March 30th. Where is spring? I want to wear shorts. Not to school of course, but as a matter of course, I love to wear shorts. I think I had mentioned that in an earlier blog. Kendra Kreitzer used to be in three of my classes but now she is in one. She hasn't kept up with her blog like she said she would.

The wireless connections aren't working again. That is not only frustrating for you, the students, but it is frustrating for me, the teacher, as well. You see, I plan for things to work, and when they don't and they're out of my control, it's frustrating. I had in my mind what I wanted to accomplish this week. Now, I don't know if I can. This is two days in a row that I can't get students on the sites where I want them to work. Be patient.

Easter is just around the corner. When we flip the calendar on Wednesday, I think we'll all be pleasantly surprised. I know I am looking forward to those couple extra days.

Ham for Easter. Why is Ham the Easter meal? Did someone sometime make that the official meat of Easter? Spiral cut ham from Costco.

Went to Capital City Mall on Saturday. Nice, small mall. That was internal rhyme.

New car. Good. Not much else to say for now. Bye.

It's later in the day, in fact it is period 11, one of my favorite classes, and I'm blogging. Someone suggested that they pulled a Mr. Miller. I'm curious what that means. Perhaps it means being cool.
I must admit, I am quite distracted right now because of something that has nothing to do with school. It is often difficult to focus when something personal is bothering you, and that's a bit what's happening with me right now.

Twelve Angry Men
Good flick.
There is a scheduled outage at 4 pm pacific time. Then is that?

Twelve Angry Men. Good flick. Should put it on my list. It's March, but it's still cold. Last night the baseball team played. Lots of stuff going on. End of the marking period.

We have a pretty good Easter break coming up. Four whole days. Four days. That's nice. Last year, we lost all but Good Friday. This year we at least have Easter Monday off. That's good. Sunday nights when there is no school on Mondays feels good.

Interesting weekend. I worked in the yard with some of the family. We got a ton of stuff bagged. Trimming the rose bushes was tiresome and dangerous. The new car got some mileage this weekend, but I haven't brought it to school yet. We did use my wife's ipod in it which was pretty cool. We don't have to drag a ton of CD's along on trips becuase we can put everything imaginable on the ipod, I mean 1000 songs.

It's cold again this week. I hope that it warms up a bit later this week. I wouldn't mind golfing. If it hits 50, I good but golfing in the 40's is too cold.

The big news. We got a new car. I stopped and thought about it and the last new car we bought, new from new, was a 1998 Plymouth Voyager, our very first mini van. So now we no longer have a van, we are officially vanless and driving an old people's car. I am quite frugal so this is a pretty good stretch for me. It's funny because as a kid growing up, my dad would get a new car pretty much every year. That's a bit how it was done, most people got new cars a lot more often than they do now. Since he was a business owner, I guess, and I'm not exactly sure, but I guess it was probably owned through the company. That's how a lot of them do it.

Haven't blogged for a couple days. PSSA testing is over. My kids were good.
Hope everyone passed.
Proficient. I'm proficient.
New tooth. It fits better today than it did yesterday. Glued in. I wonder who invented the glue that glues your teeth in.
Or my teeth. That is. My teeth. Or my tooth.
Baseball. Apple Pie. Food Oreos with double stuffing. Love them. It's weird, if you eat double stuff oreos and then go back to regular, it seems like something is missing. I wonder which cost more to make. You have to figure, there's fewer dark parts in the double stuffed oreos and more filling so if the filling is cheaper than the stuffing, then the double stuff are more profitable. I think about weird things.

This weekend the garage door opener broke. I fixed it but I must have pulled something in my back. It's a little better than this morning, but it's interesting, the idea of breathing being painful.
Musical was great Friday. I am sorry I didn't get to see the other cast.
The Chinese takeout includes free doughnuts. They say they're doughnuts but really they are pieces of the worst thing for you, dough made of white flour deep fried in oil and then while still dripping with oil rolled in refined sugar. As you eat them, you can feel your arteries clogging. I wait for the oil to drip down my fingers and off my elbow.
I could take a nap. PSSA's start tomorrow. Those will be great. Love to give them.
On Saturday I stopped at Wertz Candies. There was a little girl there. Her mom was buying candy and I looked down at her, she was just so happy and looked up at me and smiled and said hi, and I said, she's like a kid in a candy store. I just thought that was hilarious but I seemed to be the only one. Didn't even get a smirk from the proprietor. Oh well. As long as I'm amusing myself, that's really all that matters.

TGIF. Does that restaurant still exist? Haven't seen one in awhile. I think the last one I remember was at Park City and I haven't been there for awhile.
Musical tonight. Break legs and all that. Do they really break legs?
AR today, but it seemed that most people were using the computers to blog.
Random thought.
Random acts of kindness.
Our new pastor is visiting this weekend. He won't be coming in his official capacity for a few months while his old church is able to find a minister to replace him. So this is sort of a get a feel for the area trip. He's originally from Texas, but he is moving from North Dakota. That's big. When he came last time to complete his candidating, he mentioned how cold it was in ND. So who would think, move to PA to be warm....

Just updating. Preparations for PSSA have fallen apart in period eleven. Not a big surprise. Not many real focused students here. Still pondering the car, but it's a day closer. We are in the midst of musical season. Lots of kids are tired. Don't know what else to write so I'll just keep writing. I can't wait for spring, really summer, because summer is the best. Shorts and all, no school, sleeping in, golf, reading for pleasure. Those are some of the joys of teaching. Traveling. That's great too. We don't yet have any real vacation planned, we are going to wait until my daughter either has a job or doesn't have a job before we plan anything. We used to vacation in North Myrtle Beach almost every year. We of course did Disney a lot but that was more a special occasion trip, but Myrtle Beach, golf and the beach, and frankly, I think Myrtle Beach beaches are among the best I've ever visited. They are clean, you don't have to pay to use them, and you can wade out in the water forever it seems. The water temperature is pretty darn nice, usually in the low 80's by July. We never went to Myrtle Beach until about 20 years ago. We were traditionally Maryland beach type people, usually Ocean City, but we stopped going there when we started going to Myrtle Beach. The only drawbacks are that there is no boardwalk at Myrtle Beach and the drive is quite long. If you make it in nine hours, you've made good time because the traffic gets crazy. There are two thing at Myrtle Beach that I must get. One is the salt water taffy they sell at Barefoot Landing. You can watch them make it in this really old piece of equipment. It pulls the taffy and they add the flavors while it operates. The other, and this is a bit more nutritional, is dinner at Outrigger. They have all you can eat dinners. The steamed shrimp is just wonderful and they also serve these hushpuppies which you dip in a mustard sauce. I'm sure these aren't good for you but whatever. It's vacation. You see lots of buffets in Myrtle Beach, but most of them taste very commercial, all the food seems like it's been made in huge amounts, which of course it has, so we don't really do those. We usually take some time to do a family miniature golf outing which I almost always win. I do enjoy the golf in Myrtle Beach as well. One year we were down for Thanksgiving. My son and I were golfing on Thanksgiving day and after warning him to be careful not to hit a ball near the main road which runs by that hole, I hit one that begins it's journey across the road and into the parking lot of the hospital across the road. I watched in horror as my ball bounced and bounced and I waited to hear it crash into someone's windshield. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Another of the things we like to do is go to Carolina Opry. It's a great show. We've seen it a number of times, but it's always entertaining. These are some of the best memories of vacations.

Passwords. There are so many passwords required for using computers. I have about four that I use in various situations. They are...just kidding. I'm not saying.
Went to the dentist again yesterday. I gave them the book McTeague. Good book from the naturalist school. Written by Frank Norris. It starts slow but it gets pretty good. Sort of humorously sad. It was one of those books that few people have read, but I did as part of an early American lit class. Basically, it's a story about a dentist who isn't really a dentist because he never went to school to be a dentist. He has the tools and actually does what dentists do, but he's so big and strong, he can pull a tooth with his bare hands. His fiance wins the lottery, he gets married, she gets cheap, he gets shut down from practicing dentistry, and it's all sad at the end, but the characters are neat in that Norris creates them as being strange in their own individual ways very much like we are strange in our own individual ways. Think of some examples.
I eat my least favorite food first to get it out of the way. My daughter never eats her pizza crust. I keep my money in a certain order in my wallet. Things like that.
I love to read. I love reading good stuff. Good, however, is a nebulous term.
That's an SAT word.

Some of the kids are saying they are blocked from blogging. I'm not but my filters are different from theirs. I have mixed feelings about filters. In some ways they are necessary but in other ways they can really block what we are supposed to be doing here which is use this technology as part of the classroom and learning experience.
I wonder what it would be like to teach a class totally on line. I met a guy last year who was taking library courses on line and his professor was in Oregon, using satellite feeds for his class. My daughter is taking two on line classes right now. She never sees the instructor. I seem to need that interaction, but I guess I could learn.
I wonder what it would be like to teach college full time. Mr. Althouse used to teach here, math, and retired. He went to work for HACC as a tutor and now pretty much does it full time. I think he may work for Lebanon Valley a bit too. That could be fun. The classes I teach at the graduate level are fun, but I hate that they are over the weekends because that's my family time, and though family time is often just sitting around, it's still family time. I love my family. I hope you love your family too.
Brian's Song. I love Brian Piccillo. What a great movie! Never doesn't make me cry.
What movies make you cry? Most of the ones I listed make me cry.

Life is a vapor.
That's a quote. Where is it from?
Kids are heading this way and our issue today is the death penalty, but I'm not feeling very discussive about the death penalty today. I just made up that word. Discussive.
If you were an English teacher, what would you think is important? Grammar. Literature. Writing. All three?
I like grammar. It's about structure and patterns and so on. I love literature, but not all of it. Sometimes I don't like things that I think a typical English teacher should. Shakespeare, for example, is a great playwright, but I don't get overly excited about him. On the other hand, I enjoy light reading, things that aren't so intellectually taxing.
I'm having a hankering for Mexican food today. Don't know why. I know they're serving the school's version of it in the cafeteria, but that's not exactly what I had in mind.
Have a great day.

Wednesday...

I got the info for PSSA testing which is to start in two weeks. Now time to prepare.

Not much is going on. I know this is a slow time of the school year. We had snow Monday, and honestly, Sunday night I was completely convinced we wouldn't have school so I got in that mind-set where I wasn't going to get up. Then, I awoke at 3 AM and there was nothing. OK. Figured we'd get to school and get sent home. Nope. Didn't happen, but it's a distraction from my focus.

Tuesday....all other schools in the county have a late start....not us. Not a big deal, just highly unusual. Plus, now it's 25 degrees but also the first week of spring sports, so after school there is much running in the halls.

Next week is the musical. That's big. Monday there is no school. That's big too, but a lot of my kids are involved in the musical and I believe will miss class on Tuesday as well.

Not much else to write. There seems to be issues with the internet and the server and all the things that make technology great or lousy, however you choose to look at it. Florida is probably a lot warmer than here right now.

This is a neat youtube video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQXJ1RxG5U