting for him to continue on with how internet books are exactly what the robot people want us to fall for before they start sucking out our brains with their brain probes. and the son-of-a-gun has come into my room twice this week to tell me how awesome TI-83s are and try to give me programming information. i'm swearing off graphing calculators forever and putting up anti-TI propoganda in my room.

nice buns. prepare for armageddon.

those are them there cinnamon buns. let them rise in the fridge overnight and baked them up this morning. SO DELICIOUS. if you come to visit vermont you'll be treated to a batch of them. :)

so you may want to be up and ready around 8 a.m. tomorrow morning just in case something.... happens. like, let's say, the earth opening up and swallowing heathens and adulterers, thunder and lightning announcing the arrival of an army of angels wielding swords carved of the bones of infants and dripping with the blood of nonbelievers, a rain of insects and toads filling the streets and drowning canines shorter than knee-high with their venomous poisons and slimy dispositions. that's right. at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, i am headed to church. church. the place where people go to worship the sky god. it's the first day of in-service at the high school i am teaching at and that means worship of the most divine. the principal/priest already knows my religious tendencies, or lack thereof, and that's not going to be an issue or anything. but i do have a crucifix above my desk and i do have to go to church tomorrow. i plan on sitting in the back, the WAY back, keeping my head down, and making myself as non-conspicuous as possible. this also starts my "long sleeves only" fashion movement..... for the sake of the diocese. and my getting a pay check. MAN. church and long sleeeves. like i'm living in 1835.

domesticity continues

no... that is not a group of swirling, cinnamon-laden galaxies. those are cinnamon rolls that i made tonight. i am letting them rise overnight in the fridge for pure, delicious, sweet-as-sassafrass warmness tomorrow. turns out the recipe my mom gave me makes about 250 of them, so we'll be dining on cinnamon joy for weeks to come. yay!

also, i think i am going to start a photo diary of the duds i have managed to pick up this summer. some of them are much too fantastic and outrageous not to have documented. today's item = hot pink jackie onassis-style women's jacket and skirt number. AMAZING. will go great with the over-the-elbow black gloves i picked up.

bird assault

that would be equipment i found in the lab. i don't know what it does. i do know that i appreciate the color combination of red, turquoise, and yellow.

so this morning we heard a super odd, loud, banging sound coming from the upstairs bedroom. i said "sounds like a woodpecker," not anticipating that it would actually be..... a woodpecker. a huge, girthy woodpecker trying to bang its way into our house. pecking and pecking and pecking. i ran outside yelling "hey mr. woodpecker. stop pecking on our house. go peck on that tree" (but add lots of profanity) and he (or she) flew off. but they quickly returned. i went into the bedroom with proton the ferocious (see pic at left) yelling "hey. woodpecker. hey woodpecker." (again.. sprinkled with the f-bomb) and proton barked and the booger flew away and this time stayed away. then later, we saw about 15 wild turkeys in the cow pasture next door. we'd been seeing turkeys in some fields on the way to our house, but not this close before. they look like dinosaurs. delicious, delicious dinosaurs. and apparently they fly. i tried to get pics and they promptly flew away and one perched in a tree. and i thought "huh... there's a turkey in a tree. weird. " and if a thought bubble could pop from mr. woodpecker's head i'm pretty sure he/she would be thinking the same thing. who knew turkeys hung out in trees? perhaps this bird assault has something to do with the heaps of bird food i dispersed in our backyard yesterday.... perhaps.

and yes... that's where we found proton last night. in the dark. on shoes.

alice in dampness

proton really outdid himself this time. like a labyrinth of string.

it has been hot enough here that we have made the move to sleeping in the basement. we are lucky enough to have a place that has a furnished basement and an extra bedroom down there and the temperature is a good 30 degrees cooler than it is on the first floor. however, i was a little nervous about sleeping down there for a couple of reasons: 1- major spider breeding ground with high probability of a mama spider crawling into my open mouth when sleeping, 2- it smells like a basement, 3- proton regularly craps on the floor about 10 seconds after hitting the cool air. we've been working on getting him to stop that, but it's real hit-or-miss. almost like some sort of comfort poop or something... like he's been holding on to it all day and only when he is in the sweet, refreshing air of the basement can he do what he needs to do. but... i did it. slept in the cellar. our friend dan was visiting, so that meant we were sleeping in the main room on the futon. in the middle of the night i had to get up and go to the bathroom. there were a couple of obstacles to me getting there: 1-the basement is DARK DARK LIKE A NIGHTMARE DARK and you can't see anything. not even your hand in front of your face. 2-i also am not so familiar with the layout, so i couldn't necessarily feel my way to the bathroom. 3-i am afraid of the dark. so i set out for bathroom, stumbling around, feeling for the coffee table.. yep.. there it is... then the chair next to it... yep, yep, got it. and all the while i've got my eyes closed... but i'm still kind of squinting. then i run into a wall. not only do i run into a wall, i try "focusing" my eyes in the dark and kind of started to panic when i realized i was shrouded in pure darkness. except for a tiny gleam of light coming from somewhere out of a parallel universe. i reached my hand towards that light but ran into more wall. then i actually put my hands UP and that's when i really started to lose it. my hands immediately hit the ceiling, which of course led me to think that either i was growing remarkably quickly and my shoulders would soon be crushed against the dropped ceiling, OR, even worse, the world around me was shrinking, OR, worst of all, i had somehow just got trapped in a box. i started to panic and had to close my eyes and focus on my breathing and remember that i was just in a basement and if i made it through five years of graduate school i can make it to the goddamn bathroom. and i did. successfully. somehow i found the door and made it out. yep. i'll be educating your children.

dead little....

it will never stop amazing me that abortion is still used as a major talking point in political debates. i don't know if you've been following the dialogue following the proposed changes in health care, but i have and it's outrageous. first there's the argument being made that the new health care plan will involve "death panels" that kill old people. i know. hilarious. then that was followed by the notion that not only will old people be led into the "no come back bingo parlor," but these death panels would also take down children with special needs. GERIATRICS and KIDS WITH DOWN SYNDROME. it's outrageous.

and then somehow abortion gets brought into it. there's the commercial with two "waiting for death-type" folks talking about how the old guy's surgery or viagra prescriptions or whatever aren't being paid for by the government, but isn't it a tragedy that the government is giving money to pay for abortions. ABORTIONS. who has abortions? nobody. i mean, yes, abortions happen and friends of mine have no doubt had them, but NO LADIES sit around discussing how awesome it was when lucy got an abortion... "and remember the rad tuesday that we took bethany in to get her abortion and she was totally sleepy on the way home? and then she called jeremy all drugged-out and they had post-op sex? wasn't that great? it's too bad more of us didn't get abortions." i can't imagine anything more difficult and heartbreaking than going through that whole process... and it's one thing to say big fat lies about government funding (which i've come to expect), but it's another to give the idea that women are jumping around, throwing their coke bottles and coat hangers into the garbage, hugging each other, and throwing RU-486 into each other's mouths. outrageous.

chemistry nightmare

i am slowly digging my way through my classroom at a college i will be teaching at this fall, and holy smokes is it a time capsule. i reckon the last time it was cleaned out was somewhere around 1954. it has been an absolute gold mine of relics, but a freaking NIGHTMARE of chemicals. fantastic relics include a poster of communist russia around 1971 complete with a charicature of Brezhnev with little devil horns, some sort of physiology machine that has lots of tubes and levers, and a pH machine that is the size of a medium sized television set. pics are soon to be posted. as for the chemicals, i don't know what to do with half the stuff... i found a bottle of something that had a syringe attached to it (what? weird.), about 50 bottles of iodine, and some sort of sleepy potion for Drosophila. the chemical shelves were full of these reddish power and i finally figured out that the powder was from the the metal brackets holding up the shelving-- the metal brackets that are RUSTING AWAY because of all the crazy ass chemicals mixing it up in there. a previously uninvestigated cabinet i opened up today was legitimately shocking. inside was every kind of terrible, powerful acid known to man (including formic, sulfuric, acetic, butyric), all from around 1963 and nestled next to huge vats of formeldehyde. the sulfuric acid "container" was complete rust. underneath all of these terrible chemicals was a bottle of some sort of organs and a huge jar full of very large insects. i'm guessing cicadas. i put stuff in front of it and decided to deal with it later. a room of nightmares and dreamscapes. including a drawer full of fetal pigs. things that belong in drawers: spoons, napkins, socks, shorts. NOT fetal pigs.

so pregnant and so gross

i have seen TWO pregnant women smoking in the past two days. immediately preceding my spotting of the two pregnant ladies was watching an old "Seinfeld' episode where george and elaine are visiting a psychic who happens to be pregnant and also happens to be sucking down a cigarette and elaine can't help but start reprimanding her for the pro-cleft palate behavior and they get kicked out and it's terrible. so i'm waiting at a light yesterday, look to my left, and there is a charming young lady, i'd say about four months into the gestation of the human parasite, pulling hard on a cigarette. hmmm, i know i shouldn't judge you but i definitely am. pick a different habit... just for a little bit. some sort of habit that doesn't result in deformation of a fetus. like bacci ball. or building pulley systems. so many options. and then today as i'm driving to the recyling center i pass another young lady, this time about eight months in, smoking. smoking a cigarette. eight months pregnant. i mean, you KNOW that's not good for this kid. and from what i see at the weekly Friday Night Live events, most of these developing blastocysts need all the help they can get. honestly. prego ladies smoking is a hilarious and quirky and dated phenomenon you see on "Mad Men" and laugh and laugh at how absurd it all it. because you know your kid with cleft palate isn't getting picked for the baseball team. unless he's a super rad catcher or something. and i think we all know that clefties are terrible at throwing from a squatting position. for reals.

photo ops for korea

that's my pea pod!

so it's been awhile since my last blog... with good reason. the professor and i took a little trip to maine and had some mad relaxing time. unfortunately, much of that relaxing time was spent locked up in the hotel room because my dog is out of control. i had the fantastic job of judging a science fair on monday night and whilst i was gone, proton barked for 3 hours straight. the hotel people had to let him out of the room, so when i came back he was behind the main desk helping check people in. then i had to talk to the manager. needless to say, he was not left alone again.

so let's talk about north korea. wow. i know many of you have heard my korea stories (south korea, that is) and of my own experience with kim jong-il's freaking insanity when dealing with his dreaded neighbor to the south, but this whole "hostages for photo ops" campaign is really taking his crazy rice brain antics to a new level. "well yes.. yes i will release the ladies... in return for an opportunity to get my photo taken with super sexy president clinton. and 50 disney films, 25 glass figurines of elvis, and 2 boxes of fruit roll-ups." did you see those photos? he's GLEAMING like this is his dream finally being realized. all i'm saying is watch out for a rash of kidnappings of americans. and kim jongil's outrageous demands of photos with michael jordan, diana ross, heidi klum, and Pinnochio to secure release of the prisoners.

and i'm teaching an anatomy & physiology course this fall and just found out i will be leading a dissection of a cat. a cat. a dreaded, dreaded, gross, wet, dead cat. i asked my boss if the cat still had hair on it and yes, yes it does. wet, gross, dead hair. i told her i will probably have to put a towel over their faces. i'm slowly working toward actually looking at them... there's a whole stack of them in the storage closet at the school. and buckets of organs. BUCKETS. i like small cells and physics. not dead cats with formeldehyde hair gel.