Fun with quizzes

I don't put a lot of stock in those interenet quizzes, but I still find them fun to take and see what results I get.  So, when Jannx listed a few on his blog I took them, and then a few more random ones.  Don't worry, I won't be offended if you find them boring and just skip this post.  Hell, I won't even know if you do.  Enjoy, or not.  The choice is yours.

It's about time.

I finally got around to seeing the new Star Trek movie.  Yeah, I had planned on seeing it as soon as it came out, but since that coincided with the closing of my school, I got sorta sidetracked.  Which proves that although I am a Trekkie, I'm not a fanatic.

So the foods teacher finally coaxed me into going, she even got the tickets free from one of our ex-students who works at the theater.  It was great.  Everything the Gearheads said it would be (The Gearheads).  So, I won't waste your time saying the same things in my own review, suffice it to say that I'll be buying it as soon as it comes out on DVD.

Welcome back Lake Boneville

....If you look across the valley at the mountains, you can see why they say that the Salt Lake Valley used to be covered with the water of Lake Boneville.  There's an almost perfectly straight line across the bottom of the mountains that looks like a shore line.  Ring around the valley.

....The Great Salt Lake has no outlet, no river to drain it, and the only thing that regulates the level of the water is evaporation.  Which is why it's so salty, nowhere for the minerals to go.  All the water from the mountains coming into the Salt Lake and Utah County valleys (and I think Davis County too) ends up there.  Which is why I think Lake Bonneville is making a comeback.

....According to the Salt Lake Tribune, June has been a wet, wet month for us.  In the first 10 days we have gotten triple the amount of water we normally do, 1 1/4 times normal for the entire month.  This has to be Noah and the Ark all over again.

....Yeah, right.  We are in the desert, and triple the water means barely less than an inch.  Normal for the entire month is .77", normal for the first 10 days is a whopping .32".  We also have a regular cycle of drought and wet years, so this kind of rainfall is not abnormal for a wet year.  I don't think I'll list my house as "beach front property" yet.

....That doesn't mean I'm not tired of it.  Generally I love the rain, but it's rained almost every day for the last week or so.  And I'm supposed to be running the swamp cooler, not the furnace.  So I'm putting it out to the cosmos - stop the rain, bring back the sun and 85 degree weather. 

On the road again...

A couple of weeks ago Old Blue started making a scraping noise whenever I drove it. I traced the noise to the front driver side brakes, put it up on stands and tore it apart. Lo and behold, one of the springs in the brakes had broken and was dangling scraping against the drum. Yeesh, scary stuff. So I went out in search of a new spring, just to find nobody had them in stock. Well, unless I bought the entire spring set. Well, since the entire set only cost $10, I bought it. That was about a week ago, and things came up. Until today. It wasn't simply putting the spring in and reassembling, since I had to take apart the whole wheel assembly to get the drum off. That meant repacking the bearings before putting it back together. For those of you who have never packed bearings, that means getting a big gob of thick, smelly grease on the palm of your hand and smooshing the grease into the wheel bearings with the other hand. You've got to go around the whole thing, which means you get both hands completely covered with the grease. Ahhh, fun stuff. Until you have to go inside to clean off your hands and get the grease all over the door handles, soap bottle and faucet. Ah well, they all clean up. At least the brakes are as good as new, got rid of the scraping sound and even a rattling that had been previously unidentified.

Now for something completely unexpected.

.....Teacher dreams.  They usually happen in the weeks before school starts, a remnant of the nightmares between my first and second years of teaching.  Classes are completely out of control and everything I do just makes things worse.  Sometimes the principal or vice comes in and just shake their heads.  No fun, caused by the anxiety of not knowing how the new year will go.

.....I had one last night, it just wasn't usual at all.  I was back at the high school, it was yesterday, the Monday right after school got out.  Everyone was there; teachers, students, counselors and administration.  Teachers were in their rooms surrounded by students doing their work.  The librarian was tearing down bookcases, while students were working on the computers there.  No students were out of control, no adiminstrators shocked at my inability to manage a classroom, just the usual joking around and having a good time.  And we all knew that we shouldn't be there - that the school had been closed.  Anybody want to analyze that?