Raking

I came home from work yesterday exhausted. It had been a long, stressful week, and I was ready to relax. In fact, I'd pretty much been ready to relax for the weekend about ten minutes into work Friday. It really took a lot of effort on my part to stay at work. I was just zonked. And on the way home I thought to myself, I'm going to make dinner for the family and then I'm going to bed. Everyone else can fend for themselves.

And then I got home and saw the bottom of our driveway. Our driveway slopes down at a fairly steep angle towards our garage (You can sort of see it in this picture). To keep the garage and the rest of the basement from flooding, there is a drain at the end of the driveway. But when I came home last night and I was walking into our front door, I glanced in that direction and noticed that the drain was covered by about 4 inches of leaves. I knew there was a forecast of fairly heavy rain. Great, I thought. That's all I need, a flooded basement. So I changed clothes quickly, rounded up both of my daughters and one of their friends, and we set out to rake leaves.

And that's when the fun began.

I'm not sure what it was. Maybe it was that there were enough fallen leaves all around us to have that distinctive, autumnal odor. Maybe it was that it was a very warm day, in the high 70's. Or maybe it was that it was breezy, so that a few dozen leaves would sometimes lift themselves off of the ground and dance in circles. I'm not sure what it was, but something about the four of us out there raking was almost intoxicating, and it radiated beyond the four of us. As we raked and made piles of leaves and jumped into piles of leaves and had leaf fights, people started to notice. Soon cars were slowing down to smile and watch. A kid from down the street came walking towards us with a rake of his own and asked that if he helped rake would he be allowed to jump into the pile, too. Our next door neighbors, who are somewhere in their sixties, came over laughing and reminiscing about raking leaves with their children. I asked them if they wanted to jump in our pile, and they both laughed and said it was tempting. But I saw something more than just temptation in the husband's eyes, and when I told him I was serious--the pile was ready to be jumped in and he could be next--he smiled, bit his lower lip, and took about four steps toward the pile before stopping himself and saying, "No, no, no. I'd better not."

Lisa came out, and she and Natalie and I all jumped in the pile together. After about 45 minutes we looked up, and in yard after yard we saw people had pulled out their own rakes and were creating leaf piles and jumping in them. Natalie even said, without prompting, "Dad, it looks like the whole neighborhood is raking leaves!"

After all the fun, I did still have to get the leaves away from the garage door. When all was said and done, we had filled 13 lawn and leaf bags, and we weren't anywhere near being finished. We stopped because we only had 13 lawn and leaf bags.

I'm going to go get some lawn bags later today, and when the ground has dried out tomorrow I'll go back out and rake some more. But I can almost guarantee it won't have the same spark that it had Friday night. Sometimes there's just magic in the air.

Political Stuff

I have a couple of political things I wanted to talk about today. I figured it'd been a while since I'd really ventured into anything political...

1. I can't believe Arnie did that! A friend of mine posted this story about California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Facebook, and when I saw it this morning I thought it was an urban legend. "What politician would do something like this?" I thought to myself. But then I went on the Internet and sure enough, the story is real. I don't know whether my respect for the Terminator has gone up or down with this one.

2. Levi Johnston. I am no fan of Sarah Palin. A quick search of my blog would show that. But I don't see how anybody can believe anything that Levin Johnston, Bristol Palin's ex-boyriend, has to say about the Palin family. I don't see why this guy is even getting any airtime on the TV news or any print in the newspapers. He's a non-story. His credibility is practically non-existent. All I can assume is that the news stations reporting this a) think they have no real news to report or b) are truly involved in an intentional smear campaign against Palin. And I don't have much respect for them in either case.

And that's it for me and politics for now...

Tour of Frankfort

Yesterday I spent the entire work day at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Frankfort, Kentucky, at a committee meeting of the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education. The meeting ran from 8:30 AM until a little after 4:00, and after it was over those of us from out of town agreed to get together a little later for dinner.

We all decided to eat at the Longhorn Steak House, which is on the outskirts of town, right off of the interstate (Isn't that where ALL Longhorn Steak Houses are?). The Capital Plaza Hotel is in the downtown area. Since I grew up in Frankfort and knew my way around, I agreed to be one of the drivers to the restaurant, so at 6:15 I loaded up the van with myself and five others and we headed toward the restaurant.

On the way to restaurant I announced to the group that this was my hometown (Some of them already knew that, but I think most of them did not), and I told them that since I was so intimately familar with the town that I'd give them a personal tour along the way. And I did. At the restaurant one of the riders complained about my tour, though, stating that I hadn't taken them to the Capitol, the Viet Nam Memorial, the Old Capitol, or any of the other toursit areas. But I told that person that my tour had never been about the city--it had been about MY EXPERIENCE of the city. Here are some of the sites that I pointed out:

• A tall cliff that several of my high school friends and I repelled down in 1984
• The entrance to my parent's neighborhood, which is where I lived for the first 22 years of my life
• The location of the hole in the fence that my friends and I used to climb through in order to sneak across the Juniper Hill Park golf course in order to get to the swimming pool
• The Burger King restaurant that was THE place to hang out in West Frankfort during my senior year of high school
• Some Mexican restaurant that used to be the best Chinese restaurant in Frankfort, the Jubilee Dragon (That's a shout out to my friend Kevin Kwong!).
• Some Mexican restaurant that used to be a McDonald's and that now IS the coolest Mexican restaurant in Frankfort (That's a shout out to my sister's boyfriend, Jose!).
• An empty building that years ago was the original Wal-Mart, and which was where I worked my way through college
• An Office Depot store that used to be a Kroger, which was where one of the many girls I used to have a crush on worked, and I used to convince my parents to send me there for groceries so that I'd have an excuse to go see her
• The street that led to my middle school and high school
• The Wendy's restaurant where my entire middle school football team jumped up and down on the drive thru scale in order to set the thing off so that we could order drive thru without being in a car.

Now tell me, why would you want to see some old capitol building or war memorial when you could see all that?

They're coming to get you, Barbra...

Okay, here's exciting news for horror movie fans as Halloween approaches...

Uh, maybe I should start again. Because I'm not a huge horror fan. Sure, I've seen a few, and I went through a period in my college years when I pretty much rented ONLY horror movies, and the worst the better--I thought the worst ones were maybe the highest form of comedy (I remember pretty much laughing all the way through Blood Feast).

But other than that brief period (which I suppose was ruined by the TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000) I haven't been much into horror films, so maybe I need to find a new way to start this. Let me see. Let me see...

Okay. Got it...

I mentioned a few posts ago that I used to be terrified of zombies. My fear goes all the way back to when I was 12 years old and saw the film Night of the Living Dead. The film itself is a little scary, and I guess for the time that it was made it was VERY scary (at least Roger Ebert thought so). But by itself it's no more frightening than a number of other films out there. What made the film scary for me was the context in which I first saw it. I was at a summer camp called Trooper Island, which was a Kentucky State Police-run camp for disadvantaged boys, many of whom may have previously gotten into scrapes with the law. No, I was NOT a lawbreaking child, and my family was not THAT poor. But we lived across the street from the state trooper in charge of the camp, and he let my younger brothers and me tag along with him for a week. All day long we did the camp activities with the real camp goers, and in the evenings--while the kids slept together in hot, sweaty cabins--we slept in the air conditioned guest rooms of the main house.

It was scary being away from home and my parents for such a long time. More than that, there was constant talk about a "sea creature" that crawled out of the river and ate children. Even more, I was intimidated by the tough kids at the camp, who cursed a lot and kept threatening to beat up each other--and sometimes me! One kid in particular picked on me every day, until an event that ended the bullying (but that's a story for another day). Another kid--though he was supposedly no older than 14--looked every bit of 22. He was almost six feet tall and overweight and had long, stringy hair that was in his face to the point that you could rarely see his eyes, and he pretty much dominated all of the rest of us. His name was Bophus. I don't think that was his real name, but I never would have asked him what it was. He told me my first dirty joke ever. I laughed out loud at it, though I had no idea what it meant. I still remember it. Ask me sometime to tell it to you (I "get it" now).

And so, on the last night of camp, the police officers decided that it would be a good idea to show all of us ten to fourteen year olds the film Night of the Living Dead. We were all crowded into what was basically a barn. This was prior to the age of VHS or Beta players, so we watched the film on an actual film projector, the kind that if the film wasn't balanced correctly on the reel the image would shake and the audio would accompany it. This happened several times during the film, and occasionally the film would have to be stopped so that whoever was running the projector could pull out a flashlight and fix the thing.

All of this, I think, made the film scarier than it would normally have been. The shaky images, the grainy film quality, it all contributed to a sense of unease. And as the film progressed we kids got quieter and quieter.

At one of the tenser moments in the film, several arms reach through what had moments before looked like solid walls and grab one of the characters. The music coming from the projector rose to a crescendo, and everyone in the barn let out a gasp and recoiled. And at that exact moment, one of the teenage camp counselors, who helped the state troopers in the daytime, burst into the barn. He was dressed in a Halloween costume of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and he was covered with weeds that had been pulled out of the river. I recognized the scream. I was pretty sure the creature was my neighbor John, who was in the same grade as my sister Ann and who was a counselor at the camp that summer.

I wasn't frightened at all by John's Halloween costume, but I was frightened by what happened next. Bophus, apparently, was very much spooked by the "creature." He leaped up from his chair and shouted "Son of BITCH! It's the sea creature!" Then, on instinct I think. Bophus grabbed the metal chair he'd been sitting in, folded it quickly, and brought it down like a weapon right across the top of the head of the creature. I'm sure he'd seen this action performed by many professional wrestlers on Saturday afternoon TV.  I could hear John or whoever was inside the costume let out a curse word, and then I watched as Bophus pulled the chair back up and brought it back down again and again onto the head of the counselor, shouting "son of a bitch" over and over as he did so.  Several of the other kids started shouting, "Kiss his ass, Bophus!" and "Yeah! Get him!" and a couple of the other kids even started to join Bophus in the beating. That's when the movie stopped, the lights came on, and the state police officers jumped into the fray. It took two of them to get Bophus off of the poor teenager in the costume, and I saw a crazed look of fear in the troubled boy's eyes as the police officers dragged him outside. I think several of the other boys who had joined in were just looking to beat someone up, but Bophus had REALLY been frightened by the "sea creature."

About ten minutes later the movie resumed, and the blood in the movie seemed even more real now that I had seen the actual blood on the face and the shirt of my neighbor John, who had indeed been the person in the costume.

The ending of the movie, of course, was deeply troubling to a 12 year old used to the hero prevailing, and I went home that night with images of sea creatures and zombies and folding chairs and punching in my head. And I guess I've been afraid of zombies ever since then.

And the point of this whole post? That you can watch the entire movie online on YouTube for free (Thanks to a copyright snafu by the producer of the film, it is now in the public domain). There are no sea creatures or Bophus's in the film, but still, you can watch it on your computer and see for yourself the genesis of my fear of zombies.




I can't see the video.)

Stunned

I have spent the last couple of days stunned. I learned early Sunday afternoon about a tragedy that had befallen a couple I've known about ten years. To say we were friends would be to stretch the truth a little. As I've said, I've known them for ten years, but I only saw them once each year for a single weekend. Still, in all that time I had nothing but good thoughts about each of them.

Then I learned that early Saturday morning, after a domestic dispute, the husband shot and killed the wife. I went online and there, on four different news websites, was the shirtless mugshot of the husband, his eyes filled with deadness and despair. I assume that he was shirtless because the arresting police officers took his blood spattered shirt for evidence.

The articles online were all brief. They didn't say a whole lot more than what I've written above. But I was struck by the "comments" that were left on the site by website visitors. A few of the comments were from people who knew the couple personally, and apparently for the people who knew them well, this murder was NOT a surprise. The husband, apparently, never left the house without a gun on him somewhere, and apparently his past actions towards his wife predicted this event.

Well, as I said above, I didn't know them well, and I WAS surprised, and I was left with a sense of sadness, and a little bit of fear. If he'd been carrying a gun on him everywhere he went for years, that meant that he was carrying a gun during the weekends I'd been around him. He'd been around me, my wife, and even some years my kids, all the while carrying a gun. And who else in my life was not who they seemed to be? Who else was carrying a gun around? It's made me question all of the casual friendships I have. How much do I really know these people I see only once or twice a year? Am I really friends with all of these "friends" I have on Facebook? Can I really trust anyone anymore?

As I read through the comments on those websites, though, the vast majority of them were from people who did NOT know the couple, and the callousness of these people was striking. "That'll teach her not to burn the bacon," one person commented. How could that person write that? I understand he was trying to make a joke, but I knew this woman. She was soft-spoken and kind, and she had a sweet smile and a sweet disposition. She didn't deserve this.

"Hope he fries!" was a comment--or something like that--that many people wrote. But I'd known this man, shook his hands several times before, and laughed with him a couple of times on occasion. He wasn't a monster. But he's going to be in prison for the rest of his life. I'll never see him again.

I don't know what to say about all of this. I don't have some adage in my head. This is just where I am today. Stunned. Saddened.

And glad this morning that I am alive and not in prison.

Monday Morning

This is the kind of work week that I simultaneously look forward to and dread...

This week I am going to be out of my office for three straight days Wednesday through Friday. I'll be in Frankfort at a retreat/training for the Kentucky Society for Technolgy in Education (KySTE). And I look forward to these kinds of weeks for a number of reasons:

1. They get me out of my office and away from my desk.
2. They break up the routine of my job, giving me a nice break.
3. They allow me to network with colleagues, picking up tips and idea for my job.
4. Number Three above is such a dry, emotionless thing, though. More importantly, those people I'm networking with I consider friends, and this is a chance to see them.

At the same time, though, I hate weeks like this, because

1. Quite often there's a lot of work getting ready for something like this. See Saturday's post for more details.
2. When I come back to my office next week, after three days off, I will be absolutely overwhelmed with stuff I'll need to take care of. I imagine that NEXT Monday all I will have time to do is respond to emails.
3. I will be away from my family for a couple of nights.

So there are good things and bad things about this week.

Sounds like most of life...

Should Be Required Listening

For the last two weeks I've been listening at nights to podcasts of PRI's This American Life. The last two weeks the show has focused on our current health care system and why it is so expensive. It's been an EXTREMELY enlightening experience for me. I think every American should be required to listen to these two hours of radio. It has coalesced some opinions of mine about the current health care reform, namely
1. The United States health care system is in immediate need of MAJOR reform and
2. The currently proposed health care plans do not go far enough to make any meaningful changes to our health care system.

Again, I think EVERYONE should hear these. It's more "fair and balanced" than you'll get from Fox News or MSNBC, and more in depth than you're ever going to get from your nightly news.

If you'd like to listen to the shows yourself, you can listen to them in their entirey online.

Episode One is here:  Listen online

Episoe Two is here: Listen online

Working

So I don't have a post for today, Saturday, October 24. Why not? Because I'm too busy working. That's right, working. On a Saturday.

I know. It stinks.

I'm involved in a presentation for new CIO's in Frankfort next week. Today I'm making copies. You would think that making 50 copies of something isn't that big of a deal. Well, it isn't unless. Unless.

Unless the final product is 240 pages long, meaning that--front and back--you're about to use up 6,000 sheets of paper. It's easily a couple of trees.

Not to mention 50 binders. And tabs inside the binders. And labels for the binders. And--well, you get the picture.

Back to work...

It Just Sags Like a Heavy Load.

Now that I'm getting on into my forties, I am becoming aware that some of the dreams/expectations I had as a child are looking pretty unlikely at this point. For instance:

• It would appear that I am NOT going to be a rock star after all. I will not get to travel all over the globe and have scantily clad groupies waiting for me backstage. Pretty much every song I've ever heard and loved  I've imagined that I was the person who wrote that song, and that I was the person singing it on the radio. But I can't write songs, I can't play an instrument well, and I can't sing, and I don't think you'll ever see me on MTV (Do they even still play videos on MTV?). 
• Though some actors get started late in their lives, it's looking like I WON'T win that Academy Award. And to think of all of the time I've spent practicing my acceptance speech, and all the time I've spent practicing the expression I'd make the first time I was nominated, when I didn't win ("It was an honor just to be nominated, and everyone takes all of this far too seriously" I'd say).
• I used to look at my body and think I was just "that close" to having a terrific body. If I put a concerted effort into it I could get there, get really defined and get a big ole six pack..  Now I'd say I'm "t   h   a    t           c     l     o     s     e" and the odds are starting to work against me. Even a concerted effort wouldn't get me back to the "that close" I used to bemoan.
• I am not going to be a professional athlete after all. I actually pretty much knew that by the time I was in high school and sitting the bench for the football team. Still, though, I always told myself that I still had all four years of my college athletic eligibility remaining, thanks in great part to the fact that I red shirted all four years I was in college. Maybe when I got into shape (see Bullet Three above) maybe I'd try out for the team. 
• I also apparently am NOT going to be a millionaire. I never really knew exactly what I was going to do to become a millionaire (though looking back, I would think my Oscar-winning, Super Bowl ring-wearing, rock and rolling self with a killer body could probably land some endorsement deals), but I always thought I'd be rich and famous sooner or later.

But nope. It ain't gonna happen. The extraordinary life I thought I was going to lead never materialized. The "extra" in "extraordinary" sort of fell to the wayside, and I'm moving solidly down the path of "ordinary." I live in a nondescript house that looks pretty much like all of the rest of the houses in the town I live in (the couple of streets of garish, near-million dollar homes the exception), and I'm living a nondescript life that looks pretty much like all of the rest of the lives of people I know. I'm sure there are people somewhere who are living the exciting lives that I've watched on television, but I'm not those people now, and I won't be in some future date.

Maybe THAT's all a mid-life crisis really is, realizing--not that the end is near--but that though there may be PLENTY of days ahead, none of them are going to contain those fabulous dreams you used to imagine would be yours...eventually. The time for "eventually" is running out, and if you ever really had a chance, you missed it.

But don't get the idea that I am going through a hard time right now. I'm not really. In fact, this whole topic isn't something new. I've thought about writing about pretty much ever since I started this blog, but I didn't want to give people the idea that I was going to go buy an expensive sports car, or that I'd be writing on here soon about my new 28 year old girlfriend. I'm not REALLY all that bummed about all this, and I think it's funny more than anything.

Actually, and I'm being completely serious here, I think the moment that all of this DID hit home with me, and when it DID actually hurt a little, was a couple of years ago when Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning was doing a series of commercials for MasterCard. One commercial in particular really got to me. It was funny, very funny, and I laughed out loud the first time I saw it, but you know what they say about jokes--there's always a little bit of truth in them. And at the same time that I laughed I also felt a punch in my gut. I know this is egocentric, but I swear I felt like Manning was really talking to me! He MEANT what he was saying. And I saw that commercial maybe two dozen more times over that football season, and I was a little sullen about it every time.

I think I got over it finally, though. I watched the commercial just a few minutes ago and I don't find it painful anymore. It's just funny. You can watch it, too, right here:

(I can't see the video.)

Must (NOT) See TV

For years and years now Lisa and I have watched Thursday night TV on NBC. It's been a standing date pretty much since the beginning of our relationship, back when we were watching Mad About You at 8:00, Wings at 8:30, Seinfeld at 9:00, and Frasier at 9:30 (though we would often go to bed after Seinfeld and miss whatever was on at 9:30). There have been some great shows on Thursday night TV (Will and Grace, Friends, Mad About You), some okay but forgettable ones (Suddenly Susan, Just Shoot Me) and some really bad ones (Caroline in the City, The Single Guy, Inside Schwartz), but we always soldiered through.

But this year is different. I REALLY don't like Parks and Recreation at 8:30 (Suggested tagline: It's just like The Office, only it's not funny!), and though I found Community mildly amusing I haven't really gotten invested in any of the characters yet. The Office is still great, but it's JUST great--it doesn't feel fantastic anymore. It's funny, but I can feel it really straining to do something new, and it's not. It's just the same old same old. Michael Scott is going to be an idiot. Andy Bernard is going to kiss butt. Dwight is going to be crazy, and Jim is going to be the voice of reason. It's just getting old.

I think our Thursday night tradition is dying. And thanks to a weak lineup and the new Jay Leno Show, I think NBC might be dying, too...

Sand Art, Part Two

A couple of days ago I made a post about an artist from the Ukraine and her sand art that won her the Ukraine's version of America's Got Talent. During that post I mentioned that I didn't know why everyone started crying at about the 5:00 minute mark, that I didn't understand what the image of a tree on a tall hill was supposed to be.

Well, I didn't give up looking. After not being able to find anything but other blog entries of the performance after googling the artist's name, I instead began googling war monuments in the Ukraine. I found lots of good information, including pictures of a monument that looks like it could kick the Statue of Liberty's butt in a fight.

I also found what I think is the monument being referred to in the sand art. It's not a tree on a hill. It's a larger than life war medal on an obelisk, and it's a monument to World War II, which--I also learned--Russian citizens do not call World War II, but instead call it "The Great Patriotic War."

In case you missed the sand art the first time, here it is again.



(I can't see the video.)

Random Comments

Okay, I really have nothing to say today. It's not writer's block. It's just a lack of anything of import to say. So I guess I'll just make a few random comments.

Random Comment #1: I really wish we'd move on and forget about the "Balloon Boy." It's pretty obvious now that the family did this as a hoax to get attention. The best way to handle them, then, is to ignore them. I quit caring about this story about the time the kid threw up the next morning on the news shows. "Yup," I though, "it's all a fake! Let's move on to something else."

Random Comment #2: How about them Bengals? I read all week about the "resurgent" Cincinnati Bengals, who'd made it to 4-1 and were just one unlucky play away from 5-0. But what I'd been saying all week, and what I heard Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis say in a pre-game interview, is that they were just 4 plays away from being 0-5 as well. And no, when I say they're four plays away from being 0-5, I'm not talking about the plays at the END of the game, those touchdown passes from Carson Palmer that supposedly "won" the games. Wins don't happen on the final play, even in games that come down to the end. It's always some other play earlier that keyed the win.

Yesterday, for instance, I read in multiple places that the Bengals lost the game with 6 minutes to go when one of the Bengals' tight ends fumbled. That's nonsense. The REAL moment the Bengals lost the game occurred a few minutes earlier, right at the end of the 3rd quarter,  when Jonathan Joseph broke up a pass and almost intercepted it. If he HAD intercepted the pass, he'd have run the ball all the way back for a touchdown, and the Bengals would have been down only 28-24 instead of 28-17. This would have given them the confidence and momentum to come back. Had that interception been made the game would have been won 31-28 by the Bengals. The previous four weeks those kind of plays were made (In fact, Jonathan Joseph was the person who made those plays a lot of the time). It just didn't happen Sunday.

I was talking with a friend last week about the Bengals, and I held my thumb and forefinger about an inch apart and said to him, "The NFL isn't like college or high school. The difference between the best teams and the worse teams is about that much, but that's all it takes to go from good to bad or vice versa. And if a team lets up--even just that much--they're going to look like a bad team." And that's what I think happened to the Bengals Sunday.

Random Comment #3: What a Lousy Fall Break! Yesterday was my first day back at work after a week off. But I actually worked both Monday and Friday. AND I was sick all week long. AND the weather was absolutely awful. AND other stuff happened I don't feel like talking about in a public place. So it was a lousy week. My only consolation is there isn't a whole lot that could happen that could make this week much worse.

Random Comment #4: Oh crap! Where's there some wood I can knock on?

Sand Art

Lisa showed me the video below Saturday morning. It's a performance from Kseniya Simonova, who was the winner of this year's Ukraine's Got Talent TV show, which is the same thing as American's Got Talent, except--apparently--truly talented people participate in this show!

Anyway, I was fascinated by this performance, and I wanted to know more about the imagery in the video (For instance, I'm not familiar with the image of the tree on the tall hill at about the 5:00 minute mark, but everyone in the audience apparently is because they all applaud and then several start to cry). I didn't really find anything that explained the video, but what I did find when I googled the artist's name was blog entry after blog entry where people had embedded the video onto their blog. There were so many, in fact, that I started thinking, maybe it's some kind of rule that EVERY blog is supposed to embed this video somewhere.

So I thought today would be my day to do it...




(I can't see the video.)

Good Service Matters

These days when I go to a fast food restaurant I almost EXPECT bad service. Often the person taking your order doesn't even bother to smile, or even make eye contact, or even speak clearly in complete sentences. And I understand that--especially at places like McDonald's or Wendy's, usually the servers are teenagers and this might be their first real jobs, and they're being managed by people who are maybe only a year or two older themselves and perhaps don't know much about customer service themselves, but still, when I go out to eat I'd like at least a smile.

Well, I guess today's post is practically an advertisement, because I wanted to give a shout out to one restaurant that's the exception. The Roly Poly sandwich shop in Erlanger is owned and managed by one of the nicest guys I've ever met. His name is Jeff (sorry, don't know his last name), and in the dozen or so times that I've been in the place, I've never seen him not there. He's extremely friendly, and he treats everyone like that person is a best friend that he hasn't seen in a while. And he insanely remembers things about almost every customer. As I said, I've been in about a dozen times, but that's over a two or three year period. I'm definitely NOT a regular, but he remembers that I used to be a vegetarian. And I've sat and watched him take others' orders while I've eaten, and he's that way with everyone.

The food is good, too. It's REALLY good, actually. Sort of like a Subway or a Penn Station, but better, and--instead of bread--the sandwiches are wrapped in tortillas and grilled. It's really very good. But it's the service as much as the quality of the food that stands out in my mind. Jeff will make suggestions, bring your order out to you, and joke with you.

The family and I ate there yesterday, and as I watched Jeff interact with customers I thought, I want to tell other people about this place, because good service SHOULD matter. So if you're ever in Erlanger and you're looking for somewhere fairly cheap to eat, you won't go wrong at Roly Poly.

A Busy Year

Today is the one year anniversary of the first time that Lisa and I set foot in our current home. I know this because Lisa keeps a family calendar (a paper one, no less! Next thing you know we're going to be breaking out the abacus!) and written on Friday, October 17, 2008 is "4:30--See" followed by our current address.

A lot has changed in that year. I think our house was the third house we'd visited with a Realtor, and we were only half serious in our house hunting efforts. At least, I was only half serious. I figured we'd look at a few houses, see what was out there, and then save money and maybe talk about REALLY buying a house about a year later, about now.

But when we saw what was available, how much home prices had fallen due to the economy, and how low interest rates were, we got a little more serious. But I didn't have that certainty on October 17 of last year. We just walked through the house and talked about its plusses (Lots of space, very close proximity to the kids' school, in fairly good shape) and its minuses (Close to the interstate, it didn't LOOK big, many rooms needing repainting).

We've done a lot to the house in a year:

• I've painted 9 of the 13 rooms.
• We replaced the garage door.
• I painted the outside shutters and trim.
• We bricked in a window.
• We replaced the roof.
• We did some tuck pointing.
• We replaced every major appliance in the house.

I'm sure we've done more than that, but off the top of my head that's what I remember. And okay, a lot of the "we" stuff was actually done by a contractor, but still, we had the mess and the inconvenience of the work.

I guess my whole point, though, is not to brag about all we've done, but just to say that a year ago today I would NOT have guessed that this is where we'd be today. And a year and a month ago I absolutely would not have guessed that this is where we'd be today as we hadn't even talked about looking at houses yet.

It's been a busy year.
--------------------------------

You can read all about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

A Rough Night

I've had a cold for four days now.

And here's the thing about having a cold, at least for me: At some point during the cold, I begin to honestly think that I am never going to be well again. The times when I wasn't sick seem like a distant memory to me, something that happened in another lifetime. This stuffy head, this mouth breathing, this constant sneezing are just the condition of my life. This is how I will live out the rest of my days!

At least it seems that way. I know that eventually I'll get better. I know that one day, a week or two from now, it will just occur to me. "Hey, I'm not sick! And I haven't been for a couple of days, either! All right!

But that's a week or two from now. For now, this feels like forever!

Wednesday night I got tired of being congested and then decided about 7 PM that I absolutely had to take something, so I went into our medicine cabinet and got out some generic Sudafed. Pseudoephedrine Hydrochloride. The stuff that you have to sign out of the pharmacy now because it's one of the ingredients in crystal meth.

Anyway, the writing on the box said "Non-drowsy Nasal Decongestant." I think they need to rephrase that. "Non-drowsy." The whole thing should be changed to read "Will-Keep-Your-Keester-Awake-All-Night Nasal Decongestant." The warnings on the back of the box do mention the possibility of getting "nervous, dizzy, or sleepless." I wish I'd read them before I took the medicine. This is how Wednesday night/Thursday morning went:

9:00 PM. Turned the light out in the bedroom with a buzzing in my ears, pretty sure that I was never going to fall asleep. (I was wrong, however, because...)

9:03 PM. Fell fast asleep.

9:09 PM Woke right back up again.

9:19 PM - 10:12 PM Lay awake quoting lines from Shakespeare to myself.

10:13 PM. Fell asleep once more. At least I'm pretty sure I did, because I remember a dream about taking my wife to the eye doctor and he giving her a test to determine whether or not she was a robot.

10:57 PM. Awakened by the sound of the furnace coming on. Also, I rolled away from my wife a little, just in case...

11:05 PM. Hadn't gone to sleep yet

11:22 PM. Still awake.

11:48 PM. STILL AWAKE!

12:05 AM. Wondered if anyone in the house would want to get out of bed and challenge me to the sword fighting game on Wii Sports Plus.

12:07 AM. Decided against waking anyone.

12:29 AM. Yup. You guessed it. Still awake.

12:48 AM. What are the last five movies I watched in their entirety? Can I remember?...

1:48 AM. After an hour of movie recollection in my brain, realized the secret of happiness:

1:49 AM. Fell asleep.

2:18 AM. The damned furnace came on again!...

3:45 AM. I think I must have dozed off somewhere between the furnace coming on and now, because if I didn't, then there was a buffalo in the kitchen a few minutes ago...

4:29 AM. Finally fell into a fast, deep, sleep.

5:00 AM. The alarm went off.

So it was a rough night. Anyway, I'm mostly writing this post for myself. The NEXT time I feel like I need a decongestant, I'm going to search my blog to remember NOT to take Sudafed. It's not for me.

On Knives and Suspensions

I'm sure most people now have heard the story of the six year old boy who brought a camping knife to school and was promptly suspended by his district's board of education for 45 days. Earlier this week that board of education, under pressure from mounting complaints and massive media coverage showing a bright faced little boy in cute Sunday-best suits, relented and let the boy back into school.

Before I get to my real comment about all of this, let me make one thing clear: I agree that the board of education acted stupidly. Zero tolerance policies are a BAD idea. Always. There isn't a single crime I can think of where a zero tolerance policy would work. Not even rape and murder. In Nazi concentration camps prisoners were forced by prison guards to rape and murder one another, and no one would ever have suggested that those prisoners should have been prosecuted for those crimes. Zero tolerance policies are politically popular policies because they sound tough and because--like Pontious Pilate--they allow those in authority to "wash their hands" of any punishment and to avoid making any tough decisions. "Don't blame us," they say. "It's out of our hands. It's just policy."

The Newark board of education absolutely was wrong. They should have taken into account that the boy was six years old, that the camping utensil was hardly a weapon, that the old-style mathematical compass that was used when we were kids was more dangerous. I'm not sure the child deserved ANY punishment, and definitely not a 45 day suspension.

But the overwhelming thing I got out of this story was not outrage. Instead, as I watched and read all of the media coverage about the story, I was left with a question: How would this whole story have played out if the young boy had been black? What if, instead of the child being that fresh-faced white child in a suit, the child was a black child, dressed in blue jeans and a dirty t-shirt, and instead of all of those interviews taking place in a nice house in the suburbs, what if those interviews were given from the kitchen of a lower-income housing project? Would all of the outrage still be there? And if there was outrage, would it still be directed at the school board, or would it instead be directed at the parents? "That's what they get," I can imagine some commentators saying, "for allowing that boy to play with a weapon. It's just like them. And it's what's wrong with society today!"

I don't know. I'd like to think that the reaction would be the same regardless of the race of the child, that the public outrage would be the same regardless of the income level of the family or how the child looked. I'd like to think we've progressed beyond all of that.

I'd LIKE to think so...

The Best Photoshop Tutorial Ever

This is the first in a series of video tutorials for the digital imaging program Photoshop. If you're looking to a) learn something about Photoshop and b) laugh at the same time, watch these...

...Uh, the emphasis, though, is on the laughing, I think.

This has been a favorite of mine for a couple of years. Let me warn you in advance, though, there is some bad language in this video, so if that kind of stuff offends you I wouldn't watch this. And if you're a teacher thinking about using this in a class, the answer is no. Don't even think about it.

If you don't find the thing TOO offensive, you can see the whole series here.



(I can't see the video.)

Yucky Fall Break

Yesterday was the first day of a full week of Fall Break for my school district. I worked yesterday (The first day of a long break is a GREAT time to go to work and get lots done because no one bother me) and am planning to take off the rest of the week. I was hoping to have some time with my wife (our daughters are NOT off this week), time to just be a couple, and maybe to get some projects done around the house. However, two things are looming:

1) I think the teaching staff at the girls' school must all be getting the flu, because it looks like Lisa is going to work most if not all days this week.

2) Worse, I think I am getting the flu MYSELF. I'm writing this on Monday night, and I'm not feeling too good, to be honest. I left work an hour early because I felt this coming on. I hope it's just a cold or congestion or something. I've only had the flu once before, and I found it really unpleasant...

My Heart Wasn't In It

Yesterday morning I had a tough choice to make. Everyone in the family slept in, and by the time I came into the kitchen for breakfast I saw that it was 9:30 and no one had started getting ready for church. There was no way we could make the 10:30 service in time. We were either going to have to miss church or go to the noon service. But if we went to the noon service we'd miss the first quarter of the Cincinnati Bengals game.

Hmm. God or the Bengals? It was a tough choice...

In the end, though, we ended up at church. I told myself that in 6 months I wouldn't care anything about the game, but I WOULD care about the state of my soul.

Still, I don't think my heart was really in the service.

I got the first indication that was the case during the praise and worship music. The second song that was sung was "Everlasting God." The song includes lyrics that describe God as "the Defender of the weak." I heard that lyric and thought, "'Defender of the Week?' No contest! That would be cornerback Jonathan Joseph, who intercepted the Cleveland Browns down on the goal line!" (By the way, he did the same thing yesterday to the Ravens!)

I should have known at that moment that I was going to have trouble focusing. Later, during the sermon, the pastor was talking about people who aggressively evangelize and he asked, "Who ARE these people?" I had to restrain myself from shouting back, "Who Dey!"

As the pastor was wrapping up his sermon, I glanced over at another person in the same row that I was in. I saw her watch and that it was two minutes to one, and I thought to myself, "You know, if I left now and acted like I really needed to use the bathroom, I could scoot out the front door of the church and into the car and listen to the game on the radio until everyone comes out!"

But I didn't. I stayed through the whole service, but my heart wasn't in it at all.

Oh well. At least everyone else in the family hopefully got something out of church yesterday.

Who Dey!

Still More Dumb Signs

I have written on many occasions before about dumb signs or notices that I've found in life (If you're really interested in seeing the old posts, click here, here, here, and here). Here are two more that I discovered within about 15 minutes of each other last weekend. Both discoveries had something to do with Meredith's birthday party.

The first stupid notice I found was on the side of a carton of ice cream. We actually had THREE cartons of ice cream for the party--one vanilla, one chocolate, and one pumpkin. All three had the same notice on the side:

Honestly, is there ANYONE in the world who wouldn't already know that you have to keep ice cream frozen. Printing it on the label is absurd.

Even worse is the second printed notice I discovered maybe ten minutes later. The girls wanted to make s'mores, so I purchased some of those wax firestarter thingies (Sorry, that's pretty much the extent of my vocabulary in the area of firestarting) to use to start the fire. You place one of these things under the wood and light it and in just a couple of minutes you have yourself a roaring fire. There were four wax firestarter thingies in a package, and printed on the side of the package was this:

Actually, I was HOPING for a fire, not just worried about the RISK of a fire.

Awareness Test, Part 2

Yesterday I posted a YouTube video I said was profound. If you missed that post, go back to it by clicking here before reading this post. If you don't this post won't make any sense...

--------------------------

Here's why I think that yesterday's video is profound. As it alludes to at the very end of the video, it says a lot about perception, and what we miss when we're focused on something else. This is important in many avenues of life, but I'd like to focus on my profession, since that is where my mind always wanders first. That profession is education. And I can see how this video is relevant in two ways.

IN A GROUP SETTING: From an educational standpoint, the video is a parable of a teacher's world. Most teachers are in front of a classroom of 20 to 30 students and a time, and that teacher is concentrating on one thing--teaching whatever concept is at hand. While the teacher is focused on this, other things are always happening in class. The last four years that I was in the classroom I was a mentor teacher for first year teachers. Part of that responsibility meant that three times a year I was out of my classroom and spent the entire day in the first year teacher's classroom observing. And I was always shocked at what the first year teacher would allow the students to "get away with" while I was in the classroom. Some students would be asleep. Some were obviously cheating. Others were ignoring the teacher completely. Why wasn't the teacher doing something about this? The answer was simple: those kids were the moonwalking bear. The teacher didn't see them at all.

WITH AN INDIVIDUAL STUDENT: And it's not just in group settings that this video has merits. It also applies to how a teacher views an individual student, too. Especially when that student has been identified as an exceptional student of some sort. For instance, if a student is identified as having a specific disability--say, a behavior problem--the teacher may focus undue attention about that aspect of the child to the exclusion of other aspects. Holy cow that sounded jargonish! Let me try again: If a student is a known behavior problem, the teacher may look for the student to be a behavior problem and in the process of focusing on that behavior problem may miss something else about the student. Maybe he has a tremendous creative side that comes out on occasion. The behavior problems are the white team and the creative spark is the bear. It's there in plain sight for anyone to see, but not if you're focused on making sure that the kid behaves.

An interesting experiment to try, by the way, would be to show the video with the sound off and WITHOUT the instruction to watch the white team. I wonder how many people then would see the bear?

Awareness Test, Part 1

Here's a YouTube video that at first glance is just a silly way to pass a minute of your life (That's a pretty good description of MOST of what's on YouTube). In some ways, though, what this video reveals is profound. I don't want to get into that profound discussion today, though. I want you to just watch the video without any extraneous discussion. In my next post I'll tell you why I think it's profound.

Birthday Photos

Last weekend I made a post about Meredith's birthday party. It was a YouTube video of all of the girls at the party eating pizza. However, I didn't like something that one of the girls said, so I pulled down the video and promised to post some photos later. Here are the photos.

The party began with Meredith herding all of the girls up into her room and into her capacious closet. As each new girl came in the others jumped out and surprised her. They then spent a solid fifteen minutes screaming for no apparent reason. We then had pizza, followed by another fifteen minutes of screaming, followed by cake and presents. Then the girls watched music videos on YouTube on our TV before screaming for another ten or fifteen minutes, followed by (and this was a special request from Meredith) the cooking of s'mores in our fire pit on the back porch. I really have no idea what happened after that because I then had to spend an hour and a half outside tending the fire as I didn't want a repeat of what happened the last time I left a fire unattended. At some point, though, the girls started watching a movie, and once that was over they supposedly went to sleep for the night, though I think several of them were up for quite a while.

It's a good thing our girls' birthdays are several months apart. It gives Lisa and me time to forget how loud these things can be.

Facebook Reunion

This past weekend I drove to my old hometown of Frankfort to have dinner and visit with some classmates from high school. We'd all been communicating via Facebook, and this was a chance to actually sit down face to face. Call it a Facebook mini-reunion.

It was nice. I don't know about everyone else who sat at that table, but something has changed in me in the last few years. Maybe it's that I'm more comfortable in my own skin. Maybe it's that I quit thinking that life was a competition with these people. Maybe it's just that a long time ago I let go of the angst and anger and resentment and anything else negative that I'd held onto from my high school days.  I don't know what it was, but this get together was nicer for me than any reunion I've ever been to. I remember going to a reunion a few years ago, maybe 8 or 10 years ago, and a lot of the same feelings--good and bad--that I had in high school were still there.

But I didn't feel that way Saturday. For whatever reason, at some point I let go of all of that, and I just cared about everyone with whom I'd gone through the process of growing up.

I think in the end there were seven of us there that night. A lot more than that had been invited, but--as you know--life gets in the way (I almost didn't make the trip myself). I knew not everyone invited would be there, and on the way down I remember wondering who would actually be there. But then a thought came to me: I didn't care who was going to be there. I was going to honestly be happy to see whoever showed up. We'd have a lot to talk about: what we'd been doing for the last 23 years, memories of when we were kids.

And we did have a lot to talk about. As I was driving home a thought occurred to me that I could probably have spent twice as much time with EACH person at the table and been happy. I feel like I barely said hello to several of them.

I had gone to school with at least three of the people sitting at that table for 12 years from first grade to our senior year. I didn't know them until age 6, and then I saw them day after day for 12 years, and then I'd gone 23 years without seeing some of them at all face to face. And there we were again...

...I don't have anything insightful or moving or poignant to say about that. The thought just crossed my mind.

Here's another thought that crossed my mind: At one point I was doing something on my cell phone, and when I looked up I saw that literally everyone at the table except one person was doing something on their cell phone, too. And the guy beside me and I were friending each other on Facebook. How weird. We were physically sitting side by side and squinting at our phones so that that we could become "friends" virtually.

A lot more has changed in 23 years than just me..

I'm in Awe of this Guy

Back in December I wrote a post praising the vision of J.C.R. Licklider, one of the founding fathers of Information Technology. I was specifically praising an article he wrote from 1968 called "The Computer as a Communications Device." Earlier this week I read an even older article of his written in April of 1960.* This article was called "Man-Computer Symbiosis." Once again, I was blown away by this man's ability to see into the future.

Keep in mind that this article was written in 1960, before the Internet, before email, back when the idea of networking computers was just that, an idea, and an idea only to a few people. But 50 years ago, Licklider is describing how computers can make human lives better, and darned if he isn't describing something a whole lot like Google:

Men will...formulate hypotheses. They will ask questions. They will think of mechanisms, procedures, and models. They will remember that such-and-such a person did some possibly relevant work on a topic of interest back in 1947, or at any rate shortly after World War II, and they will have an idea in what journals it might have been published. In general, they will make approximate and fallible, but leading, contributions, and they will define criteria and serve as evaluators, judging the contributions of the equipment and guiding the general line of thought.

That's what humans will do. The computers will do the following:

The information-processing equipment...will answer questions. It will simulate the mechanisms and models, carry out the procedures, and display the results to the operator. It will transform data, plot graphs (“cutting the cake” in whatever way the human operator specifies, or in several alternative ways if the human operator is not sure what he wants)...In general, it will carry out the routinizable, clerical operations that fill the intervals between decisions.

To sum it up, the men will have a vague idea of something and put a question into the computer and the computer will do all of the heavy duty research work and provide a bunch of possible answers, and the human will then choose which is the correct answer. That's Google and other search engines in a nutshell!

Right after the above section Licklider admits that--in 1960--no computer system capable of answering questions in such a fashion existed. But he does go on to explain HOW such a network could be created (Licklider would be instrumental in the creation of the Internet later in the decade), and in the process pretty much describes the commercial Internet as it exists today. He doesn't call it the "Internet"--he calls it a "thinking center," but he definitely has the concept down. He writes the following:

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a “thinking center” that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.

You can read the entire 1960 article here. It's all pretty insightful stuff when you consider it was written 50 years ago.

J.C.R. Licklider. What a guy! On the other hand, he's the nerdiest hero I've ever had!

*And yes, I AM a nerd, as evidenced by the fact that I was reading this--not for a class or an assignment or anything like that--but for my own personal enjoyment!

A Vote of No Confidence

In the NFL, kicking an extra point is pretty much automatic, and it usually is. You can even hear in the announcer's voice the lack of interest in the extra point kick. They're busy talking about the touchdown that was just scored, and the extra point feels like just an inconvenience, something that gets in the way of all of the instant replays of the TD and the images of the offensive player who scored celebrating on the sidelines.

Maybe once or twice a year an extra point gets missed, and when it does you can hear the surprise--nay, horror almost--in the voices of the announcers: "Oh my God! He missed that kick!"

Enter the 2009 Cincinnati Bengals...

Somehow, they have managed to turn extra point kicking (and short field goal kicking) completely around. Now the announcers seemed shocked when the Bengals DO get an extra point down!

And yesterday, when the Bengals and the Browns went into overtime, I was certain that the only way the Bengals were going to win was if they scored a touchdown. There's no way they'll make a field goal, I told myself. And even when they DID kick the game winning field goal, I didn't believe it. My first reaction was, "He kicked it wide right! The loser!" Then I saw the referees signal a score and realized I'd been wrong.

But that's how much confidence I have in the Bengals kicking game right now.

Oh, well. They're 3-1, and one weird play from 4-0. But they need to fix their special teams.

Florida Zombies

Okay, here's something that many of you may not know, because to my knowledge I've never written about it on my blog:

I used to be terrified of zombies.

I'm not talking about 35 years ago when I was a little rascal. I'm talking about during my adult life. Prior to just a few years ago, if someone asked me what my deepest fear was, I'd always answer the same thing: zombies. I know. Those people were looking for something like "fear of abandonment" or "worry about money," but those are nothing compared to zombies.

I mostly got over the whole zombie thing after seeing the movie SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but they're still not my favorite things. Still, I'm beginning to see the humor in zombies. I recently purchased a friend a copy of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES.

And I was VERY excited to see that last week the University of Florida posted--along with its H1N1 Disaster Plan--a plan for dealing with zombies. Once the media became aware of this the university pulled it off the site, but here it is for you to read.

Tired this Morning

Not much of an entry this morning. That's because last night was Meredith's sleepover birthday party, and this is pretty much what the entire night was like:

(I can't see the video.)

UPDATE: I pulled down this video because of something that was said on it that I didn't like and didn't notice the first time I watched it. I'll post pictures later.

Roman Polanski

I'm really confused by the whole Roman Polanski uproar.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Roman Polanski is in the right, or that what he did, to put it as Whoopi Goldberg so eloquently stated, isn't "rape-rape." On the contrary, I've always thought Polanski a serial pedophile, and I absolutely believe he needs to answer for his crimes.

What I don't get is the constant comments in the media that Polanski is a "polarizing figure that has split the country in two." I heard that same basic idea on three different news shows the other day. I guess my question is what country are these people talking about? Because if the United States IS split on Roman Polanski, it isn't split 50-50. It's split maybe 99.5-.5. Outside of a few Hollywood people and friends and relatives of Roman Polanski, I haven't heard from anyone who thinks that what Polanski did was okay, or that he should be set free. I know because I've looked. I couldn't imagine how anyone could really think what he did was okay, so I tried to find some argument. I figured I must be missing some important detail in the case. But you know what? There are no cogent arguments out there that he should be freed. There are comments that he's served his time (He hasn't), that he's suffered enough (which is rubbish--Lots of criminals serving time had traumas in their past), and that the judge was going to back out of a plea deal (which is actually irrelevant--if the judge WERE going to back out of a plea deal then Polanski could just change his plea), but there's nothing else.

So I had planned to write in this space an argument for why I thought Polanski SHOULD be punished for what he did. I was going to bring up the lurid details of the case (which many don't seem to know), and I was going to bring up the fact that my daughter was turning 13 soon and how I'd feel if any 43 year old man had sex with her, whether it was consensual or not. But I can see now that there's no need.

I'd be arguing with pretty much nobody.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Here's a story about how little power I have in my office...

One of the things that I'm in charge of is the district's day of professional development that we've dubbed the Erlanger-Elsmere Teaching and Learning Conference. This is a daylong conference-style professional development where teachers can attend five one hour training sessions. During each hour the teachers can choose from 13 or so different sessions, ranging from technology to special education to promoting parent involvement. It's all good stuff, and we give teachers an hour and a half for lunch on this day, under the theory that they're going to go off to lunch with each other and discuss what they learned in the morning anyway.

An hour and a half for lunch sounds like a lot of time, and it is, but I think anyone reading this will attest to the fact that once you get talking to a group of people in a restaurant, time can pass quickly. We wanted to make sure that everyone came back from lunch ON TIME, so the EETLC committee came up with the idea to give away door prizes as soon we come back from lunch. It's a good idea; this is the 3rd year we've had the EETLC, and in past years we've had almost every teacher back on time.

This year, though, the committee member in charge of getting door prizes was having trouble getting them. With only a few weeks left before the conference, she only had 2 or 3 door prizes. I mentioned this to one of the secretaries at the office, and she decided she wanted to show teachers how much she loved them, so she started calling every business in Erlanger, Elsmere and even in the surrounding areas. A couple of weeks ago one of the other secretaries came to me and said, "Peggy's doing great. She has about 20 or 30 door prizes."

"That's awesome!" I said. "And it's just the right number. I'm going to go out and thank her." I did. I went out and told her I was VERY grateful for all that she'd done, and that I felt like that was enough. "We only have maybe 10 or 15 minutes to give out door prizes," I said. "I think 20 or 30 will be MORE than enough."

"But I'm just getting started," she said. She held up a piece of paper and I could see that there were many more unchecked names of businesses than checked ones. "This is fun!"

"It may be fun," I said, and I looked at her in a serious way. "But really. I think we're fine."

I thought that was that until about a week ago when someone else in the office said, just in passing, "I think Peggy is almost finished making calls for donations."

"She's STILL making calls!" I asked.

"She's been making calls for weeks," this person said. "We're up to over 75 items at this point."

I went out to Peggy's desk. I think she heard me from my office, because she saw me coming and had a look on her face like a dog that's been caught eating food off of the kitchen counter. "Peggy," I said. "These donations. They really have to stop. Not only are we eating into the time for the presenter, but I was planning to place their logos all around the schedule we were going to hand out the day of the conference. There's no way I can do that now. We'll have too many. I'm going to have to come up with a different solution. You're creating MORE work for me!"

"Pshaw!" she said. "I still have some people who've promised to bring things in, and I have a few more calls I want to make."

"Please, please, PLEASE!" I said. "Finish up with the oustanding promises, but don't make ANY more calls."

She promised, but the next day I heard her from my desk cold calling someone else. This time I didn't even bother to go out and talk with her.

The final tally: 95 donations totalling more than $4,500. There are going to be a lot of happy teachers at the conference next Friday. We have so many donations that we've decided to cancel the speakers we had lined up for breakfast and do about 1/3 of the door prizes during breakfast.

What I'm missing in all of this, I know, is Peggy's generosity. Most people's personality is about half heart and about half intellect. Peggy is the only person I think I've ever met who is 100% heart. She got it in her mind to do something for the teachers, and she did it. Also missing is the generosity of all of the local businesses who donated all of those gift certificates and Entertainment books and gift baskets and some things even nicer than that. People complain a lot about the state of education today, but most people truly CARE about the teachers who teach their children, and given a chance, the owners of all of these local businesses were glad to show they cared.

And that's all great, and I'm sure next Friday I'll be overcome with both of those things. Yesterday, though, I spent four hours putting all of those local business's logos on the back of the schedule, and I left work none too happy about it.