A Little Entertaining

A very long weekend. I love it. It was another hellish week at Burpie Cow Wow. I'm actually quite inured to it all which I think is good. My mate is in worse shape than I. He even made an appointment last week with a hypnotherapist. He missed the appointment which is par for his recent out-of-control course. We met a friend for a quiet Friday night dinner at one of our favorite 5th Avenue restaurants and avoided all talk of the real world.
Saturday AM I was up early to make my shopping lists. My cousin and his new wife and his two grown children were coming to dinner Sunday night. The cousin is in from the west coast. His kids live here in Brooklyn. I haven't seen either in at least 20 years.
My cousin now works for Apple at their headquarters in Cupertino. He lives in that unreal area of the coast just north of Carmel.
I would throw an official dinner party. I invited a few more New York relatives to round out the group to an even ten.
I did a quick clean up of the house. That consists of throwing all the crap that piles up on horizontal surfaces into shopping bags and stuffing them in closets.
Mac-husband and I both made several trips to various food purveyors across the neighborhood on the coldest day of the winter thus far but the sun was warm and the prospect of using the fireplace was enticing.

The menu:
plenty of wine, of course
Cheeses and olives and vegetables with dip
Green salad with pear and grilled tuna
Fillet of beef with scalloped potatoes and roast asparagus
Tarte Tatin with vanilla ice cream

All went well. I especially enjoyed my cousin's children.
His daughter is a physics teacher at a prestigious New York City independent school "...after college I just hung out in St. Luis Obispo working in a coffee shop and smoking a lot of pot."
His son is a drop-out from an English Lit PhD program at Columbia who now works for a hedge fund. "...I really hate it and all the people I work with. I'm not going to blow up the building or anything though."
My younger brother also came out from Manhattan. He's always funny and edgy.

We sent the guests home at a reasonable hour neither too early nor too late – Legends car service ( better cars and distinctly middle-eastern with American flags stuck in their rear-view mirrors to throw you off any terrorist inklings) for the cousin and wife who were headed to a Manhattan hotel, Arecibo car service for the kids who would be perfectly comfortable heading back to Williamsburg in those jalopy cars, with the cardboard air fresherners and salsa background music, my brother by subway as he eschews cabs of any kind.

Monday I was up early to do the clean up which I actually enjoy. I worked for half a day as I had network consultants going over our servers at school. My colleague who is the official "Network Manager" had his nose out of joint about that so I had to spin it a bit to get him to swallow this (to him) intrusive pill. He doesn't realize yet that it will be a lot worse before it gets better. Oh, don't get me started down that road.

Tuesday I'm up and off to the dentist to repair some broken teeth. He'll tell me for the fourteenth time, "I think you grind your teeth at night." I probably should just get all my teeth sheathed in steel like Jaws, that villian in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Last Year...

Last February ('05) and the first half of March I'd get up every week day morning at 5:00 AM. I needed to be on the subway before 6:00 AM in order to get to the Upper East Side for the first radiation appointment of the day.
There were a few snowy and stormy days and a major East Side subway shut down during that six week period of time.
This is all to say that I took it as a challenge. I would get through radiation therapy every day for six weeks and still be at school before my first class of the day. No one would be any the wiser.

Radiation is nothing. It's painless. It does not make you feel sick or tired. (Everyone I know is sick AND tired but radiation has nothing to do with it.)

The down side of radiation:
•It's a pain in the neck to make the commitment of going every day with the other things you have to do in your normal day.
•At the end of the six weeks you do have a very itchy rash. They give you medication for it and the rash eventually goes away.

I bet most of the people I work with didn't even realize something was different with me last year. That was my plan.
I forgot all about it myself, until today.
I got a questionairre from Sloan Kettering:
"When was the date of your first breast cancer?"Oct 15, 2004
"Which side?" right
" What was your treatment?" surgery and radiation
"Have you had a second breast cancer?" no
"Have you had a third cancer of any kind?" whoa...give me a break, it's only a year!
My annual radiation follow-up falls on March 7 this year, a Tuesday. If Mondale really pays attention he might notice that I'm not there at the beginning of his computer class that day. He may not notice at all, which would please me. I like to accomplish these things under the radar.
Life goes on.
I really did enjoy the snow this weekend. almost as much as the snow last February.

Snow is a Nice Diversion

If you're going to feel plowed under anyway, you may as well have a snowstorm. I'm still not able to dig out of the heavy weather that's hit me at work. The weekend's snowstorm is sweet icing on my bitter cake.

It's Sunday night and I'm sitting next to a pile of paperwork that I've shuffled about for the last 48 hours. I spent Thursday and Friday with our school database developer. We were trying to find and repair glitches and bugs and generally get the thing to function better. When he left I was left with one of those eye-squinting headaches. And while we did move forward, I slept the disturbed sleep of FileMaker Pro layouts and scripts.

I'm into my second week of Federal jury duty. Luckily...not picked but I have to call in every day 'til Friday. I admit, I just forgot to call last Thursday night. I'm sure to forget at least one night this week too.

These things worry me:
•I have to make a decision on a three year Internet access contract for school on Monday. I have not done my proper homework.
•I have to arrange for many thousands of dollars of network security projects in the next several weeks.
•The historical academic data has to be converted from the old database to the new so that transcripts can be accurately produced.
•The three-year tech plan I must produce in order for our school to qualify for discounted network services requires a survey of staff tech skills (where they are now) and a plan of where their skills will be in three years and how I propose to get them there.
•I have a meeting with red pants on Tuesday.

And there lies the theraputic nature of blogginng for just writing this down makes it seem not so bad. In fact almost laughable.

I will be working on the holidays next week and I won't be able to take the March break either. I am beyond self-pity on this as now I'm just worried that these pieces of time won't be enough to catch up on all this crap, and besides, my friends at school are going through really life-altering issues and what have I done for them?

I hope they can be strong. I hope they can be happy.

...She's Under That Rock Over There

•I've been "away."
•It' was exam week in Middle and Upper School, grades need to be entered by many teachers...always problems with the software (or more accurately the software users)
•Have been prepping for a major presentation -also at the "big" school. That's done but now lots of follow-up and planning for the next presentation.
•Report card support in Lower School, not too bad this year, but still not as smooth as I would like.
•There are several things (of an uncomfortable nature) brewing at work having to do with employment and next year and I don't want to go into it.
•I have a major (three-year) plan that needs to be drafted in five weeks.
•I have a meeting with red pants in three weeks.
•I'm still teaching my third and fourth grade classes every day.
•I have yet to set up the new purchase order database for the business office that was requested in October.
•It's contract time for the students, don't have that part of the database working properly.
•I'm totally sick of the database...I mean really sick.
•I took advantage of no meeting yesterday to run downtown and purchase supplies for my auction project but while I was out...
•Someone rifled through my computer lab last evening and stole something of value.

Load Those Staplers Folks!

I'm afraid our "new guy" has gone a bit off the deep end. It's not so much this message he sent
Looking forward to seeing new bulletin boards now we're back.
as the fact that he sent it at 11:01 PM on a Saturday night.
At about the same time Saturday night ...Mondale was toasting his newly-attained Google status. I was arriving home after dinner at Stone Park and returning to the Season Three, Six Feet Under marathon that I had started at dusk.
I wonder what my other blog-pals were up to at 11:00 PM this Saturday night?

Mid Year Report Card

Back in August I wrote about the opportunity for change that a new school year brings. We reach the halfway point in January. Time for a report card. You'll see that I'm not living up to my potential (who the hell is?) but there is time to get my grades up.

I haven't followed through on making this the year I figure out a great new system in the classroom. I never teach the same things in the same way and that's fine but it does make me feel like I never get things to go really smoothly. Still, the teaching kids part of what I do is the best and most satisfying part of my day's work. Kids are happy in my class and we do a lot of fun stuff. Every year is different and that's good.
Dealing with everyone's technological breakdowns and questions is – to put it mildly – daunting. I will never get used to this deluge. I have been a teacher of young children for a long time and so I have a high tolerance for interruption but this is over the top. Literally, the ONLY time I can work on something for longer than 15 minutes is when everyone has left the building at the end of the day. The other hard part for me is this: I can't fix or answer everything and some days I feel like I haven't fixed or answered anything! This leaves me feeling inadequate. This is a "course" that I wish I just didn't have to take. But I can't get out of it and so I have to make this better somehow.
I'm working on a couple of presentations right now, one on introductory web page creation and one for parents on Internet safety. These tasks are actually interesting to prepare and with the Internet safety one I've been working with some folks from the upper school and that has been good for me. I'm pretty impressed with the the number of tasks these particular staff members juggle and their high degree of professionalism. They work hard and there's no whining (at least not that I've witnessed) They are my new models.
Other administrative stuff that I've had to do has been very mixed. I'm a bit overmatched by this new database and helping all those who have to use it. That's only going to get worse. The business office also had a major computer crash this fall and I had to sweat that out, still am, actually. I have a major report in the way of a three-year technology plan to write before the end of the school year. Some of this I like and I'm good at, I just don't have enough time to do my best so it gnaws away at me.
One area where I need to work harder is having fun. Maybe it's not going to be in school, as I always hope. So I just have to face that and use my time away from school in more fun ways. Some excellent examples have been set for me recently by fellow bloggers. I have to develop some good habits here! More movies, going out, seeing people, taking trips, spending money!!
OK it looks like teaching the kids gets an A, being "your company's computer guy" gets a D, Working with others on special projects? I think a B+, Administrative duties a C+ at best, Having fun? I'm failing there. I'll get a tutor and turn that around soon.

Flappy New Year

First day back at school after the holidays...D+
The plus is just because the lobby of our building was fixed up over vacation and it looks, well, plus.
Everything else about the day...D