American Idol Complaints

Last year about this time of year I wrote about American Idol and how I was getting sick of it. A year later, nothing much has changed. I wouldn't watch the show at all except that everyone else in my family LOVES it, and if I want to spend time with them I have to watch it. Luckily, at least we DVR the thing and skip all of the commercials.

Aside from just being tired of the show, though, there are two things about American Idol that bug me:

1. Four judges is too many.

I've noticed this since a fourth judge was added last year. Unless the fourth judge to give a review is Simon, I don't ever care what the fourth judge says. I'm sick of hearing critiques and ready to move on to the next contestant. I understand the need for three judges--if the first two give wildly differing reviews, the third judge is sort of the tie breaker. But the fourth one just takes up time.

2. I hate that we have to listen to the person who got voted off sing again.

This has always made NO sense to me. What kind of an inspired performance are we expecting these people to give us? These are young people who just seconds before received the biggest disappointment of their young lives--they were voted off of a show in front of millions of people. So what do we do? We hand them a microphone and ask them to sing. It's almost cruel.

And from an entertainment standpoint, the idea is kind of dumb, too. I mean, who pitched this idea to the show's producers, anyway? Did it go something like this: "Hey! I've got a great idea! America just voted last night and they told us--by the millions--who their LEAST favorite person on the show is, and what their LEAST favorite moment on the show was. How 'bout we put that person back in front of the camera and have them repeat that terrible moment?" On ANY other show the person who pitched such an idea would have been fired.

I can understand the show--especially towards the end when the contestant has been on for weeks and weeks and viewers have grown attached to him or her--wanting to do some kind of retrospective, but don't follow that up by forcing the contestant to repeat the mistake of a performance that got him or her voted off the show! I'd be okay with the producers deciding in advance which performance throughout the competition was that person's best and replaying THAT one, but forcing them to re-create a bad performance is silly.

The only fun in watching that is to see if the person breaks down and cries. Most have the dignity to wait until the lights go out.

_____________________________

Despite all of these complaints, though, I'm sure I'll get sucked in like I have almost every year.

I've only watched this week's episodes and a few minutes of some of the others, but I will tell you that I think this year's group of contestants is mostly a fairly bland, talentless group. The only contestant I was really wowed by was Siobhan Magnus. Maybe her performance of "Wicked Game" was a fluke, as I've never seen her before Wednesday night so I have nothing to compare it to, but I was blown away. I thought her voice was great, and she has a charisma that--though it was muted by the type of song that "Wicked Game" is--I felt pretty strongly. And the judges all complained that it was one of her WORSE performances!

Based on my now more than an hour of viewing so far, she's my pick.

The Olympics

I'm going to take the easy way out today and not actually write a post...

...Instead, I'm going to point you to a post that I made a couple of years ago. It's about the summer Olympics in 2008, but it pretty much exactly sums up how I feel about the Winter Olympics, too. All you have to do is--in your mind--substitute the name of obscure summer sports with obscure winter sports, and substitute the name of summer sport athletes with their corresponding winter athletes. And I won't have to repeat myself.

Read the original post.

From Bookshelves to Cabinets

This post is a shout out to my brother-in-law, Jackie, who--along with his lovely wife--came to our house Saturday to install some doors for us. Wood is what Jackie does for a living, and he does a good job of it.

When Jackie was here during the holidays for the Sweasy Family Christmas, I mentioned to him that we really liked all of the bookshelves we had in the basement, but that we'd really like some doors on them. We have a limited number of books we want to display, and the other items we placed on the shelves made the basement look a wee bit cluttered. I don't have any good "before" shots of the bookshelves, but here is a shot of one of my younger daughter's friends (she's playing the Nintendo Wii Fit game) taken at my daughter's birthday back in January. You can see the bookshelves behind her:

What you CAN'T see in the photo above is the ugliest part of the entire wall--the area just underneath the TV. Wires hang down to where all of the electronic devices (the Wii, our Roku Player, a DVD player, and a DVR) sit underneath the TV. So Jackie went downstairs before dinner and measured those shelves, and Saturday he came up and installed them. This is what the finished product looks like:

We're very please. So thanks, Jackie and Ann. And if anyone in the Lexington/Nicholasville area is looking for someone to do built in cabinetry, desks, that kind of stuff, I know your guy!

An Unpopular Position

I'm going to take an unpopular position today...at least for someone in my career...

Friday the Kentucky House and Senate leaders held a joint news conference in which they discussed the House's first draft of the state budget. It includes reducing the instructional days in public schools in Kentucky from 177 days to 175 days. Educators throughout the state have decried the move (You can read about it here and here), stating that Kentucky is behind the nation and the world in total instructional days now, and that we should be INCREASING the number of instructional days, not decreasing them.

Saturday I attended a legislative caucus in Florence that was designed to give any citizen a chance to speak to all Northern Kentucky legislators. About 2/3 of the people in attendance were educators (as evidenced by the fact that all of us wore red as a sign of solidarity), and more than half of the people who actually went to the microphone and spoke to the legislators were educators or students or parents of students, and they all had the same message: don't decrease our days of instruction.

Once the meeting was over, a friend from another district came up to me and asked me why I didn't speak. "You're eloquent," she said to me. "Didn't you have something to say?" I told her what I'm going to tell you now. I kept quiet because I couldn't tow the party line.

I don't think the loss of these two days is that big of a deal.

I understand that cutting instructional days means cutting contract days for teachers, which means basically a pay cut for educators (including me!) of a little more than 1 percent. And symbolically, yes, I understand that cutting education looks bad. Practically, though, I don't think that losing two days of instruction is going to make a big difference. And don't think I'm going to get on the "Teachers waste all their time watching movies anyway!" bandwagon because I don't believe that's true. Sure, there are teachers out there that probably aren't the best teachers and that DO perhaps show films that aren't particularly relevant. I KNOW those people are out there because back when I was in the classroom my students used to tell me which teachers in my building were doing so. I never did, though. I remember telling my students at 2:50 on the last day of school, when they were whining for me to stop teaching, that "Your parents are paying me to teach you for a certain number of days until 3 o'clock on each of those days, and it would be wrong for me not to give them their money's worth." That's not to say that I never had a down moment in my classes--I had plenty. But I never had a throwaway day, not even when I was sick and a substitute was in my class.

No, it's not that I think that teachers waste time. It's just that--in the grand scheme of things--two days each year isn't going to make that much difference. If legislators were talking about cutting FIVE instructional days, that might be a bigger deal. A teacher can teach a lot of concepts in a week. But I don't see where two days is going to change much.

That's just my opinion, though. Fellow educators, please don't pummel me.

Instructions for People Who Are Bad at Math

This evening for dinner I wimped out and decided not to make anything homemade. Lisa was gone to her night class, and honestly, the girls PREFER non-homemade food (though I can't really get too upset with them about that. When I was a kid, my dream meal at home was Spaghettios with Meatballs and my dream meal out was McDonald's).

I'm not here to talk about my kids' eating habits, though. I decided to make Pasta Roni Garlic & Olive Oil Vermicelli for dinner tonight. It's one of my younger daughter's favorites. I started to make a box of this and then noticed that under the Nutrition Facts the "Servings Per Container" was listed as "about 2." Knowing how much my daughter loved this, I figured a single box wasn't enough, and since I knew there was a second box up in the cabinet, I got it out and decided to double the recipe.

The recipe called for 1 3/4 cups of water and 2 tablespoons of margarine. I figured I'd just double the recipe, and so I got 3 1/2 cups of water and 4 tablespoons of margarine, and was all set to start cooking, when I glanced down at the box and saw this message just above the directions: "See below for special instructions when preparing two boxes." Uh oh, I thought. Do I need to do something different?

I scanned down until I found the "special" instructions, and this is what they said: "To Prepare Two Boxes: Follow Range Top Directions, except prepare 2 boxes of PASTA RONI Garlic & Olive Oil Vermicelli in a 3-quart saucepan with 3 1/2 cups water and 4 tablespoons margarine."

Uh, those aren't SPECIAL directions. Those are just the original directions doubled. I'm assuming that the directions are intended for "special" people who can't do basic math.

And so I thought I'd help the Pasta Roni company out. Here are "Special" instructions for preparing 83 boxes: To Prepare Eighty-three Boxes: Follow Range Top Directions, except prepare 83 boxes of PASTA RONI Garlic & Olive Oil Vermicelli in a 124 quart container (roughly a 30 gallon metal trash can) with 145 1/4 cups (about 9 gallons) water and 166 tablespoons (about 10 and a third cups) of margarine.

No charge for that one, Pasta Roni!

P.S. The pasta really is good...

Back at Work

A couple of weeks ago on my Facebook page and on my Twitter account I posted the following message:

I know the "cool" thing to say now is how sick I am of winter, but the truth is...I HOPE we get snowed in this weekend. I'd love the break!

Now I think God is testing me to see how much I really meant that. The break has been VERY nice, but I'm ready for the snow to go away now. Three or four inches of snow is nice. It's beautiful. It reminds me of my childhood, building snowmen and playing football in the snow with friends. More than a foot of snow, though, which is what is outside now, is a whole other story. It drifts to two or three feet deep in places. It's HEAVY when I try to shovel it off of the driveway. It sits on top of landscaping and weighs it down, perhaps damaging it permanently. It's a menace.

And missing school is nice, but this is enough already. Last year we missed six days of school due to the weather, and that was the most my school district had missed in the two decades that I've worked here. So far this year we've equalled that number, and there are still two weeks of February left. This is enough.

With all of that in mind, I came into work today. The district was still closed, but I'd had enough relaxing at home. There are only so many movies and so many cups of hot cocoa that can be drunk before a person starts to go batty. So I came in to get some work done. And I was glad to do it.

Of course, now that I've worked a full day, I remember all about the stress that caused me to write the message above, and now that I'm back home again I can appreciate how peaceful it is here, and I'm just about ready for another snow day.

Well, maybe I'm not quite ready yet...

More Snow

Here's something interesting that the weather from the last couple of weeks has caused: I was looking at the weather report just now for the next couple of days, and I actually thought to myself, "Oh, we're only looking at maybe four or five inches of snow with this next storm. That's no big deal!"

In any other year, a forecast for five inches of snow would have thrown me into high alert mode. But it's hard to get too upset about that today when there is still more than a foot of snow outside (Okay, thanks to the sun, maybe it's down to about 7 or 8 inches in places), and it was hard to even get upset about the snow storm that caused THAT snow when I remember that my brother in Maryland is dealing with multiple FEET of snow. It's been an odd year.

And to think that at the end of January I remember shrugging my shoulder and saying to someone, "Well, looks like we're not going to get any major snow this year!"

Brand Name Recognition

Yesterday I went to the doctor for some tests (Sorry, not going to get into the gory details on this very public blog). While I was sitting in the examination room waiting for the doctor to come and see me (which is always a bummer--I'm always so excited to get out of the waiting room and to get into the queue, but then I end up back in this room with no magazines and no TV, and I realize that I was better off out in the waiting room), something dawned on me.

My dentist for most of my childhood was Dr. Schneider.

When I moved to the Greater Cincinnati area, I had to choose a doctor from out of the hundreds of primary care physicians. The doctor I chose: Dr. Schneider.

When I had my LASIK surgery done a few years ago, I chose Dr. David Schneider of the Midwest Eye Institute.

Why are so many of my doctors named Schneider? I can't help but wonder if it is a result of the same phenomenon that gives us a dozen different kinds of Cheerios and innumerable flavors of Coke: name brand recognition. Did I choose Dr. Schneider as my primary care physician out of childhood memories of going to the dentist Dr. Schneider. Do I just trust the name now? It IS weird that when I meet someone whose last name is Schneider, the first question I want to ask that person is, "So...what kind of doctor ARE you?"

It's odd, but I'm not TOO terribly worried about it: after all, my current dentist and current opthamologist are NOT named Schneider. If one of them retires, though, I'll no doubt have to choose a new provider from my insurance company's list of providers. And I'll probably start my search in the "S" section.

Updates on Some Old Posts

I thought today I'd write and give you some updates on a couple of posts I wrote a few months ago. The first post, which I made back in early November, was about a "new" kitchen counter top that I'd "installed." Instead of buying a new counter top, which Lisa and I had actually planned to do that day, we purchased a Rustoleum product called "Countertop Coating." It was supposed to make our old counter top look brand new. I included photos of how it looked at the time, which was fantastic, but I said that what would really count is what it looked like in three months. Well, it's been three months!

And the result is this: I'd give the product a C-. It DOES look great at first glance. The photo above shows you what the kitchen looks like today. Gone is that ugly, glaring red that we'd had before. And the paint is smooth enough that--unless a visitor really got a few inches away from the counter top and inspected it--he or she would never know that it was a painted counter top. So all of that's good.

On the other hand, if the visitor DID get just a few inches from the counter top, he'd notice that the counter is NOT perfectly smooth. No matter what type of ultra smooth roller is used, nor how careful I was to smooth it out, the pain still on close inspection looks a little bumpy. Worse, if the bumps are run across with something heavy and ungiving--something, say, like the bottom of a tin can--the new paint can be pulled off. In our case, that reveals the ugly red that's beneath it. You can see an example in the photo to the left. The photo shows both the wrinkled effect of the new paint and a gash in the paint that shows the red beneath it.

Overall, though, I still think the product has uses. After all, our kitchen counter gets used a lot, and there are only maybe 10 or 15 spots like the one in the photo above, and at about 1/2 centimeter in size, the one I've photographed is easily the biggest. The rest are about the size of grains of salt. I'm actually surprised that the paint has held up as well as it has. I didn't expect it to do so. I think it would make an excellent alternative in a less heavily trafficked area, maybe on the counter of a bathroom sink in a guest bathroom. But I wouldn't use it in the kitchen unless (like us) you absolutely HATE your current counter top color.

The other product I wanted to give you a quick update about are the compact fluorescent light bulbs that I've installed throughout my house. As I mentioned back in November, I replaced our old incandescent bulbs two or three at a time until they were almost all replaced. At this point, the ONLY incandescent bulbs in our house are in our garage door opener in our garage (which is used so seldom that I don't think it's worth changing them out) and in two fixtures in our bathroom in the basement (which have odd bases and I haven't found bulbs to replace them yet). My goal was to make the house all CFL's by Christmas, but with the exception of those bulbs I actually finished at the end of November. So I've had two complete cycles of my utility bill with the new bulbs in, and I compared them to the bills from two months ago. And the difference is right in line with what I'd been told they would be: In both months, I've saved a little more than 20% in my ELECTRIC bill (my gas bill, of course, is unchanged). That translates to about $15 a month. It's not a huge amount, but it's a difference nonetheless. It will take me about a year to save on the bills what the bulbs cost me, but after that I'll practically be MAKING money when I turn on lights in the house!

Obsessed with Age

We drink a lot of diet Coke products in my house (At least we used to. Both Lisa and I are trying to cut back). As a result, Lisa has taken to collecting My Coke Rewards. And there's a lot of free stuff on there, but we got a lot of--at least at first--are magazines. And I've noticed something about the different entertainment magazines that we have: they all seem obsessed with age. Every person listed in these magazines has his/her age revealed at some point ("Taylor Swift, 20, was a big winner at the Grammy's the other day" or "Mel Gibson, at age 54, is trying to make a comeback after eight years away from the big screen.").

I've yet to figure out why these magazines are so obsessed with age. I've had a subscription to either Time or Newsweek for each of the last 15 years or so, and these magazine aren't obsessed with age. I've never read, "President Obama, 48, is finding his health care coalition falling apart." I also don't recall ever reading "53 year old Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hit the club scene in New York after his speech before the U.N."

I'm not sure what the difference is. The only thing I can think of is that people who read these magazines fantasize about having a relationship with the celebrities, and the age is an important barometer of whether or not that reader is compatible with that celebrity. Or maybe that's a dumb idea.

It's just the only one I can come up with.

My Birthday Present

My birthday is the same day as the Super Bowl this year, so all week long I've been telling myself that all of these parties people are planning Sunday are for me! In fact, while I was shopping at Kroger yesterday I passed an acquaintance and overheard her saying to her husband, "...have to figure out if we'll need four or five cases of soda for the party Sunday."

I interrupted and said, "So you've heard it's my birthday Sunday, too, have you? And you guys are throwing me a surprise party, too? I tell you, it seems like everyone is having a party for me this Sunday!" After they got over the surprise of this interruption, I then went on to tell them that--as much as I'd like to come to their party--I was going to have to pass as I had other plans.

But I'm not here today to write about me being goofy in a grocery store. I'm here to talk about my birthday present. Okay, I guess it's not REALLY a birthday present since the present wasn't purchased because it was my birthday...and it wasn't gift wrapped when given to me...and it wasn't opened on my birthday...and I bought it myself with my own money. Uh, on second though, I guess it's not a present at all. I guess it's just this thing I bought that I happened to buy just before my birthday. But none of that matters. To me, it's my birthday present!

And what it is is a piece of electronics called a Roku player. It's a tiny box, about the size of a portable DVD player, and it connects to our TV downstairs. It also wirelessly connects to our Internet connection, and it streams movies from Netflix and Amazon Unbox. The movies from Amazon Unbox are $4.99 to rent, and you have 24 hours to watch them. The movies and TV shows from Netflix are free and included as part of the subscription to Netflix. As I mentioned in posts a few weeks ago, we recently renewed our Netlix account after about 18 months away from it, and I was blown away by how much their offering of movies has grown. 18 months ago pretty much all that was available to stream for free was indie movies and movies from the 1960's. Maybe you could throw in a few recent flops or direct to DVD entries, but that was about it. Today, while the newest movies are still not on Netflix streaming, there's a LOT of good content. Sitting in my Netlix queue right now is Walt Disney's Bolt and The Ant Bully for the kids, and Doubt, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and Sunshine Cleaning for Lisa and me to watch. We also have TV shows like Meercat Manor and South Park in our list, and classics like Caddyshack and Nightmare on Elm Street. It's an unbelievable difference in selection compared to a year ago.

And I have to say this about my new "toy": It's pretty awesome. It says in its sales material that it takes three minutes to setup. That's a stretch, but not much. I would say I had ours up and running in less than ten minutes. Keep in mind that I'm a tech savvy person, but still, I think most people could have theirs up and running in 30 minutes or less. The only part that might throw some people is setting the machine up with their wireless network. It's the same process, though, as connecting any other device with a wireless network, so if you can connect your laptop, you can connect a Roku player. And if you're not going to connect it wirelessly, the setup is even easier--just plug a cable from your router into the LAN port on the back of the Roku and you're ready to go.

Speaking of wireless, I worried that maybe I wouldn't get a very good picture with the player because our TV is so far away from our wireless router (It's one floor down from the router and at the other end of one side of our house). But the picture is unbelievable! Much better than what I was getting watching the movies from my computer monitor.

I'm very satisfied with my new toy, and I'll be playing with it for a long time. I told Lisa yesterday, "I'm going to spend the next hour watching the first 30 seconds of everything in my queue...because I can!"

An Epic Fail (or "Licking My Wounds" or "Ralphie")

I've been licking my wounds at work all week...

...Each year, the federal government releases some technology grants called by various names, but for the sake of brevity, let's go with the short name of Ed Tech. These grants are distributed to the states and then broken into two types: competitive and non-competitive. EVERY school district in the state gets its share of the non-competitive grants, but only some of the districts in the state are eligible for the competitive grants, and those districts must--as the name suggests--compete against each other for those grant monies.

I don't know about the other 49 states, but in Kentucky who is eligible for the competitive grants has to do with the poverty rate of the school district. The poorer the district, the better the chances of qualifying for the grant. My school district has never qualified for one of these competitive grants...until this year. Thanks to a) the federal government pumping money into the grant through federal stimulus funds and b) my school district's deteriorating socio-economic status, we finally qualified for this grant. In fact, thanks to the influx of federal stimulus funds, something like 110 of the school districts in the state (out of 175) qualified for the grant, and the Kentucky Department of Education said about 75 or so of those districts would get the grant.

It wasn't a huge grant, but it wasn't anything to sneeze at, either, and any amount of money for technology is useful in lean times. So I set out about three months ago to get this grant. I worked on and off for about five weeks crafting the proposal, and if I'd worked for 8 hours a day on the thing, I probably would have put eight full days in on it. I got assistance from the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the district finance officer, and the principal at the school that would be--the way the grant was written--the primary benefactor of the money. I told all of them that it was a virtual shoo in of a grant because a) with 75 out of 110 districts going to receive money, all we had to do was not come in the bottom quartile of grant proposals, b) I'd volunteered in the past to score these grants and had done so, knowing that doing so would give me some inside information into what the scorers were looking for in case I ever did get the chance to apply, and c) I had never written for any grant before and not gotten it. I told everyone that we should go ahead and start planning for the grant because the announcement was just going to be a formality.

I'm assuming you can guess where I'm heading with this blog entry...

...And you're right. Tuesday morning I received an email stating that the scoring of the grants had been completed and that the results would be emailed later that day to all applicants. I emailed all of the interested parties and told them that hopefully we'd have the official word later that day. When the email did come, right at about lunch time, I opened the email, assuming that my district's name would be on the list, and hoping that the scores would be arranged from highest to lowest because I assumed that my district's name would be near the top if not at the very top. Indeed, when I opened the email and went to the website linked to in the message, the district's names WERE in order from highest to lowest (at least initially--someone at KDE noticed this error and quickly rearranged them alphabetically...but I'd already seen). I scanned quickly through the top of the list and didn't see my district's name anywhere. Oh well, I thought, it's in here somewhere. I went all the way down the list, though, and didn't see it. My district's name is NOT easy to miss. It's two odd, German words with a hyphen in between. Off the top of my head, I think it's probably the longest school district name in the state. I searched again. Still couldn't find it. I bet I looked up and down the list six or seven different times before it even began to sink in that it wasn't on the list. 77 OTHER school districts were on the list. My district's name was nowhere.

I was devastated. Not just because we didn't get the grant. To be honest, more than once I had told myself that I really would be better off if we DIDN'T get the grant, because it just meant more work for me next year. What devastated me was that I really thought I had written a good grant, and I REALLY assumed that I would be somewhere in the top 10. In fact, if I'm going to be honest here, I'd entertained thoughts that at the state technology conference next month someone from the scoring committee was going to come up to me and whisper in my ear, "You know, we're not supposed to say these things, but I just have to say it: I've scored these Ed Tech grant proposals for years, and yours was the best I've ever read! You have a gift!" I'm not exaggerating for effect here--that's really what I thought was going to happen. But no, there I was Tuesday, sitting at my computer, staring over and over again at the list, waiting for my school district's name to magically appear somehow.

It never did.

My world had been rocked, and it has taken me days to recover. I pretty much got nothing done for the rest of that day. I tried, but I kept looking back at the list. I emailed the person in charge of the scoring and asked her if I could have the evaluators' score sheets so that I could see where I needed to improve. I received those very quickly, and so I spent a big chunk of the day reading them. My grant had been read by four scorers. I basically got a B, two C's, and an F-. And I wanted to tell myself that the problem was that fourth scorer, that if--by the luck of the draw--someone ELSE had scored my grant, I probably would have gotten funded. And there's probably some truth to that. But when I read the VERY thorough comments written in the F- review, it was obvious to me that the fourth scorer hadn't scored too low--the others had scored too high. There were serious flaws in my grant, and if I'd been scoring it, I would have scored it low, too.

I was so upset about my epic fail (Yes, if you've read this blog before you know how much I HATE that expression, but in this case I think it's fitting and appropriate to label me with it) that I pretty much told everyone exactly what I've written above, and everyone tried to comfort me. They told me that grant writing is just like this, that sometimes it's just the luck of the draw. I told them I could have accepted that if there had been 110 applications and only 5 had been awarded. Then I could have comforted myself with the idea that maybe I had just missed out on the grant. Maybe I'd been 6th. But no. I was AT BEST 78th out of 110. AT BEST, I was at the top of the bottom quartile. And the way I felt that day, I was pretty sure I'd been probably closer to 110 than 78.

I went home that day in such a bad mood that I didn't want to be around anyone. I couldn't sleep Tuesday night I was so upset. Wednesday I wasn't feeling much better, and I went into my superintendent's office and apologized, telling her I felt like I'd let the district down. She used the same lines I mentioned above to try to comfort me, and I told her about how I wasn't buying it--my grant just stunk. I laughed, though, and told her about what I thought that scorer was going to whisper in my ear in a month, and how this had all been such a slap in the face. Today I was feeling a little better, well enough to write this anyway.

I guess, to sum it up, I guess I felt like Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he wrote his theme about what he wanted for Christmas: I thought I was going to get an A++++++++++++, but I ended up getting a C-. Worse than a C-, though. I failed. An epic fail.

Why am I telling you this? I don't know. Part of it, I guess, is that this is how I process stuff, by writing it down. Another part of it, though, is that--like everyone--I sometimes can let my ego get the best of me. It's good for me to fall on my face every now and then. I'm not saying it's fun. It's not. But it's good for me. It reminds me that I'm not perfect, and (once I get over the 48 hours of grieving) it gives me resolve to redouble my efforts. If my district ever qualifies for this grant again, you better believe I'll spend 16 days next time getting the grant ready.

So the 48 hours of grieving is over. It's time to get back to work.

(I can't see the video.)

Weather Geek

To my poor family's chagrin, this time of year I become an absolute weather geek!

I know. It's sad. In fact, the weather is sort of a benchmark boring subject, the sort of thing to which people compare the most boring of discussion topics ("That was as interesting as talking about the WEATHER!"), but this time of year, when a big snow storm could be moving in, I get REALLY excited by weather forecasts.

I don't get most of my information from weathermen on TV, not since I've learned that about half of the so called meteorologists on TV don't have an advanced degree in meteorology. Most of them are broadcasters first and meteorologists a VERY distant second, and they just take their cues from the forecasters at the National Weather Service.

And since that's the case, I decided, why should I even go through the middle men? Why not go straight to the source? So I get my weather from THIS website: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=Ft+Mitchell&state=KY&site=ILN&textField1=39.0293&textField2=-84.5649.

I love so many things about this website. First, if there's "breaking" weather like a Winter Storm or some other hazardous weather, there are links, right there in red at the top of the page. Second, if you want to know the weather for some other part of the country, just type in the zip code or the city and state and you have the same information. Third, there are timestamps showing when all of these things are updated, so you know how old the forecast is (and I've learned that pretty much everything on the page is updated about 30-45 minutes BEFORE the time of local newscasts, most likely to give those poor uneducated "meteorologists" a chance to check out the official forecast). Finally, there are maps and radar images down near the bottom.

But I'm not here to talk about any of that today, though I discovered my awesome, cool, new weather-geek thingy as I was looking down at the maps and radar images. Right below all those maps is a link called "Forecast Discussion," where the meteorologist from the National Weather Service who wrote the ACTUAL FORECAST describes how he came up with that forecast, based on various computer models.

Isn't that exciting?!?!? I can hardly contain myself!!!

There are all kinds of way cool abbreviations and mentions of fronts and systems and stuff, and most of it is hyperlinked so that you can look it up yourself. Thanks to this page, I know that--in meteorology terms-- "WA" is short for "warning area," and "GFS" is short for "Global Forecast System," and all kinds of other cool things I never knew before. I was so excited by all of this that I felt like I just HAD to share it with all of you people!

You can thank me later...

On the Economy

Just a couple of years ago I remember talking to someone who needed a job and saying, "If you're looking for part time work or a way you can make money while you're job searching, you should think about getting an emergency certificate and becoming a substitute teacher!"

"Really?" that person said. "I could do that?"

"Sure," I said to him. "School districts are ALWAYS looking for new substitute teachers!" And at the time, it was the truth. With so many jobs in this area, we sometimes struggled to have enough substitute teachers. I know we were always limited in how many teacher we could send to educational conferences NOT by the money it cost to send them but by the number of substitute teachers available to cover the classes.

Flash forward a year to January of last year. I wrote a post on this blog about the number of people who were requesting information about becoming a substitute teacher. Requests at that time had increased by 300% over the previous year!

Flash forward one more time to a couple of weeks ago, the middle of January. That's when our school district made the decision to stop accepting substitute teacher applications. There's an administrative cost on our end to process the applications, and we just didn't have the demand for the substitute teachers that this economy is supplying. Now when people show up in our offices wanting information on becoming a substitute teacher, we turn them away.

I never thought I'd see the day.