Look Out, McGriddle!

I've been away from home all this week (and will continue to be away from home for the rest of the week as well) at a technology training in Hodgenville, Kentucky. The training is for certification on the networking equipment in my district. This is NOT my area of expertise (hence the reason that I'm at the training in the first place), so I'd be hard pressed to keep up under normal circumstances. But the course I'm taking is a "Fast Track Course" that takes two other 2 week courses and condenses them down into five days. So I'm leaving the training each day with my head absolutely SPINNING with information overload.

But I'm actually not here to talk about that. The training--as I said above--is taking place in Hodgenville, Kentucky, a small town about 15 miles southwest of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It's so small, in fact, that there aren't any hotels in Hodgenville and I'm staying in Elizabethtown. Hodgenville is the home of the birth place of Abraham Lincoln, so the town has a small tourist industry. And over the last three days I've tried to take it all in.

Monday after the training I just sort of drove around the downtown area and got my bearings. Tuesday during lunch I went to the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, which is run by the federal government. I have to say, I was underwhelmed. There is a log cabin on the site, but a) it's not the ACTUAL log cabin, just a "representation," and b) visitors don't even have access to the log cabin this summer. Federal stimulus dollars are being used to air condition the monument around the cabin, despite the fact that--according to the locals who are at the training--there's really nothing to see inside the monument and most people are only in there for a few minutes. That's federal money being well spent!
There IS a small museum beside the monument, but it's nothing exciting. My favorite thing there was the Lincoln family bible, open to the page where Abraham Lincoln's name was written. All in all, though, even if the monument had been open to the public, I wouldn't have spent more than an hour there.

Today we were given 90 minutes for lunch, which was enough time for me to go to the town square in downtown Hodgenville. There are several small shops there that sell trinkets and candy and home made stuff. Your typical Kentucky merchandise. There also is a private Abraham Lincoln museum, and I whizzed through it. THAT was nice. Of course, where the national monument was free to the public, the private museum cost money. But you get what you pay for, I guess.

Of all the things I found in Hodgenville, though, the thing that excited me most was the lunch I had today. I ate at a little diner right beside the museum. I think it was called Honest Abe's Diner. And the specials of the day were a taco salad and...wait for it...a donut hamburger! I asked the waitress to tell me about that one.

She said, "Well, it's a 1/4 pound hamburger grilled and topped with cheese, lettuce, tomato, mustard, and ketchup, and placed inside a Krispy Kreme donut that's been cut in half. It's delicious! I had one for breakfast. Would you like to try it?"

I laughed heartily at her description (WHY I laughed so hard is explained below). "I ABSOLUTELY want that for lunch!" I told her. So that's what I got. A donut and cheese hamburger with stewed tomatoes instead of the fries. I asked her to hold the lettuce, tomato, ketchup, and mustard, though, because that just seemed weird to me.

The woman who worked the counter also came over to me after I ordered it and told me that I was going to love it. "You're in for a REAL treat," she said.

"I hope so!" I said. "This makes me happier than you can know. I'm even going to take a PICTURE of it when I get it"

I got the lunch and ate it. I didn't like it. In the end I took the hamburger and the cheese off of the donut and ate the burger on its own, and then I ate the top part of the donut for a dessert (the bottom part of the donut was soaked in hamburger grease).

But I didn't care. I didn't REALLY order it because I thought it would be good. I actually couldn't imagine that it would be. I ordered it because of the video below, specifically at about the 5 minute and 50 second mark.



P.S. I asked for ham on my burger but they said they didn't have any.

Dad Life

Okay, I have to admit, I don't know whether to laugh or get mad about this...

My wife emailed me a link to the video below, a video called "Dad Life." All her email included was a link to the video and a message that said "Enjoy." I started watching the video just a few minutes ago and honestly expected it to be a sappy, teary video about fathers. I wasn't expecting something humorous.

And not just humorous. Laugh out loud funny stuff.

But like I said, I think there's a part of me that wants to get mad, too. Because I know why my wife sent this to me: She sees me in the guys in the video.

And I guess she's right. Especially the first guy.



(I can't see the video.)

P.S. And though this isn't usually the case, today I really DO have dozens of dollars!

Rand Paul is NOT "The Guy"

Before I had the job I have now, back when I was a high school English teacher, I did quite a bit of consulting in the field of writing instruction. I worked with every school in my district and with schools in several surrounding districts on ways to help teachers help students to become better writers. And in every situation, I found the faculty members at those schools to be cooperative. True, each school was different, with its own challenges and with its own unique culture, but in every case the faculty was willing to work to solve the problems it faced and to work in the best interest of the students.

Except at one school.

There was one school where I presented two sessions during two different school years. The first was a day long session where the school was hoping to revamp the entire way that it handled writing portfolios (which used to be a staple of state assessment in Kentucky), and the second was a shorter training about something--I honestly can't remember what.

It doesn't matter what the subjects of the trainings were, though. I left both trainings at this school (and you better believe that NOTHING could drag the name of this school out of me) utterly disgusted with how dysfunctional the teachers were. Not as individuals, but as a group. The problem was this: For whatever reason, the teachers were divided into three separate groups, consisting of a small group of older teachers who sat together at a round table in the back of the library, a small group of even older teachers who sat together at a round table in the FRONT of the library, and a larger group of teachers, mostly young teachers, who sat wherever they could find a seat. The Old Group (Let's call them Group 1) couldn't stand the Older Group (Group 2), and the feeling was reciprocated. As a result, no idea that came from anyone in Group 1 was going to be accepted by Group 2, and no idea that came from Group 2 was going to be accepted by Group 1. To make matters worse, there were a couple of teachers in Group 2 who were knee jerk pessimists anyway, and so regardless of where an idea on the floor came from--even from their own group--they would find a problem with it. And they were both loud and abrasive, and they usually got their way.

This meant that NOTHING got done. We spent an entire six hour day trying to revamp their writing portfolio process. But after six hours of work, including time working together by department and time working together by grade, we finally had a plan, only to have Group 1 stand up and belittle the elements of the plan that came from Group 2, and Group 2 to stand up and belittle the elements of the plan that came from Group 1, and for the two negative teachers to stand and belittle EVERYONE including me. In the end, the grand plan was never implemented.

When I went back the following year for the shorter training, I complained about the buzz saw that I knew I was about to walk into. And I wished--oh, how I wished--that things could be different. And I actually knew HOW to make things different. If I could just find a way to get those two groups out of the library, then the rest of the teachers and I could actually get something done.

And that's the way I feel about political extremists today, about what's happening in Washington and in Frankfort. Group 1 (the Democrats) and Group 2 (the Republicans) are so dead set on destroying the other group that they're getting NOTHING done, and Group 3 (you and I) are the ones that suffer as a result. You and I would LIKE to get something done, we see that there is some room for compromising and some areas of mutual agreement, we even see the way to move toward some real progress, but we're powerless to do anything because of the extremist legislators bent on proving the other party wrong.

The obvious thing to do, then, would be to vote the extremists out of Congress, move toward moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans who will work together to get things done. But that's not what's happening. If anything, we're moving in the opposite direction. The Republican Party in the state of Kentucky HAD a chance to nominate a moderate Republican to replace Jim Bunning--Trey Grayson is a good man, and by almost any definition, he's a staunch conservative, with your standard set of Republican values. But did Kentucky Republicans nominate him? No, they went with Rand Paul, a right-right-right wing conservative, who has a penchant so far for saying outrageous things that might whip the Republican base into a frenzy, but that isn't going to play well with Democrats and with moderate Republicans. I think he'll have a tough time getting elected in November.

But my fear isn't that he'll lose. My fear is that he'll WIN. That he'll go to Washington and become another extremist who'll help bog down the government and get nothing done.

So if you're a Kentuckian, even if you're a Kentuckian with conservative values, please think twice before voting for Paul. Let's not put another negative teacher in the library. I can't take it anymore!

The War in Afghanistan

I may be sticking my finger into a hornet's nest with this post, but I feel like it absolutely needs to be said...

As I've been following the news about the ousting of General Stanley McChrystal from Afghanistan, I've heard several national news commentators state that part of the reason for the general's actions are that he knows that we are doomed to failure in Afghanistan and McChrystal wants out before the failure falls on him. Many have said that now is the time for us to go ahead and get out of Afghanistan.

I want to remind everyone, though, that we have a very real reason for being in Afghanistan. I've complained since the beginning that we have no business being in Iraq, but we're in Afghanistan BECAUSE THE TALIBAN ATTACKED US! This isn't a war of choice--this is a war to defend our country.

The fact that we had to go to Afghanistan makes me very sad. I remember in 2001 standing in front of one of my English classes and saying how profoundly sad I was that thousands of Afghani's were going to die because of what happened on September 11, and that maybe some of the young men and women in that classroom would die as well (though I can thankfully say that I don't THINK anyone I know has died on the battlefield in either Afghanistan OR Iraq). But I also said that we HAD to go over to Afghanistan--we HAD to. We'd been attacked and we had to respond.

Our task in Afghanistan isn't finished. We've set up a new government, but it's a corrupt government and it doesn't control even the majority of the country geographically. The Taliban--the people who attacked us on September 11--are still in control of much of the country.

If we leave now, the message we send is that you can attack the United States if you want and get away with it. Sure, the Americans will come over to your country and blow off some steam and kill a few thousand people, but if you hide in caves long enough they'll grow weary of the fighting and leave you alone.

That's a bad message to send. It's EXACTLY what Osama bin Laden and other members of Qaeda and the Taliban said about Americans before the attacks--that we were weak and couldn't stomach war. Leaving will just prove that they're right.

So let's change the guy in charge. McChrystal was disrespectful and deserves to be removed from command. But let's not forget why we're in Afghanistan, and let's not make the mistake of proving that bin Laden was right all those years ago.

The Blueprint Guy

As I've mentioned in several posts before, my current job is as the Chief Information Officer for my school district, which is a fancy title for the director of technology. However, as I'm in a relatively small school district*, I have several jobs that fall outside of the realm of a typical technology coordinator. For instance, I run the district's attendance reports, which is something usually done by the truancy officer. I am also the person in charge of ensuring that everyone who teaches a course is certified to teach that course. And just today, I learned of a new responsibility that I didn't even know I had.

I was merrily working away at my computer, doing something that was ACTUALLY TECHNOLOGY RELATED, when I got a call from Paul, the assistant director of the maintenance department.

"Mr. Sweasy!" he said cheerfully. "I need a favor from you!"

"Sure," I said. "What's up?" I assumed he was going to ask for help with his cell phone, or he was going to need some information about a piece of technology installed in the ceiling of one of the classrooms.

"I need you to pull the blueprints from the original 1954 construction of Lloyd High School."

I laughed out loud at this request. "You need me to do WHAT?"

"You're the Blueprint Guy, aren't you?"

I laughed again. "Well, if I am, I didn't know I was."

"Well, Mr. Davis"--who was my predecessor--"was always the guy who handled this before, so I'm assuming this is your responsibility now!"

Though Paul couldn't see it, I was shaking my head in disbelief. "I've been in this job position for seven years," I said to him. "How is it that I never knew until now that I'm in charge of this?"

"Well," Paul began, "we have copies in the maintenance building of the new additions to the school, and they answer most of our questions, but we don't have the old stuff. That's your department."

"I don't mind being responsible for the blueprints, and I don't mind going and finding them for you," I said, "but before I do, I need you to do something for me."

"Sure!" he said.

"Can you tell me WHERE these blueprints are?" He did.

And that's how I got to spend an hour and a half sitting on top of some precariously balanced boxes in the safe at my office, looking for blueprints.

I never did find them. I could tell that no one has been in charge of the blueprints for seven years, and I could also tell that the person who was in charge of them before that was--like me--preoccupied with technology and attendance and NOT spending a lot of time with blueprints. There were hints that at one time the blueprints had been organized, but not any more. I found new blueprints mixed in with old ones, blueprints for buildings that don't even exist anymore, blueprints for improvements to the "Erlanger-Elsmere Negro School Building," and blueprints for sections of buildings that were never built, including a swimming pool complex proposed back in the 1970's when the Juggernauts regularly won swimming titles, and a much needed auditorium that was going to be built in the area that is currently the new science wing of Lloyd High School.

It was interesting, but it was also a waste of an hour and a half. Now that I know I'm in charge of these plans, I may have to carve out time to spend a day organizing and labeling them.

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*Though not as small as you might imagine. I can't get over the number of people who assume that because my school district is an independent school district that we are a tiny school district. I actually was viewing a webcast where the Commissioner of Education stated that if you were a "tiny" school district "like Erlanger-Elsmere Schools" that you might have to do things differently from what he was suggesting. I wanted to shout at the guy, we're a MIDDLE-SIZED Kentucky school district. Geographically we ARE tiny (It's two and a half miles from one side of our school district to the other), but we have more than 2,300 students enrolled in our schools. From a student population, we are 86th out of 174 public school districts--more school districts are SMALLER than we are than are LARGER than we are. And that includes 43 COUNTY school districts that are smaller than we are!

Stupid Directions

Yesterday at work I was installing bank software for my Finance Officer. She is the ONLY person in my district who utilizes this software, and as a result, I'm not all that familiar with it. So I had to do what I usually don't have to do with software, and that is to read the directions. And these directions really bugged me.

Here's why: Step one of the directions was fairly straightforward, to back up the old database, and I did this very quickly. Step two was to create a folder for the new database. Again, I did it without difficulty. When I got to step three, "Uninstalling the Old Application," though, I was thrown by these directions: "WARNING: Prior to uninstalling the old application, please complete Step Four, 'Downloading the new application.' Then return to this step."

I was immediately struck by a better idea--why didn't the technical writer who created those directions simply revise them to reverse the order of Steps Three and Four?  After all, if you have to do step four BEFORE step three, then it's not really step four, is it?

What amazed me is that the warning wasn't hand written or anything like that. Someone had opened up an electronic version of the document and revised it to add the warning to do step four before step three, but never did it occur to this person to simply skip the warning and reverse the directions. Brilliant!

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though. The Step Four directions, which I dutifully did before going on to Step Three, guided me to download a new version of the software. And written in the directions was this: "This is a large file, which may take as long as 2 hours to download." That's a completely useless statement that gave me no idea of the size of the file. I started the download and as I watched the size of the file grow, I had NO idea whether it was going to be a 5 MB file or a 3,000 MB file (In the end, it was 175 MB and took maybe 4 minutes to download). I just stood there twiddling my thumbs while my Finance Officer asked, "How long is this going to take?" and I had to answer truthfully, "I have no idea."

I only hope that the software works better than the directions!

God Speaking in a Loud Voice

I am one of the last people to buy into the "That was a message from God" argument. Honestly, most of the time, when that phrase or something like it comes out of someone's mouth, I usually find myself pretty irritated. For example, if someone tells me that he's really not sure whether or not he should stay in a relationship, and right at that moment Tom Petty's "Time to Move On" comes on the radio, that person might say, "See? It's a sign from God! I should break up!" to which I retort, "No, it's just a song on the radio. Are you really going to let your life be ruled by a DJ's playlist?"

I'm a big believer in coincidence, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

HOWEVER, even someone like myself has to pause after what happened last night and begin to worry that God might truly be speaking to us in a loud voice. What happened last night was this: a giant, sixty foot tall statue of Jesus that sits beside I-75 just north of Cincinnati was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The statue shows (or I guess, I need to start saying "showed") the top half of Jesus rising up with his hands in the air. A cross--which was not, for whatever reason, to the same scale as Jesus--leaned against Jesus' stomach. It actually took me a while to figure out what this statue was supposed to represent. The presence of the cross is what threw me. At first I thought it was supposed to represent the moment on the cross when Jesus cries out, "My God! My God! Why have You forsaken me?" But I thought, how can Jesus raise his hands to heaven when they're nailed to the cross? Then I read somewhere that the body of water beside the statue is where the church holds baptisms in fair weather, so now I think the statue was supposed to represent the moment after Jesus is baptized when he rises out of the water and the spirit of the Lord "descended upon him like a dove."

Depending on whom you talk to, the statue was either a) a loving tribute to the Lord, meant to counter the unGodly influences around it (like the Hustler store right across the interstate) or it was b) an ugly eyesore that all but cheapened Christianity and was an embarrassment to the community, many of whom derided it with nicknames like "Touchdown Jesus" or "Drowning Jesus" or "Big Butter Jesus."

No matter which camp you fall into, I think we can ALL agree--if this is indeed a message from God--what that message would be: Don't build your statues out of Styrofoam, especially if your statue is going to be taller than anything around it and is going to have its hands raised to the sky like some Dixie Cup lightning rods!

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against statues. I'm all for them, actually. I just think there's a reason that the ones that last are made out of durable materials like copper or marble. You know, things that aren't flammable.

All that's left of the statue now are the metal beams that were the frame beneath the Styrofoam and fiberglass. The minister says he plans to rebuild the statue. I have a better idea. I say he leaves the beams exactly the way they are now and builds beside them a plaque with the following written on it:

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
Matthew 7:24-27

My Daughter's Garden

I've been very busy of late, and as a result I haven't really taken the time to write to you about everything new that's been going on at my house. One thing I've neglected to write about is the garden that my younger daughter has started.

For as far back as I can remember my younger daughter, who is 11, has wanted to grow a garden. When we lived at Vent Haven, though, this wasn't really a possibility. We couldn't grow a garden in the front of the museum where visitors would see it. And the area behind the museum that my daughters used as a back yard had several HUGE trees that towered over it so that the sun never hit the ground back there. It was a great place for a child imagining that she was lost in an evil forest. It was not such a great place for trying to grow anything. Heck, we had a hard enough time just getting GRASS to grow.

So when we moved to our new house one of the things we promised (in addition to getting a dog, which we checked off the list more than a year ago) was that my younger daughter could finally get her garden. And she has. About six weeks ago we planted against the sunniest side of the house nine tomato plants, two cucumber plants, a strawberry plant, a watermelon vine, and a green pepper plant. And everything so far is doing great. My daughter takes care of the garden, weeding and watering it each day it doesn't rain, and we already have plenty of vegetables. So far we've eaten TWO strawberries (Yes, that's TWO. Count 'em.), but there are plenty of vegetables that aren't quite ready on the vine, including a green pepper that's about half the size of one you'd get at a grocery store, and a cucumber (see photo) that's about 2/3 of the size.

More than anything else, I view this as a learning experience for my daughter, but I'm also looking forward to eating some fresh vegetables. As the little green tomatoes begin to appear on the vines, though, I AM beginning to wonder why we felt it important to get NINE tomato plants. I don't even like tomatoes that much! Ah, well. I envision tomato salads and tomato preserves and tomato soup will be a large part of the August menu at the Sweasy household.

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Oh, and by the way, I took the photos above during a rainstorm Saturday morning. I opened the kitchen door and looked out and it didn't seem to be raining so hard, so I quickly stepped outside and took the top photo. When I bent down to take the photo of the cucumber, though, and to put my fingers by it as a point of reference, it was like God turned on the faucet--the skies opened up, and in the ten seconds it took me to snap the photo and get back into the house I was completely drenched; my hair was dripping and I all but needed to wring out my shirt. Nice.

At the pool

I am writiog tonight's blog pobt on my cell phone using the phone's handwriting recognition program. I am determined that i will not back up bnd correct any errors in the proyram so l hat you can see my frustration when i try to vse this phone to compose anything. This morning i read an article in a magazinetalled disrrict administration that was assertipg xhat cell phones would soon surpass computers as the computing deuice of choice %r scbools' the article arguej tkat students will orite more and write better using mobile word processing deuices. I say ''hogwask." t f this phone and its handwriting software are any indicat'/on,cellphones still have a long way to go.

One of My All Time Favorite Songs

I'm a fan of the Indigo Girls. A big fan. Maybe the biggest non-lesbian fan ever.

Anyway, this is the first Indigo Girls song I ever heard, and it's still my favorite. In the same way that I think of "Born to Run" when I think of Bruce Springsteen and "Thriller" when I think of Michael Jackson, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when I think of Nirvana, and "We Will Rock You" when I think of Queen, this is the song I associate with the Indigo Girls. Just like all of those other artists, there are plenty of other good Indigo Girls songs, but this is THE song.



(I can't see the video.)

What I've Been Doing at Work

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was almost through a really rough month at work. The video below, which was posted this week on Microsoft's website, discusses the big part of why May was such a busy month for me. The video, and the accompanying news articles, make it sound like all of this was done over a weekend, but it's been years in the making.

And what we had to do at the district level is nothing compared to what the Kentucky Department of Education had to do to get this ready.

Oh, and by the way, for my Western Hills High School classmates reading this on Facebook, if you watch the video carefully, you'll get glimpses of 1986 grad John Logan, who was one of the computer engineers behind the project (John's been the mastermind behind KDE's email system for almost two decades now). John never speaks in the video, but you can see him throughout. He's kind of hard to spot as that flaming red hair he had in 1986 has grayed quite a bit, but you can see him. He's wearing a powder blue golf shirt, and he's first seen just before the 1:00 mark, drawing a diagram on a whiteboard. He's most visible, I guess, toward the end of the video, opening a door that says "Office of Education Technology."



(I can't see the video)

The Sweasy Bunch

A week ago I made a post called "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" that mentioned in passing that terrific 1970's television show The Brady Bunch, a show that was loved by millions (mostly once it made its way into re-runs). What I didn't mention this is that--when I was a child--I did not see The Brady Bunch for the silly sitcom that it was.

In my mind, The Brady Bunch was a documentary...


My life growing up was a lot like The Brady Bunch. True, we never went to Hawaii, and we never were haunted by a bad luck tiki doll and kept in a cave by Vincent Price. Nor were any of my family ever lost in the Grand Canyon overnight and rescued by some Native Americans. And none of us kids ever performed original songs in matching polyester and spandex.

But in my many ways, my house WAS The Brady Bunch house. Here are just SOME of the similarities:

• Like Greg, Peter, and Bobby, I shared a bedroom until I was 12 years old, usually with my brothers Kelly and Donald (though at first with my older brother Tom). And like in the TV show, I had a regular bed while Kelly and Donald slept in bunk beds.
• In The Brady Bunch house Greg eventually moved out of the boys' room and up into the attic. In our house, it was the basement where the older kids slept, and when Tom went off to college when I was 12 years old I got to move into the basement. I never put up beads in the entry to my room, though, and I never cut a record as Johnny Bravo.
• My family went on yearly vacations just like the Brady family. As I said before, not to Hawaii or the Grand Canyon (though all of us DID go to King's Island at one time or another). Most years we went to Myrtle Beach. 
• We ate dinner together around a big table almost every night. 
• Most important of all, we had a relatively peaceful, quiet, and loving home. Just like the Brady's, we occasionally had disagreements and there were occasionally kids in trouble, but just like The Brady Bunch, those problems were for the most part episodic, and not a defining part of our lives.

Looking back now, I wonder how false The Brady Bunch must have felt to someone whose parents were fighting all of the time, or someone who was being sexually abused by a step-father, or someone whose mother was an alcoholic. To people in those situations, the show must have seemed SO stupid. 

I feel blessed to have thought that The Brady Bunch was realistic fiction.