Happy Thanksgiving & some funny stuff.

What am I thankful for?

• I’ve got a wonderful family and great friends.
• My job, which for the most part I still love.
• I get to live in a house I really like.
• My Jeep.

Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving, and a whole lot of stuff to be thankful for.

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I’m thinking of painting my Jeep this color.  Yeah, just kidding.  Pepto Pink, in my opinion, is not a good color for any car.

One of the most ironic typographical errors.  Or was it intentional?

French Club meetings at my school are taking an odd turn. 

There’s an app for everything, and one of my students had fun with this one and a picture of me.

Life imitates Art.

About 20 years ago I experienced an episode of M*A*S*H.  You know the episode where Hawkeye and Trapper are looking for an incubator?  They run into a control freak Supply Sargent with 3 incubators in storage who, when they ask him for one, responds “but if I give you one, I’ll only have two.”

We were just getting computers in our classrooms and I had gone to the front office looking for a surge protected power strip.  The secretary found one in the supply room and when I asked if I could have it she told me “but then I wouldn’t have one.”

Last week I lived another sitcom episode.  The Seinfeld episode where George eats an éclair out of the trash.

It wasn’t an éclair, but when a student threw away his box from KFC and another student grabbed the biscuit out of it, I just had to laugh.

Over 50, with the inner mind of a 16 year old, washboard stomach and Zombie Hunting permit.

Yes, that’s one long title.  But here’s the 16 year old mind part.  I took one of those stupid Facebook “What ____ are You?” tests and here was my response:

I never can see the connection between their questions and the premise of the quiz, but I’m sure the people who write these have a PHd in psychology, so they know what they’re doing.  Right?

Well, at least as much as the student who drew this picture of me.

He’s got my physique down to a tee.  Trust me, and please don’t ask me to prove it.

But what I am sure of is this Zombie Hunting Permit I got from the Wrangler Forum.

So, watch out Zombie Apocalypse, I have a permit and I’m not afraid to use it.

And just to round things off, here’s a couple more pictures students drew this week.

Shirley U. Jeste

Somebody lost their rubber chicken at the 7-11 on July 3rd.  Didn’t even get to use it on the 4th.

Granted you may have burned off 100 or so much needed calories walking to the trash can, but why should someone else be responsible for taking care of your baby’s dirty diaper?  Slob!  (Found in the Shopko parking lot in Sugarhouse).

In case you can’t read it, the sign says “Will model for $$$”.  I just think he likes to dance in traffic with a sign because a few months ago, when he was selling his SUV, he was up the street dancing on the corner with a Car For Sale sign.

D’ya think they are serious about keeping strangers off their dirt road?

Some funny stuff.

I so want to do this.

Truth in Advertising

Exactly what students say when I ask them what they’re doing

I found an old disk in my desk and showed it to the class.  when I explained what it was, several of them said “Oh, that’s why the ‘save’ icon looks like that.

Um, maybe ya should thought this one through a little bit more?

It was 9^th Grade week this week, (8^th & 7^th are the next two weeks), and we’ve had games (for the 9^th graders only) in the commons area every day during lunch.  Thursday’s game involved setting up red plastic cups full of water, having the contestants bounce a ping-pong ball on the table and hopefully into one of the opponent’s cups.

If the ball goes in, the cup gets removed and the player with the last cup left on the table wins.

Pretty innocuous, fun kind of game for a junior high, eh?

Until the kids start asking things like “Aren’t they supposed to chug it when the ball goes in?” or “It’s not supposed to be water in the cups, is it?”

I even had to inform a dozen or so kids that we were playing Water Pong when they asked about the Beer Pong game going on in the commons area.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I’ve been working with the same Vice-Principal for the last 3½ years at 2 different schools.  A week ago we got informed the district had decided to move him to another school.  That put the faculty in a panic, because he’s been fantastic and the previous Vice they had (I never worked with him) was, well, uh, … not nearly as good.  He didn’t ask to leave, really doesn’t want to, but when the district “asks”, you simply say “thanks & how high?”, especially if you ever want to make it to full-fledged Principal.

The good news is that we’re getting a rookie, an intern that is being promoted to his first full position.  A rookie is good because, of the five rookies I’ve seen my current Principal train, 2 have become a couple of the best Principals in the district, one is in charge of Technology and Adult Education for the entire district and the fourth, the one we just lost, is being transferred to a school in need of a strong V.P.  I have no idea what happened to the fifth, but an 80% success rate makes me comfortable that the new guy is going to be good.

Anyway, I decided we couldn’t just let him fade out into oblivion, so I orchestrated a fun farewell, live during Thursday’s morning announcements.  The Student Body Officers got him up to the studio on the premise of presenting him with a farewell card.  He made a little “I’m gonna miss you all” speech and then was presented with these:

Before things got too emotional, but mostly before he could escape, my Tech Crew and I presented him with one final farewell gift.

After he finally extricated himself from all the silly string, he told me “Now I know what it’s like to be an insect, getting sprayed with bug spray.”

Why I get on Facebook.

I started my Facebook account as an assignment in one of the technology classes I took for my Master’s Degree.  It lay dormant for a couple years, until the last Presidential election, when I discovered there is a lot of funny stuff being passed around there.  I spend most of my time there scrolling through, looking for things like this and passing it on for my friends and family to see.

But blended into that humor, I also found a source of news.  Now, I take everything I see on Facebook with a grain of salt, so this is only a starting point.  Things like this make me curious and then I look into it further, in this case to find out that Cheerios got slammed for having a commercial with an interracial couple and their mixed-race daughter.  They also decided to continue airing the commercial.

And then there’s my creative/opinionated side.  The beauty of memes is that they are meant to be copied, adjusted, edited and then passed on.  I adjusted this one about Naval Bases and noise to fit our current debate about moving the Utah State Prison.

I also had to adjust this one, because although I agreed wholeheartedly with the basic premise, I felt it had a myopic view of the problem.

So that’s why I like my Facebook account.  For me, it’s a source of humor, information and inspiration for spewing my own opinions.

Blurred Vision

I’ll admit it – I blurred these perfectly sharp pictures just for this theme.  That’s because as soon as I saw the theme I thought “Cool, now I can use some of my school pictures.”  In case you didn’t know, I can get in trouble if I post pictures of students on my blog, especially if the students are in focus and easily identifiable.

So I waded through my school pictures and chose one from each of the schools I taught at, ones with (hopefully) good stories that go with them.

School #1:  In 2001 our school did a service project where we brought a bunch of students up to Midway to help clear part of the track for one of the 2002 Olympic venues.  Here are a few students sitting on the hill relaxing after a day of clearing.

Back then it was common for both boys and girls to bleach their hair, and this picture reminded me of one student who did it himself.  He came to school with his previously brown hair bleached a very white blond.  One spot on the top, back of his head was particularly white, and the hair just fell out onto my finger when I poked at it.  I asked him what he did to bleach is hair.

“I poured a bunch of bleach in a bowl, stuck my head in and held it there.  I figured it was done when it started burning.”

Uh, more than done.  He ended up having to shave his head completely.  At least it grew back.

School #2: This kid got paid $5 to lick my chalkboard when I called him up to do a problem.  The smearing of chalk all over his face was free.  **This student also drank a 3 month old carton of milk for $7, and was confused why he was feeling nauseous by lunch.

School #3: One of the classes I enjoyed the most was this after-school cooking class at an inner-city middle school.  It was always packed and the kids loved it, and surprisingly they liked cooking “real food” more than desserts.  Several of them proudly told me how they had made our home made chicken noodle soup for their families.

School #4: Another class I really enjoyed teaching was my Psychology classes at the high school.  One of our counselors got her father to bring in his lie-detector machine and we had fun hooking up students to it and asking them (benign) questions.

School #5: A student brought in some Kool-Aid that he had forgotten to put the sugar in.  We spent some time seeing who would dare to try the unsweetened Kool-Aid, and getting pictures of their reactions.

School #6: And finally, a crowd surrounds students competing in a pie eating contest during lunch.

Cat on a hot [tin] roof.

So Friday I rented a kick-ass tiller so that I could finish the ramp in the back yard so I could park two of my old Fords back there. 

A friend of mine and I had plans to get together that evening and when she called I told her “I just need to rearrange the cars and clean up.  then I’ll head right over.”

She just started to laugh.  “I’ve never heard that before: rearranging the cars.”

Anyhow, they’re all rearranged.  Now the area between the house and the garage is obstruction free, and I can get any one of the cars out with moving at most one other vehicle.  And that block is just the Jeep, which is easy to get out of the way.

Tonight, when I was up on the roof getting that last picture, first I noticed the sunset.

And then I had a visitor.  Here’s Denny, right at the peak of my house’s roof, just looking like he wanted to ask “Whatcha doin’”

Yeah, the crazy cat climbed up on the roof just to see what I was doing.  And he’s running around on the roof like it’s solid ground.  Cats.  Go figure.

But, at least I got one project done this summer.  And with only 24 days left until teachers are back at school, my next project had better go quickly.