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.

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).

Somewhere in there I might want to sleep or breathe.

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.”)

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.

(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)