Listening to: Elton John
Reading: not a thing
Weather: 60, windy and cold!
Trivia: Hummingbirds are the only animal that can fly backwards.
Cool word: bloviate [v. BLOW-vee-ayt]
To bloviate is to speak loudly, verbosely, and at great length, without saying much. It's an American word that was used by (and to describe) President Warren Harding, who was known for long, windy speeches. To bloviate is to engage in bloviation [n. blow-vee-AY- shun]. In the early nineteenth century, it was fashionable to create "latinized" words by adding Latin endings to ordinary words, giving them an enhanced sense of importance or formality. From blow (brag, boast) was created bloviate, to describe the extended, self-important speeches of certain political figures. This word has gone in and out of fashion several times after mostly vanishing for the first half of the twentieth century. It is not
found in most dictionaries, but is now heard again in the political arena, where such a word may live for years to come.
Almost done
I always look forward to the end of the week, but I’m looking forward to it more than usual this week.
I think it has to do with the condition of my abode. I am at the point where I can’t stand the clutter and I’m actually looking forward to cleaning on Saturday! I never look forward to cleaning, but everything feels out of control in my life, so I think that I need to try to regain control of the environment that I live in.
I’m hoping that will put me back on track.
I’ll sleep in on Saturday and then force myself to remove some of the junk that is in the way.
I hope.
I did have a small victory at school today. We’ve been testing kids all week, everyone in the building has to take a standardized reading test. I scored the test of one of my neediest puppies today and she’s at a 3.9 grade level. That’s up from a 1.2 at this time last year. I’m so glad to see that she’d made so much progress. I knew she’d improved, but I didn’t realize it would be quite so dramatic. She’s such a dyslexic little kid that each word is a struggle for her to read, and I’m thrilled to see that it’s slowly becoming easier for her.
Every once in a while little things happen to make me smile.
The "T" rides into and out of Boston this week have yielded some interesting people.
There was one young man who was clutching a stack of index cards and studying them quite diligently. I kept thinking that he was a college kid getting ready for a test. After a lot of manipulation and neck craning I managed to get a glimpse of the subject. It was no heavy text, it was a restaurant menu! He must have been trying to learn the ingredients of each of these dishes in order to be a waiter at some upscale yuppie place.
I struck up a conversation with a woman who was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt (it was a cold night). Turns out she was from Montana and here on some sort of a job training session, That explained the fact that she was wearing shorts while the rest of us were bundled in wool blazers. She said that Montana has nine months of snow and three months of bad skiing. She thought the weather was balmy.
I turned on the heat in my car.
I’m going to have to go to a meeting tomorrow night to finish writing the script for the show. I’m not sure I’ll be good for much, as I don’t feel as if I have many brain cells firing. The script needs a lot of work, it lacks class.
I spent almost forty dollars on books for school today. I made the mistake of stopping at Barnes and Noble on the way home, and ran into trouble. These kids have been working so hard this week that I wanted to find something different to do with them tomorrow. So I bought a kid version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and a bunch of other Halloween related stories. I thought it might be fun to do something that was more relaxing and less academically oriented.
So now I need to go plan a lesson so I can do something with it in the morning!
Yes the baseball game is on, and yes I am upset about the outcome of last night’s game.
I don’t care to discuss it any further.
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