Tracing Our Roots.....

Sweet Girl has become interested in tracing her ancestry through an online website, and she has already found some cool facts about her family, particularly her dad's side. I think it's remarkable that she's interested, because it seems unusual for young people to care about their roots. It may be that both grandparents on her dad's side are deceased, and she didn't get to learn a lot about them while they were alive. She doesn't have a lot of contact with that side of the family, and her biological father is NO HELP at all, so she is wise to go the online route, where a lot of the work has already been done. For a fee, of course.

She didn't get this curiosity from me, because I have never been interested at all in tracing my family roots. First of all, with our family, I figure it's wise to let sleeping (and dead) dogs lie and not go digging too deep in the dung heap. Secondly, I've just never seen the point. So what if we can trace our roots back to the Mayflower or the Salem Witch Trials or some random serial killer? The only kind of ancestor I would really be interested in finding is one who unbeknown to me left me and my descendants a million dollars a day for life.

This is not to say that Sweet Girl (and others) SHOULDN'T be interested. I think it's fascinating that they want to dig into family histories. It's just not for me. Probably years down the road when I don't have anything else to do, I may regret not going to a little more trouble to find out about my ancestors. I'll have to take that chance, though.

If they had just been considerate enough to blog about their lives, it would be so much easier. See what a favor I'm doing Sweet Girl and all her descendants?

You're welcome.

Baseball Overdose.....

There is really no such thing as baseball overdose, but it's past my bedtime and that's the best I could come up with.

We went to a minor league baseball game tonight, a first for me. I had heard several people say there isn't a bad seat in the house in this new stadium, and I have to agree with them. It was a small, intimate, fun environment.

Thank goodness for the torrential rains we had this afternoon, or I would never have been able to sit outside in the pollen clouds. But everything was fresh and cleansed by the rain, and it was very pleasant.

We didn't get to stay for the whole game -- do we EVER when Hubby is along?

So now I'm home, watching the animated version of the game we just left to see the conclusion (the home team won 8-6).

I'm also watching the end of the real Braves' game on television, where there is one out in the ninth and the end may not be so good for the home team unless something positive happens in a hurry. Our phenom batter just went down on three pitches, so I am a little less confident.

Tomorrow night I'm going to a high school baseball game between the two schools in our county. Lawanda the Warrior Princess's son plays catcher for one of the teams.

Then I'm going to come home and watch highlights of the Masters. Saturday I will ride the tandem with Katydid, watch more Masters coverage, watch highlights of the G-Day football game, and catch the gymnastics regionals online.

I need to go buy some Cracker Jacks.

Happy Birthday to Me.......

Ten reasons I'm glad my birthday occurs when it does:

1. April has the coolest birthstone. Really, how did the powers that be decide that WE deserved the diamond? Clearly it was a correct assumption, but how did they KNOW?
2. My birthday means that baseball season is officially underway. My gift from Hubby this year is tickets to the minor league Braves team, who relocated nearby just last year. They (there "they" go again) say there isn't a bad seat in the whole stadium.
3. It also usually coincides in some way with the Masters golf tournament. I will gorge myself on Masters coverage starting tomorrow. Hubby will be gone this weekend, so I will have complete and total control of the remote. Seriously, the deciding factor of whether or not to go to Missouri for gymnastics this Saturday was the fact that I would miss all of Saturday and a large chunk of Sunday coverage of the Masters, and I can always watch the gymnastics meet online.
4. My birthday USUALLY occurs during Spring Break. Thank you, board of education, once again for our retarded, exhausting, homicide-inducing schedule this year. Oh, and thank you in advance for your wise, insightful decision to have the same schedule again NEXT YEAR.
5. The annual G-Day football game occurs this week as well. Although it isn't an official game, it reminds me that we get to start all over this year in a mere 150 days.
6. My birthday means that the Spring Tune-Up ride is just a week and a half away. It's the first multi-day ride of the year, and this year Katydid and I are taking the motorhome. No more sleeping in a tent for us!
7. I can officially put away the sweaters, turtlenecks, socks, and closed-toe shoes. We MIGHT just have another mini-cold snap (shhhhhhhhhhhhh), but if we do I will just suffer through it. Once the toe ring goes on, it's sandals for the next 6 months.
8. Opening the pool cannot be too far away.
9. Yellow is my favorite color, and everything around here is such a lovely shade of yellow. Oh, that's not such a good thing.
   
10. Yellow roses are so much cheaper on my birthday than they are on Valentine's Day, and Hubby surprised me with a dozen of them today. They were on the table when I got home from school, and he was only slightly insulted that I failed to notice them. My only defense is that I have felt like crap all day, and my mind isn't where it should be.
    

It has been a terrific birthday, the last one in my 40's.

Okay, it was terrific up until THAT.

From the "Is This Really Necessary?" Department....

Perhaps you have seen this ad for a website where only the truly talented ($100K) get only the jobs truly worthy of them ($100K). It apparently appeared during the Super Bowl in 2009.






If you don't want to watch it, let me summarize it for you. This is a direct quote from some random website where I found the commercial in its entirety: "A majestic herd of office chairs races across the African plains as a team of determined hunters attempts to capture the one giant executive chair in their midst."

It's a clever enough twist on the job search theme, particularly in these days of a crappy economy. I get that you want to capture the really big, plush, leather office chair instead of one of the many plain old rolly chairs you find on the plains of Africa.

What this clip doesn't show is the disclaimer that appears at the end of the ad when it airs on HLN in the mornings.

I am aware that disclaimers are necessary due to the stupidity of the American public as a whole, because you know if they have to say it, that means that SOMEWHERE, SOMEBODY has tried it.

This disclaimer, however, appears as a herd of runaway office chairs scoots across the safari-type landscape:

"DO NOT ATTEMPT"

Hmph.

Darn.

I had just thought about booking me a trip to Africa to see if I could land me one of them there chairs.

The Yellow Dust......

It's that time of year here in North Georgia.

The time of the yellow dust.

I wanted to take a picture of my car, which is supposed to be red, now yellow, but it's almost dark now. The car (and every other one in these here parts) is covered with a thick layer of yellow pollen.

They say (who is this "they", and why do they talk so much?) that the pollen we see on our cars isn't the pollen that aggravates our sinuses. I'm not usually bothered by pollen, since I have vasomotor rhinitis and suffer allergy-like symptoms every freakin' day of the freakin' year, but boy am I suffering today.

I foolishly opened my window-door in my classroom today so we could enjoy the nice weather. Bad move. In no time my eyes were watering, my nose was running, and I could taste the grit of pollen in my mouth.

I know I'm prone to exaggeration, but this is NOT one of those times. You can actually see yellow clouds of pollen drift across the road. I have a feeling it's going to be a Benadryl night. Please, please, please, please let me have some Benadryl in the cabinet.....

It reminds me of a funny story of one of my favorite teachers from high school. I loved him dearly and would work harder for him than any other teacher. It wasn't a crush kind of adoration, either. He wasn't cute, he was just smart. And funny. And he wouldn't let me get away with crap, so I respected him for that.

He went out to get in his car one day after school and became infuriated that someone had sprinkled yellow chalk dust all over his car. And the other teachers' cars too. This was, obviously, back in the day when teachers still used chalkboards, and someone had discovered that yellow chalk was easier on the eyes than white. Or perhaps it was cheaper, I don't know. Or maybe it was just trendy.

The poor man stormed up to the principal's office to report this act of vandalism.

Apparently he wasn't from around here. I thought they would never let the poor man live it down. Someone sent him an envelope full of chalk dust the next week and asked him to analyze it.

You see, the poor man was a science teacher.

I wonder what he's doing now.....

I'm Baaaaaaaaaaack...........

Just in case you noticed I was gone.....

It is a rare event that I miss a day of blogging, and I don't think I have EVER missed two days in a row.

I didn't know there were parts of the world where there was no internet AND no cell service.

We took the motorhome to South Carolina this weekend. We had planned the trip for a while, but then we had some minor mechanical problems late last week, and I didn't think we would get to go. Therefore I didn't plan ahead and write a couple of blog entries to post while we were gone.

I found out literally at 3:00 Friday that we were indeed going out of town. I had to pack the food, clothes, dog, gear, breathing machine, crocheting, computer (useless, as it turned out) all in a matter of about 30 minutes.

I left out some really important things. Like my toiletries case. I reached for it, but it never made it to the RV. You know you've been married almost 13 years when you can share a toothbrush for a weekend. I didn't think I had a hairbrush either, and I was going to cut my hair with a butcher knife in that case. Luckily I found one in the bottom of purse, largely unused. The brush, not the purse.

The campground had wireless internet, but only at the main building and in the guest rooms. That was about a 3 mile walk around the lake from where we were camped. It was a very short row in a kayak, but we didn't take that either. It was a very doable bicycle ride, but we didn't take those either. I wasn't about to lug my laptop on a 3-mile walk.

I remember now that the last time we were in this state park, the cell coverage was spotty. But in the campground itself, it was nonexistent. We were completely incommunicado all weekend. And you know what? It wasn't totally bad. I think it might do us good every now and then to be without those amenities.

I used to be a tent camper, and I didn't mind it at all. Then. I could cook on a campstove, "go" in the woods, wash dishes in a creek, and be entertained by a campfire.

Nowadays, my idea of "roughing it" is what we did this weekend. A campground without internet.

I enjoyed having a microwave, shower (theoretically - we also had an issue with the hot water heater), coffee maker, air conditioner (yes, really!).

Oh, and I actually drove the RV. It wasn't nearly as scary as I thought it would be. Of course, I mostly went straight.

This is the view out our "bedroom" window. Yes, I make my bed every day, even in the RV.


Last night we grilled steaks and some of the most awesome corn-on-the-cob that I've ever had. I think it was completely accidental that I cooked it the PERFECT amount of time. We also had a salad, which means we officially ate better at the campground than we do at home. Hubby says we're going again next week.

Not really.

I was able to add another state sticker to the map on the inside of the door.

Those of you who are my OCD friends will totally be able to relate to the state sticker thing. Hubby thinks I'm nuts. Our RV was a used one, and this map was already on the door. Apparently that's just something you DO when you have an RV. The folks who owned it before us had put stickers for Florida, Alabama, and possibly Mississippi on the map. I'm guessing they had actually camped in those places. They left the remaining state stickers in the RV.

I tore off the stickers of places we haven't been yet. That means that when we DO go there, I won't have those states to put on the map. But it didn't seem right to have them on the door when we haven't been there ourselves. So when we take the RV to Florida (I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope), I will have to buy a new set of stickers.

Yes, I need therapy.

But I felt really terrible about not blogging. I felt worse about that than I do when I don't exercise.

Which I didn't do today. It was a beautiful day for a bike ride, but I spent the day inside, catching up on my virtual school grading that I couldn't do over the weekend.

Oh, and Happy Easter!

Another Sign of the Apocalypse.......

Or perhaps just another sign that our students are losing their collective mind.

(If it's collective, is it one mind? Or should it be plural?) Hmmmmm.....


This incident is from one of the students from whom we never hear a peep. Sometimes literally, because he can't seem to come to school all that often. When he is there, he works steadily, behind his curtain of hair, and rarely says a word. He's not a problem student.

Today I saw him when he checked in around 10:00 or so. I knew he was there.

When 11:00 came and it was time for him to be in my class, he wasn't there. I gave it a few minutes, because sometimes students are finishing up things in other classes and neglect to come tell me they'll be a couple of minutes late. It's no biggie.

He didn't come to class, and he didn't come to class, so finally I emailed my co-workers.

"He was just in my 2nd period," came the reply.

"Not here now," I emailed back.

About 30 minutes later, he walked in my room.

Here is the conversation that ensued:

Me: Billy Bob? [That's not his real name. Names have been changed to protect the stupid.] Where were you?

Billy Bob: I was going to play hooky, but I changed my mind. [This would be perfectly normal coming from some of our students. Billy Bob, however, is not one to joke around. He wouldn't waste the energy.]

Me: No, really.

Billy Bob: Really. I was all the way at the BP station on 211, but I turned around and came back.

I can't decide whether it was an April Fools' joke or not.