As of noon day 3:

In the last three nights, I’ve gotten 14 hours sleep; 8 hours a night would be 24, so I am pretty much a zombie.

The car needs to go into a shop for something related to power steering, probably a blown pump.  Meanwhile the car is horrible to turn and makes funky growling sounds.  Sears will do it for $380 if I’m right about what’s wrong but the scheduling just doesn’t work out; if I drop it off after training it won’t be ready until midmorning the next day so I’d miss the whole day.  A call is in to a shop near training that offers rides from and to the shop, so…maybe that’ll sort things out, though I don’t know how much more it’ll cost at an independent shop.

Training itself is better than that first day.  We neither started 15 minutes late for the stragglers nor are killing time surfing the internet while the trainer shows us how to play, not set up, powerpoint jeopardy.

We’re supposed to get out early today but I won’t; I’m sticking around to take the 8-12 practice exam since that turned out to be the one I need, of Gen 4-8, Math 4-8, and Math 8-12; of course that’s the one I didn’t take and this seems to be my last chance to take the practice test for quite a while.  True, I could’ve taken the Math 8 job, but it would’ve been double-prep (Pre-Alg and Alg 1) and I’d rather do one thing and do it well.

Major trouble hauling myself out of bed this morning; over a year and a half with no schedule from one day to next (longest exception was two weeks, second longest was a week and a half, the rest were mostly 1-2 day jobs or 3 here and there) is brutal for an insomniac.  Made it here almost half an hour early anyway and then we started 15 minutes late for the stragglers, which is ridiculous because I have, if not the longest drive, one of the top few.  If I can make it on time, anyone can.

Day 1 for core content single subject is tech…thank God.  I can leave my brain idling and still end up functional enough that no one will know (unless, say, they read this…).  With a few exceptions I’ve spent the morning working on my resource list for the coming year.

When school began at 8 a.m., 66% of students reported feeling “somewhat unhappy or depressed.” After delaying the first bell until 8:30, that figure fell to 45%. Likewise, the percentage of students who said they felt “irritated or annoyed” fell from 84% to 63%. (They were still teenagers, after all.)

source

In other words, teenagers are more decent to be around in school when they get a bit more sleep beforehand (and possibly learn more too).

Grad school…including the class that I didn’t finish last semester. I’ve got an exam scheduled for this month, and very few good clear study days left in the semester, to work on projects, with everything else going on.
Moving…have a chance to move into an over-garage apartment, with yard and house access, for $300/month less than my current place. No pool so I’ll probably have to join a gym with pool to replace that, but it’ll still nudge the budget toward balancing.
Work…I took a weekend job to pay some bills. I have a real job lined up which starts in just over a month and a lot to figure out between now and then.
Alternate path program…3-week training is coming up, paperwork is beginning to pile up.
Computer glitches…the problem just won’t completely go away. Sometimes it flares up worse, right now it’s backed off a bit, but it keeps throwing blue screens at me off and on. Trying to avoid needing to buy a new computer but…I can’t help but think that this one doesn’t have much longer.

Somewhere in there I might want to sleep or breathe.

I use StumbleUpon now and then. Every now and then I turn up a site worth revisiting; reasonably frequently, I find something worth poking about in for a few minutes or something that presents a clear one-shot use like a paper or lesson plan topic. It’s a good way to scan through many sites quickly…which means that a site gets a very small amount of time in which to convince me to give it more time.

I also have my screen set up the way I like it. Firefox occupies a rough square a little smaller than the screen’s height on the right, and anything else I happen to be working on or monitoring appears to the left. Do. NOT. Mess. With. This.

I will tolerate a site that messes with this only if I absolutely have to use that site. For example, a common teaching job site in my state tries to open job listings in a new custom-sized window, and because of my Tab Mix Plus settings, the default behavior for a site trying to open a new window is to put it in a new tab. I took up right-clicking to force it into a new window while I was job searching, when I remembered. When I didn’t…I tolerated it because I had to, because many districts including some with a drivetime worth considering from here use only that site and many others use it extensively.

When I am Stumbling Upon your web site, I have no such commitment to it. My initial attention span when I’m Stumbling is about three seconds because I know that unless your site interests me in that amount of time, I can find something just as good or better in a click or two without even trying. Therefore, if it forces Firefox to reize itself, I will Stumble away before I even see what your site is about. (Note: This also applies to splash pages, because I will not click here to enter your site when I can click without having to move my mouse and have similar or better odds of getting to something interesting. Ditto for anything featuring the word “loading.”)

The point is not to have the students reinvent every wheel. It is to have them reinvent enough wheels to get the idea that the other wheels they learn about can also be invented.

A nice circle-based print that picks up one of the colors from the tunic top I’m working on (which is being made from fabric from the completely unrelated source known as a sheet bought also on sale in junior year). On sale. Heck yes.

I have a chance to pick up a few bucks tomorrow by picking up some work that otherwise wouldn’t get done for BF’s boss.  Cool.  For this, I need black pants…which I didn’t have.  So, off to the store…where they have sparkly crap, pants that don’t even come close to zipping up, and pants that are too big and too long.  I go with “too big and too long” because I figure I can feed the extra to the sewing machine.

Then begins The Great Process: Figure how much to take them in at the sides.  Pick apart the waistband a few inches around each side seam so it can end up looking like it wasn’t just folded and stitched (this alone must have taken an hour).  Re-sew side seams, waistband’s side seams, and waistband to pants.  Try it on to make sure I didn’t screw up, and cut off the excess.  Figure out how to hide a couple of seam ripper mishaps that didn’t get cut off.  Figure out how much to shorten the legs.  Pin this amount up.  Start sewing.  Realize I didn’t pin enough spots so the new hem is coming out ripply.  Seam-rip the new hem out, re-pin, re-do, pin the heck out of the other leg, sew up, find a fold of pant leg that somehow got into the second hem, seam-rip out that part of the hem, re-pin, re-do.

According to an alterations price list I Googled, between taking in the waist on the pants, tapering the legs to match, and doing the hems, I just saved myself $38 (although spending $38 on alterations for $13 pants would be kind of dumb anyway).  Not bad for about three hours’ work, I guess, but making a pair of pants from scratch might have been easier.

The following message contains the instructions for cracking the code. (See also: recursion.)

(11395, 8510, 329, 138, 500973, 956358, 15521, 952622, 1051202854, 21, 138, 956358, 15521, 15351, 43579081, 337212, 1794, 173745241989, 138, 337212, 143, 8510, 251503, 21, 208351, 5, 61835462, 6251, 8510, 251503)
(21, 995596, 138, 14663860, 3469305, 2015, 5639703311710, 138, 251503)