Big mistake.

Yeah, you park in the back of the building where no kid goes during the school day, and few otherwise.

So you park up against the building and between two large vehicles.

I know they’re a pain to take off and to put back on.

But still, I would never leave the “For Sale” signs (with your phone number) on the car you drive to the Junior High you teach at.

Never again, that is.

The sad thing is I actually did think about it, but for some reason believed my phone number was safe back there.  In my defense, it did take them almost 2 weeks before the first kid noticed.

Now I just have to sell the Jeep and wait until the novelty of having your teacher ignore your phone calls wears off.

And never again bring a car to school that had my phone number on it.

Just Sayin’

Tomorrow I think I’m going down to the Salt Lake Tribune headquarters and apply to be their new Director of Inadvertent Innuendo Avoidance.

Unfortunately, with John Swallow’s political career in the toilet, I don’t think we’ll ever see him running for political office against Olympic gold medal swimmer Mark Spitz.  Now, that would have made a good headline.

Whoops.

I found these maps of the US that were sorta filled in by some people in the U.K.  They got a lot of things wrong, and were quite funny.

I sent them out to the faculty, and I generally don’t send things out to them that has anything bad on them.

Well, today we got onto the subject of geography in my 2^nd period, so I pulled up a couple of these funny maps.  Third one in, this map comes up.

Even with it on the big screen, I didn’t catch it.  After all, I was focused on what I was showing the kids:

North Utah, Utah and South Utah.  And none of the three are even Utah.

It took only a few seconds for the kids to focus in on this:

Whoops!  It took me only a couple seconds to pull it off the screen and to apologize to the class.  I photoshopped the offending part out and put it back up on the screen so we could continue to discuss the three Utahs.

The next thing to do was to tell the Administration.  These things happen, and they really like to know before a parent calls to complain.  As my Assistant Principal told me, it tends to diffuse the outrage when he can say “We know.  It was an accident, he got rid of it right away and apologized.”

Here are the rest of the messed up maps.

Um, nevermind.

Swamp Cooler vs. Heater

One of the problems with the swamp cooler system is that it is completely separate from the heating system.  They have no idea when each other is on.

So, if I spend the morning up on the roof cleaning up and tightening everything on the swamp cooler to get it in tip-top condition, and turn it on without turning off the heater, voila – the heat comes on while the cooler is on.

Yup.  I did that today.

Fortunately I was home, in the house, and turned it off immediately.  It’s happened before, when I’ve gone out to run errands just to come home to a split-personality home fighting itself.

The drawback of driving a 1972 Ford LTD.

On the way out of class one of my students rattled off two 4-digit numbers and then asked “Those sound familiar to you?”

Uh, yes.  One was my house number, the other my street number. (For those of you not familiar with Salt Lake City, and Utah in general, our streets are set up on a coordinate system. Each house and each street has a coordinate number that relates to the number of blocks it is either north, south, east or west of the center of the city or town.)

My first thought was that he had somehow come across that information on the internet.  It’s possible, and a couple other students had claimed they were going to pay the buck or so for the information, but it never came through.

But instead he had been heading somewhere with his brother and they were behind me when I pulled into my driveway.  He described the house and the station wagon on the side of the house perfectly.

If I were driving a 2004 Toyota Corolla, I bet he would have never noticed.

Oops!

  … Yup.  I forgot to set my clocks back last night.  Good thing is it happened in the fall, rather than the spring.  At least I was an hour early for work rather than an hour late.  Of course my co-workers at Chevron still made fun of me.

Um, shoulda thought about that one a little longer.

… I was helping my good friend, the counselor from Granite, with the web page for the counseling center at her new school.  For this, she took me out to lunch at the Cafe Rio on 33rd South up about 30th East.  If you’ve ever been there, you know that their walls are adorned with little stenciled sayings like Zagat Rated, I sold my soul for a pork salad, The best handmade tortillas in the world and The pressure is on, black or pinto?

… I went to the bathroom and when I saw what was stenciled right above the john, I thought “hmmm, bad planning.”

… Here it is, you decide. Click on the picture for a full sized one.

Mistake number 745-003-456B

Note to self:

……When wearing black jeans, do not pet your orange tabby right before leaving to meet people for dinner.

……And that was after brushing them clean.

This beats that little remote control car.....

I watched them move one of the I-80 bridges across 13th east tonight. I was out in the convertible around 10 pm and saw that 13th was diverted into the Shopko parking lot, so decided to see what was going on. Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera along, because they were moving one of those huge bridge peices. The weird thing is that they were moving it from the west, towards where I thought they go, over to the east side of 13th, where they are building them. Who knows what the reason was, but it was almost like they had grabbed the wrong bridge and had to bring it back to swap it. I could be wrong. Anyway, it is an awesome sight. I'd been watching it from the time is came around behind the Red Lobster, it was cruising it's way north bound when I noticed something really, well, funny, and really wished I had my camera. Now, picture a bridge. The width of 3 freeway lanes and a long as it needs to be to get across a 2 lane city street. Huge, heavy, a shitload of concrete, rebar and I beams. Underneath it are what look like huge legos with wheels. They're at least 10 feet tall, 6 or so feet wide, long enough to span the length of the bridge and there are 3 rows of them. (my stats may not be completely accurate, I wasn't allowed out there to measure, they had us standing a good distance away, and it was an hour and a half ago.) Anyway, massive. And I look at the front of the bridge, down by the wheels, about 10 feet in front. There's a guy with a little remote control box, wired to the wheels, and as I watch I realize he's driving the damn thing. Just like one of those cheapo remote control cars we had as kids, except it's the size of a house.

At least I figured out how they get the bridges across 13th east - up the westbound off ramp and then down the westbound on ramp. I wonder how you'd report a collision between a bridge and the Red Lobster to your insurance company?