Hurray! A Week Off!

Phew...

Things are weird right now. School is out for the week so I can sleep in all the way up to 7:00 now. But with time off comes the pile of grading that I stupidly made for myself. I had all the assignments due by last Friday so I could have the time to grade them over the week. That made sense. But now it's about the last thing I want to do--a reality made worse by the idea that a majority of my students did not do their assignments correctly, so I've got to decide how much time I want to spend digging around on GoogleDocs to find what they turned in and what is just hanging around. Wow, that was a long sentence. The other thing that's weird about having a week off is I'm saying things like, "It's already Tuesday." Only when you have time off do you get so worked up by the second day of the work week.

I finished reading Mark Buchanan's The Rest of God. People need to read this guy's books. He's about as entertaining and insightful as a writer can be. And with this book in particular, my identity as a Seventh-day Adventist is made all the stronger (though also needs to be taken more seriously). Find any of his books, they're worth your time.

Weirdest thing--I went to California this weekend to perform the ceremony at my brother's wedding. In short, there was no wedding, and the weekend was instead plagued by emotional awkwardness. It's a good thing in the long run, but it's really stuck in my head (can't imagine how much worse for my brother).

Hopefully, life picks up and I get things done. I'm planning on getting cats to the vet, getting contacts that actually help me see, rearranging a good chunk of my house, and seeing some movies that need to be seen.

Going Back

So, with my feeling like my laptop will soon die, I've avoided doing anything on it at all. Unfortunately, I've had enough going on in the last week to write about, I feel totally lame for not stealing my wife's computer to do my blogging. Oh well.

Aside from my sister-in-law and my youngest brother moving to Lincoln (later blog), the next big business item is my job. Today marks the day that I return to work. Nothing more exciting than meetings today (yippee!), but soon my classrooms will resound with stimpy-stompy of colossal, adolescent feet.

In that vein, I had another teacher nightmare last night. The last one I had a week or more ago involved students working beyond my expectations, leaving my plans in ruins. I got angry at them for progressing too quickly and they called the principal to come in the room and yell at me. By the time the principal arrived, the students had all left, and I was trying to put on a shirt (I don't know when I lost my original shirt, but at that point, the shirt was gone).

Last night's was more terrifying. I dreamed that I had a schedule conflict for my first class--teaching composition (which really is on my schedule) and co-teaching with another with another English Ten teacher. They were both schedule during the same time (first class of the day), and I decided to commit to the co-teaching. I was soon sought out and barked at quite harshly by administration for neglecting my composition duties.

It's been a not entirely too strange addition in my most recent line of bizarre dreams. Last week I had to flee a team of assassins that somebody had hired to kill me. The dream had a very Samurai Jack/Dexter's Lab feel. Very strange.

I Ought to be Packing

Today my wife, fetus, and I are heading to Colorado. This is a vacation that we've been working on for quite a while. It started with my parents' idea of trying an Alaska cruise (suggested two years ago), but with economic insanity and other financial restrictions, we opted for a visit to the folks' place and gallavent about the mountains and nearby sights. It's going to be awesome. So I'll be out there for a week, so I don't know how often I'll get to update. So I should be packing things as our departure time is about three hours from now, but I wanted to rave a bit about Away We Go.

This film is great, though I don't know how everybody will react to it. Really, it's a fantastic flick for the sake of mirroring a lot of what my wife and I are experiencing. The story follows a couple with their first child on the way as they try to figure the best place to settle down and start a family. It is a legitimately good time, and rather humorous (if you like John Krasinski, you can't go wrong here). But the thing that really stuck in my brain were the similarities between either the story and characters and my life. For instance:

1. In the movie, Burt and Verona find out that the only family they have in town is moving to another continent a month before the baby is born. My brother and his wife are moving to Guam and will be missing the arrival of our kid.

2. Some friends of Burt and Verona miscarry. I found out that some good friends of mine who we expecting also recently miscarried.

3. Burt in general reminds me of the way things work in my brain. I don't act like Burt usually (though there were some blaring similarities), but the things he did in the film mirror much of what goes on in my head.

Anyhow, go check it out. I'll try to see it again if it's still around another week. It definitely has that indie film flair, but not in such a way that you can tell the crew were trying to strike and be different for different's sake. And with a summer of such a crap-load of lousy movies, this should rank pretty high on your list.

Don't Know How to React

I got a class from my brother last night. We've lived in the same town since his first year of college, and even though we don't see each other all that often, it's been kind of nice to have him there. But now he's moving. I knew he would be. His wife has graduated and they've been looking to relocate to a place where they are more likely to both get work. Possibilities have been California, Oklahoma, and Guam. Yep, that's right, Guam.

So he calls me last night to tell me that they're near 100% sure that they'll be living over-seas. It's bizarre, mostly, to know that I'll be related to somebody who lives beyond the realms of a road trip. It's cool, I guess, but it's just plain bizarre--I have no real reaction. A huge part of me says, "You sure you want to do that?" while another part says, "Well, that's pretty groovy. And if you feel God calling you there, more power to you."

Some People...

This has just been a good week for people to say weird things.

I assigned my composition class the task of looking up images on Google and then describing them in as much detail as possible. The idea was for them to find flowers, cars, landscapes, anything that would be school appropriate. However, before I could get the point of clarifying what the students should look for a student piped up.

"Can we look at things that are sexual in nature?"

I was thrown off enough that he even asked. But after all the girls called him a pervert, he just shrugged and said, "Can't a guy ask a question?"