People, people, people…

Don’t send money to people you don’t personally know unless you initiated the contact. (P.S. – answering a classified ad does not count as initiating the contact – the ad itself counts as the initial contact.)  Simple economics – if we weren’t falling for their b.s., they wouldn’t keep spending the time calling.

I’m just might start a new blog, devoted solely to these stupid scams that people are either too stupid or greedy to just simply say “Duh, kiss my butt you scam artist.”

The latest?

“Hi, [your name here], I’m a court clerk for the federal courts and my records show you failed to show up for jury duty.  There’s a warrant out for your arrest, but if you put $400 on an untraceable, reloadable debit card and send me the account number by 5:00 tonight, I’ll just delete that pesky warrant and you won’t even have to show up for jury duty.  Deal?”*

Let’s face it, it’s the scams that nobody falls for that we never hear about, because they don’t last long.  They can easily make 100 calls a day, since the ones that don’t fall for it probably last less than a minute.  If only 1 out of those 100 fall for it, that’s 1%, then you can be making $400 a day.

That’s $100,285.71 a year, and that includes weekends off and 2 weeks vacation.  Not to mention: it’s tax free!

But I digress.  The point is: DON’T FALL FOR THESE STUPID SCAMS.  You’re just encouraging them.

* – I kinda made the quote up, allowed myself a little poetic license to make it a little more interesting, but still get the point across.

Thematic Photographic 255–Repetitious.

Construction of condominiums by my house when I was a teenager.  Each floor identical to the one below it, workers performing the same tasks over and over again as it rises.

Street lights along 7th East, and the signal light repeating the same pattern indefinitely.  Green, yellow, red…

Seagulls at the pond in Liberty Park.

A bridge where the Shoreline Trail crosses the freeway, ironically 20 miles (30 km) from the nearest shore.  But 20,000 years ago this trail would have been right along the shore of the late, great Lake Bonneville.  Most of my city resides on the dry lakebed Bonneville left when it receded down to it’s current size, now known as The Great Sakt Lake. 

And finally, a scene that repeats itself every 4^th of July as people show up early to get a good spot to watch the fireworks.

Exterior complete!

I originally built my back porch in stages, so it was a hodgepodge of construction.  The walls, which started out simply as a railing, were right at ground level, so I had water coming under it.  They weren’t insulated and because they did help buffer my bedroom from the cold I decided to rebuild them this summer.

I put a footer down  to keep the water out, and built it with normal 2x4 construction so I can insulate the walls.  I also put in 3 actual windows, before they were just screens that I would cover with plastic to help keep out the cold.

I just finished the exterior today, put the shingles on the roof of the little end piece I just closed in.  Here are some before & after pictures.

It may look very similar, but that’s because I reused all the cedar I could salvage from the destruction phase.  Next summer I’m going to re do the roof, put a real one on it, and then I’ll also cover up that really nice linoleum that is showing.

The good part is that the rest of the work I need to do is inside the porch which, with a swamp cooler, stays nice and cool.

Jeff & Amy

Brane ded.

11 hours and 20 minutes.  That’s how much time I spent today writing answers for a 7th Grade Math workbook.

A couple of years ago, Utah adopted the new Common Core standards for Math, even though there were no textbooks for it.  Last year we got a “textbook”, in the form of an online, interactive program.  All our textbooks were taken away, so there was nothing physical we could give to our students.

There are a lot of things to like about the program, but the biggest complaint I got was from parents who wanted a physical copy so they could have something to reference when helping their kids with homework.  They, like I did, learned how to learn math from a textbook.  We know how to read them, how to pick out what we need and bypass the stuff we don’t. 

So, the Utah State Board of Education gave a group of professors up at the University of Utah the money to write textbooks for the new 7th and 8th grade curriculum.  And being smarter than the average non-middle school teacher making stuff up for middle school students, they knew they needed actual middle school teachers to review their work and critique it.

That’s what I’ve been doing this summer.  Reading through their books and making suggestions on how to make it more student friendly.  For the most part, it’s been 3 hours here, couple hours there, maybe 6 hours a week tops.

Well, it’s the end of July and they want to have it completed before the school year gets too far along.  It’s crunch time.

Monday evening I got a call from one of the professors and she asked me if I could write the answers for the 7th grade chapter 4 workbook. 

Sure, no problem. 

Oh, and can you have it done by Wednesday night?

Yeah.  How hard can one chapter of 7th grade math be?

Uh, well.  It was 101 pages of charts, graphs, proportions, fractions and all the fun stuff that makes Microsoft Work go bonkers.  Handwritten, I could probably have done it all in 4 or 5 hours, but Word is not so math-friendly.

All-in-all, it took me over 16 hours to solve all the math and get it properly formatted on a Word document.  But I’m done, and now I’m going to bed.