the great worm escape of 2008

picture it, sicily, 1932 ~~-~~

yesterday i looked at the worm bin and noticed it contained no bedding and was entirely comprised of castings with a small amount of eggshells, avacado skins, and a few chunks of carrot. d and i sifted through the finished compost and pulled out all the worms. we left the compost out on the balcony covered with a screen to dry out, as it was pretty wet. the worms, about 500 of them, were placed in a sealed tupperware. it's really interesting to watch them form a giant wormball and wiggle and burrow under one another. they're highly sensitive to light and temperature so it's best for them to be on the bottom of the pile.

today was a really interesting day. i feel like sharing:

3am * couldn't sleep even though i had to wake up at 8 to do a nerd job in the city
7am * walking the dog, giving him breakfast, eating some blueberries
8am * opening the wormball tupperware to give it some air. closing it back up tight.
9am * leaving the house, battery tunnel bound
10am * arriving at k's for some serious geekery
12pm * breaking ie 7 with java update, decimating outlook web access with hotfixes
2pm * lunch break
3pm * picasa tutorial
4pm * itunes tutorial
6pm * breaking itunes
7pm * repairing itunes and getting paid an obscene amount of money considering how much i broke
8pm * arriving home to pick d up and take her out to dinner
830pm * opening the wormball tupperware to give it some air. closing it back up.
9pm * cafe steinhoff for some bavarian treats
915pm * either a food allergy or panic attack causes me to be unable to swallow food
10pm * arrive home, pee
1002pm * notice dozens of worms all over the dining room table, chairs, under the table, on the rug and floor - yes, worms, dozens of them, like 75 to 100 worms, out, in my living room, uncontained, wriggling around
1004pm * freak out on couch and cry a little with toes in full retraction
1005pm * eat xanax and set up fresh bedding for worm bin
1030pm * sample ben and jerry's creme brule ice cream
1145pm * decide to blog about the great worm escape of 2008


as of today i think i might like the idea of the worms more than i like the actual worms.

sleeplessly updating

august is here, which means summer vacation is mostly over.
that's a bummer.

but we do have 25 days until we need to be back in the school buildings, and about 30 until kids arrive. i'm looking forward to meeting my new kids. i'm hoping that their internal filters, sense of decency and morality, and self motivation levels are all set a few notches higher than at my last school. hopefully they'll happily surprise me.

i've been brainstorming some ideas for the upcoming school year. anybody know any middle school teachers in the UK? i'm not sure what they call middle school over there, but it would be in the realm of 11 to 14 year olds. drop me a line if you do, i've got a podcasting/american revolutionary war/global classroom project in mind.

d and i are taking our first vacation ever together. it's only taken me 2 years to get her to agree, but i'm really glad she did. we're headed to my old stomping grounds of western mass next monday and tuesday. i'm pretty psyched to have the opportunity to show her northampton and amherst, the farms of hadley, the back roads of sunderland and belchertown, and maybe head up to deerfield or greenfield for a hike. eddie is accompanying us...poor little guy has an eye infection which we're treating with an antibiotic ointment that he'd prefer we not smear in his eye twice daily. i'm going to check into a multivitamin for him. maybe he needs a little immunebooster.

my car has been doing this finicky occasional refusal to start. it began over the winter and i thought it was cold-related, but it continued into the warm weather. i suspected it had something to do with dampness and/or humidity getting under the hood and causing a disconnect from the battery, or that the battery had some type of leak, or the electrical system was improperly grounded and something was draining it. turns out with my model jeep, the battery terminals are located directly on top of the battery, exposing them to all the air flow that enters through the grill. this causes the terminals to corrode more quickly than most cars. as long as i clean them off every few months the car should start and i can avoid this ridiculous problem that's plagued me since november. baking soda, coca cola, or a wire brush should do the trick. that's my latest installment of cartalk.

so while it's nearing 2am, and i'm wide awake despite having taken xanax earlier, i can likely attribute this to the 3 hour nap that d and i had following some really exhausting gettin it on time. the fatigue from the lex withdrawal is SO worth the fading away of the sexual side effects which have been source of frustration for me. i'll admit that part of my decision to stop taking the lex revolved around curiosity regarding sensitivity, stamina, libido, and getting turned on.

i set up a googlereader today. i often find out about these cool new technologies and procrastinate about using them until it's way too late. but i'm really trying now to stay more up to date so i can show my new students cool tricks this year without having to hear them yawn and say, god ms. a, that's so last year. and stuff. i added all my favorite subscriptions to the reader and now i can read all my blogs in one place. convenient. it even recommends other blogs that i might enjoy. one of them was spot on - nyc educator. hysterical.

my sis is in town for the weekend. i should be seeing her sometime tomorrow or tomorrow night with her boy. she might even be spending the night. my first overnight guests! now - to find a drinking establishment we can all agree upon. the criteria are: must serve a variety of unusual beers. candidates meeting the prefered criteria will receive extra attention: indoor and outdoor space, serves food, casual, walking distance of the slope, not overly crowded, gay friendly, and dog friendly. suggestions are welcome.

time to bond with the neglected cat.

xoxo
w

outcome

we had the graduation party for the dell kids on wednesday.

it all went very well, and even though h didn't wind up with the other, lazier, lameass intern's computer because his was stolen, he wound up happy and everyone won in the end.

we wound up outfitting h's computer with an s-video card, ganked from an old machine he scavenged in the takeapart room. i also dug up some extra ram for him, so he got 1 gb. he was pretty enthused though i could sense his frustration. i think in the end he understood the reality of the situation, and the other oaf really didn't.

and that's just one of the problems with kids today.

or is it just one of the problems with overcrowded school systems today.

i'm not sure.

maybe both.

interblues

that missing computer was really the final straw

this camel's back is beyond broke, and it shows in my every move at that place.

the tale of laughter today is:

coming in to find no wireless service. the wlan was up, but no ip could be reached.

the server room, known to blow a lot of hot air read 104 on the busted mobile a/c unit.

i put in a ticket, find out they already know, and have intentionally shut us down once we hit 95.

so i let s know we need a new a/c unit - the head custodian is on vacation, lucky guy, and over the next 7 days all networked workstations will lose their dhcp lease and no longer connect to anything.

interesting how this priority is not really a priority.

***************


i'm in a holding pattern of sorts at the moment.

i keep envisioning the morning i can say to s, 'i'm leaving you. i've been offered another position.'

what a holy dream.

much better than the one where i had to loan a certain someone my car and cell phone for somewhere between 2 and 9 days.


it's 96 here, with little sign of cooling.

can't wait to see what melts down tomorrow.

xox

advise

every once in a while i might ask for some advice

those who know me well know i may or may not listen

but i really like opinions of others

the perspective thing -

i only have my own until somebody shows me another.

so this thing happened about a month ago

where a good kid's computer got stolen

and my P was all like, make signs

and i did

and being that it's my school, where even quality artwork won't stay up on the walls for more than a week without being vandalized or torn down by some little snot who never learned any better, the posters are all but destroyed now.

i never heard anything back from the P or the A in general offering help or subsidizing the cost for another.

i did check in with another teacher in another school in another district, who had an extra computer but turns out it was a 9 year old box with no RAM.

and so it goes.

i have another kid in the program - one who has been designated an identical computer to the one which belonged to the first kid whose computer was stolen.

the other kid is fairly lazy, inconsistently available, overly social when he should be working, and the other day asked me what he could sell his computer for.

he also plans on not attending graduation.

the part where you come in - the advisory section:

can i, in good faith, being the moral, decent person i am, take the computer from the lazy inconsistent kid and re-designate it to the helpful good kid, whose computer was stolen? lazy kid would still get a computer, just not the computer he was planning on getting.

of course i can - i'm the teacher, i can do anything.

but is this ok to do?

i wouldn't normally ask, but i'm really struggling with this one.

thanks,

<3

harvest!

exactly 3 months and 1 week after acquiring and setting up my worms, i have had my first compost harvest.

no - i don't eat compost.

for the past month i haven't been feeding my worms due to a mite infestation, a fungus gnat invasion, and a feeling of discontent noticed amid the worms.

they've been perfectly content burrowing around in their own poop but i know that after some time that becomes toxic for them and i'd have to do something soon.

so over the past month i've been digging handfuls of the stuff out and feeding it to my patio garden plants. we have tomatoes, peas, morning glories, catnip, parsley, basil, chives, cone flowers, and violets. other than the occasional dried up newspaper crust rising to the top after a day in the sun, this method has worked well.

enter vivian, my neighbor, tending her own patio garden out front this morning. she's in a robe, just like me, when i'm having an early morning garden retreat. i ask her if she'd like some compost for her plants, as i have extra and can bring her some. she says she's never used it before. i told her it's like super-nutritious dirt and she says she'd love to try. i get home and realize i can't give the stuff away with all eggshells and newspaper clumps in it. i get started sifting it in our pasta strainer. i now have about 10 containers of perfect compost to give to friends and relatives. anybody want some?

i started with 1 pound of worms, which was supposed to be about 500. after removing as many as possible prior to sifting, i found i have about the same, if not a few more. i thought they'd multiply faster than that, but maybe conditions were off. i've set up a new worm bin, similar to the old but i'm doing a different feeding cycle. it's also nice that i have the garden to take my kitchenwaste overflow.

i broke d's laptop last night. unintentionally but still. we're trying out the mac support store on 7th st. i'll let you know how it goes.

<3 & compost