Listening to: Michael Crawford – On Eagle’s Wings
Reading: Ransom Julie Garwood
Weather: 65, sunny
Trivia: Why do Kool-Aid packages tell you not to store it in metal containers?
Because it's liable to absorb a metallic taste from the metal. People who aren't fond of storing their Kool-Aid in plastic or cardboard containers are advised to store the tasty treat in a stainless steel container, the one metal whose "taste" won't migrate in the drink mix.
Cool word: pabulum [n. PAB-yuh-lum]
Pabulum can be good, nourishing food or it can be insipidly non- stimulating entertainment or other intellectual fare. Example: "This season's Tuesday night comedies are little more than pabulum designed to hypnotize millions of viewers." When this word was first introduced into English in the 18th century, it came from the Latin pabulum (food, nourishment, and fodder), and carried that meaning. Within 30 years, it added the sense of
stimulating intellectual nourishment. In the early 1930s, a new breakfast cereal for babies was patented. Highly nutritious but also quite bland, it was called Pablum, after the same Latin root. With the great success of Pablum, the similar sounding pabulum came to refer not only to stimulating nourishment, but also to anything bland and unstimulating.
A Long Day
It’s 9pm and I’m just getting home from school. It was parent conference night, so I was trapped. There didn’t seem to be much point in going home, as the reading tutoring didn’t end until almost 3.30, and then it takes at least a half-hour to get home. Getting back to school in the evening takes at least forty-five minutes and my first conference was a 6. No point in going home.
Parent conferences are always stressful, as I’m just there to support the teachers I work with, and some of them really don’t have their acts together in talking about special ed kids. I never know what curve they might throw.
And the same holds true of the parents.
Of course I can’t get to all the meetings, as the teachers never bother to check with me to see where I might have conflicts. So I have to prioritize and go to the ones I think I most need to be at.
One of the teachers never even gave me his schedule and then came looking for me tonight. I’d already scheduled my time, so I think his nose was a bit out of joint. I figure that’s tough. I tell the teachers to give me a schedule or to tell me which meetings they want me at, and I’m only as good as the information that I’m given. If you want me to be at a meeting respect my time and give me some notice.
I spent the afternoon writing a report. Then the computer froze. A third of it was lost.
Sigh…..
Today was my sister-in-law’s fortieth birthday. I enjoyed making nasty phone calls to her today. They were so miserable to me when I turned forty, and payback can be a bitch.
I mentioned to the kid I’m teaching the reading program to that I was torturing my sister-in-law so I could get her back, and the little girl said, "You’re over forty?!?" I love this child….
So now I have a headache and I feel as if my contact lenses have adhered to my eyballs. This calls for taking them out, taking some Advil and taking to the bed.
The good news is that Thanksgiving vacation starts at 2.30 tomorrow.
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