Birth in a shelter....

Spelunking around in the underground caverns of Granite High we stumbled upon the old bomb shelter. Still had 45 year old first aid kits, toilet paper, water and biscuits. Oh, and the "Family Guide to Emergency Health Care" published by the Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense, December 1961.

• Chapter 1 : Facing the Fallout Threat. (includes Shelter living, pg 5. "..shelter occupancy tests have shown that typical Americans of both sexes and widely divergent ages can live under shelter conditions for periods of up to two weeks without much stress." Uh, nice.)
• Chapter 2 : Caring for the Sick. (includes pg 9-unconciousness, pg 10-convulsions, pg 13-diarrhea and pg 21-treatment of radiation sickness.)
• Chapter 3 : Caring for the injured. (pg 26-excessive bleeding, pg 29-sucking wounds in the chest.)
• Chapter 4 : Special Problems in Caring for the Seriously Ill or Injured in a Shelter. (pg 41-When death occurs.)
• Chapter 5 : Birth in a shelter.
• Chapter 6 : Emergency Supplies and Sanitation.

Pretty light reading - I think tomorrow I'll wrap myself up in a warm blanket, with a big cup of coffee and go through the whole thing. And I can't wait until the morning when I get to try out one of my rolls of 45 year old Service Quality Toilet Tissue. Hey, anyone else see a "kill two birds with one stone" opportunity here?

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

Today was phobia day in Psychology. I took a list of phobias from the internet (http://phobialist.com/) and read them off to the class for them to guess. Got some really interesting responses. I chose to skip a few of them, (Eurotophobia, Medorthophobia, Oneirogmophobia, Paraphobia, Parthenophobia, Phallophobia and other fun ones), because I really wanted to avoid the possible responses. It was a lot of fun. We got into some interesting discussions about the origins of words, and what to look for. Several students noticed the piece "hex" three times in the title here, and correctly guessed it was the fear of the number 666. Oh, and one of my favorites, for all you Jr. & High School teachers out there : Ephebiphobia- Fear of teenagers. I told them I suffered from that, and a couple asked "So, why are you a teacher?" Well, uh, maybe I was just kidding? Freshmen!

Happy Birthday Rachel!

(Monday)

Yes, Virginia, seagulls do yawn.......

and other random scenery pictures.
HERE.

And if you really want to be confused about what I'm doing in college,
HERE.

The pond at Sugarhouse park was frozen over. Nothing funnier than seeing a bunch of seagulls and ducks try to land on ice. Saw a couple good faceplants, but didn't get any good pictures of it happening. Bummer.

421 days to go.......

I just signed up for next semester. I'm taking Introduction to Research Design and Integration of Educational Technology. Personally, I think I'm going to enjoy the technology one more that the research one, I love working with the technology in my classroom, and I don't see myself doing a lot of research. But you never know, since I do a lot of technology I could see myself getting bored with it, and maybe I'll really like research - could lead my career in a previously unseen direction. It's happened before. I never thought I'd be the Tech Specialist for a small high school, teaching both math and psychology. I thought I'd live out my career teaching math in a junior high setting. Point being you never know where things are going to lead you, you gotta be ready to try and sometimes, like me, you end up somewhere you love being. (is this seminar on cassette or DVD?).

Anyway, we're almost done with the fiorst semester. We have one final project to put together for the Instructional Design class, and on Thursday we will be assigned our final subject in Learning Theory. FINALS WEEK! Man I miss those days. (uh, no, not really). Just don't expect to see much here for the next couple weeks.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K

Ok, it's really the Chevron, but I just had to use that quote.

I found out today that there's gonna be a few changes around the Chevron. About a year ago the owner decided that he needed to let his offspring become more involved in the business, and for some reason they earmarked Mindy for destruction. (Mindy manages the one I work at). While Mindy was on maternity leave earlier this year, the son took over our store and nearly drove all of us employees out. He's 22 and knows all, and instead of sitting back and learning from the well oiled machine that Mindy had organized, he decided to mark his territory. Fortunately we knew that this was only temporary, and lo and behold, when Mindy came back everything went back to normal. As far as we could see at least. Not so much for her. The offspring continue to nitpick and go out of their way to make things hard for her, enough that when Mindy got an offer to become the General Manager for another company with 9 stores, she decided to go. So Mindy gave her 2 weeks notice this week, and will be moving back up to Idaho in december. Amy, the assistant manager gave her notice too. So did the graveyard crew, at least half the swing shift crew and the entire day crew. We all know what life there would be like with the offspring running it, and we all think unemployment is better. I'd pretty much quit anyway, I've only been helping out for the last week because they had 2 full time people quit at the same time. I'm gonna help out for these last two weeks and then I'm done, finito, kaput. It'll be weird going in there for gas and not recognizing anyone that I'm willing to talk to, but what the heck. Was that way before I worked there. Anyways, stay tuned here for updates on the antics of "The Chillin' takes over the Chevron"........

Tryptophan uber alles.

So, how was your Thanksgiving? Mine was great. Slept in until almost 11, layed around the house for a couple of hours and then went over to A&M's house. Ate my full share of the 5000 calories that they newspaper said was the average American intake for the day, saw most of the family, played poker, watched Uncle Buck & Elf and then came home. An excellent day. Thanks Alex & Marijke for the feast! Hope the rest of you had as good a day as I did. And now I'm going to go to bed because I have a study session right around noon tomorrow, the feedback on the second phase of our project said "talk to me ASAP" no less than 3 times. Yikes! It's not as bad as it sounds (we got 80% as it is) but he's still going to let us revise it and improve our grade. Anyhoo, gonna run.

Sit back and take a breath, finally......

Long time no write. Been a little bit busy with everything going on. But I've got a few days without anything going on, other than getting together with family and eating a lot. That and Sir Duke is in town again - or will be tonight.

I know it is ironic that I have more time to do my blogging when I'm here in class than any other time, but there's a lot of discussing going on that I can keep in the periphery. We just got told the story about the Greek god Thueth and King Thamus. Shouldn't it be Thueth and Thamuth? Thath the way I thee it. The story isn't that great, I just thought the names sounded funny, so I had to post them here. But for the record, the god Thueth created writing and was so excited about it that he took it to King Thamus. King Thamus, on the other hand was not so excited, he felt that transmitting knowledge through writing would detract from the actual learning, that the focus would be on the writing and would result in unauthentic learning. The comparison is with technology today. Think about it.

Well, back home and it's Thanksgiving day. So, I hope you're all having a :

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'll be heading out to A&M's house in a couple of hours for dinner and general family fun and the mandatory viewwing of "Uncle Buck".

I watched "Almost Famous" a couple of days ago, wanted to see if my car really was in the movies. It was. For about 3 seconds during the credits, partially hidden behind a Mercedes. But it was definitly my car, and kind of cool to see it in a movie. I watched the whole movie looking to see if I could see more of the car, but I didn't. I kind of got into the movie, so if it was in the background again, I could have missed it, but it certainly didn't have a huge part in the movie. Now I'm borrowing "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" which will, hopefully, be a little less anticlimatic.

Sorry this post has been kind of choppy and disjointed - I've been adding to is over a couple days. I've also added some photo galleries, if you want to check them out.

• Chevron slides into the abyss.
• Octrober snow at home.
• The beginning of the ceiling at Back of Beyond.
• October snow, bad driving and other various sceneries.
• Farmers Market and pumpkin toss at Granite High.

Well, have a great Thanksgiving and prepare for the Christmas Advertising Onslaught......

Happy Birthday Paige

Sorry it's late, but I hope you had a great birthday....

Trax Hell.

Getting downtown this afternoon was an experience. First of all we were meeting at Trax later than usual, and I lost track of time and realized I was supposed to be on my way about 5 minutes before the train was supposed to arrive. So I haul butt out of the school, figuring if everything goes right I might actually make it there in time. Everything went perfect, it took me about 3 minutes to get to State Street, but then I got stuck behind Slow Poke Sammy. Took 3 minutes from 5th E to State (4 blocks) then 7 minutes from State to West Temple (2 blocks). Not only was his top speed somewhere between molasses and cooling lava, but he had a serious fear of crossing traffic - even when there wasn't any. So, I missed the train. Which gave me the opportunity to meet The Most Disgusting Couple in the World. Well, not meet them, but kind of experience them. I'll skip the physical aspects, you can see them in the picture. What really struck me was them standing right under the No Smoking sign, cigarettes in hand, smoking the entire time. That only borders on disgusting, more inconsiderate, what pushed it over the line was the constant 'farmer blowing' all over the sidewalk. (Farmer Blow : verb. Middle English. To plug one notstril and clear the other randomly into the air). Gross. 10 minutes of that and I was ready to walk downtown. Finally Trax came and they got onto one train, I got onto another one. Trouble's not quite over yet - we had a long stay at the 21st South station, while a Trax Cop peeked into each train. Don't know what, or who, they were looking for, but we were there for about 5 extra minutes while he looked. Finally we took off, and the rest of the trip was typical - not bad at all.

Happy Anniversary Dad & Julia

2 out of 3 ain't bad.

Of the 3 issues I voted on, 2 of them went the way I voted; School Vouchers and Salt Lake City Mayor. In both cases over 60% of the people agreed with me. The one I lost was the bond for new police and fire facilitlies in Salt Lake City - it lost 51% to 49%.

I was struck by the contrast in the concession speeches of defeated candidate Dave Buhler and the Pro-voucher camp. Buhler congradulated Becker, and made a positive comment about the new mayor and the changes he will bring to the mayors office. The voucher people, on the other hand, slammed the anti-voucher people by saying that vouchers didn't pass because people "really don't care about children", and promised that vouchers are not dead in Utah. 62% of the people who cared enough to vote said they do not want vouchers. But that doesn't matter because, after all, they really know what's best for us. Didn't think I could have less respect for the pro-voucher leaders, but at least in that respect they proved me wrong.

Happy Birthday Anna

"The H2 is the ultimate poseur vehicle."

The web site that Danny just introduced me to continues with : "It has the chassis of a Chevy Tahoe and a body that looks like the original Hummer; i.e. it's a Chevy Tahoe in disguise."

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I'll let you discover the rest by giving you the link : FUH2, but I do want to offer one warning before you head over there : this site contains excessive use of the "F" word and thousands of images of H2's getting the middle finger salute." Do not go there if you are offended by either.

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Otherwise - enjoy, because it expresses my exact feelings about the H2, and the H3 too.

MC for the Homecoming Queen assembly

Details later - in class and gotta pay attention... just wanted to show me in my tuxedo.