rustypants speaks

what a week. i’m exhausted.

school’s been great - i love working in special education again and being at sharonville elementary has been a good thing for me. everyone there has been so kind and cool, gary tyler is an incredible principal, working with amanda and joe has been great and the kids - well, that’s why i’m in it to begin with… they rock (even on the days when i’m ready to throttle them).

grad school’s going fine but a lot of reading and long days between work and classes. two of the three classes are less than exciting - the third one (phonics and foundations of literature) is VERY good but the professor has been having some health probs, so two of four classes have been cancelled.

lise continues to heal from surgery two weeks ago and goes back in this coming monday for more surgery. cancer sucks. i don’t recommend it to anyone.

toying with some kid from umd has been fun but i’m naturally concerned that he might become a stalker. what’s a guy to do?

dolby continues to destroy toys and continues to be a great dog.

my sister-in-law had a baby last weekend - i’m an uncle again! is the the fifth time? or the sixth? i don’t remember.

i’ve finished reading john grisham’s The Broker this week and i’ve got to say: it’s the same thing he’s written at least four times before. it definitely kept me reading and it wasn’t boring, but it was quite predictable. i’ve started two books recently - The Great Bridge and The Remains of the Day. which will i finish first? if it were a race and i were a betting man, i’d have to go with the remains of the day (it’s shorter).

today i finished watching dr. strangelove (gotta love stanley kubrick - the man was a genius) and a room with a view. both excellent movies. merchant ivory productions has an incredible list of movies they’ve put out and room joins other favorites of mine, howards end and the remains of the day.

a good number of our kids from years and youth groups past started college this fall and it’s always interesting hearing about the differences in experiences - extreme drunkenness and partying to extreme studying and no life to terrible melancholy and regrets of going to college to homesickness to freedom from parents/family/bad friends/bad lifestyle to fresh start to excitement to sadness and then everything else between. youth ministry has given me so many things and having my kids to love and lead and listen to and become friends with after they’re too old to be my “kids” - i love it - sharing in their growing up experiences like college, marriage, family-growing - it’s awesome.

scheduling classes for the spring semester looks like it’s gonna suck - three classes, three nights.

this song has been stuck in my head for the last two or three weeks. i can’t shake it. it’s driving me nuts. hopefully now it’ll get stuck in your head, too.

technically this isn’t a real stream of consciousness - if it were, there’d be no punctuation, no links and no coherence. my mind doesn’t work in the linear sense.

saturn is having teacher appreciation month right now - they’re offering a deal to teachers on a new car. we’re thinking of looking at getting lise a new Ion, but probably not. her 2000 Saturn SL2 may have 150,000 miles on it but it still runs fine (and gets the same MPG as my 2004 Ion) - why would we want a second car payment?

i hate shopping for clothes and i always have. probably always will, but we have to shop at some point, don’t we? did a little today and got some pants and socks. shirts sometime this week.

giving blood at Hoxworth on tuesday - if you don’t already do it, you ought to. lise’s sad because she likes giving blood (she’s type O) and because of the breast cancer of two years ago she’s not allowed to give anymore.

we’re making some calls early this week to get some folks out to the house to fix sections of it up - new roof on the leaky garage, tuckpointing the chimneys, maybe getting some new gutters  need to get some estimates on these things first.

lise and i went to Betta’s Italian Oven for dinner tonight - it’s one of only two wood-fired ovens in cincinnati and The Councilman makes the best wood-fired pizza in town. if you go, try the pizza diavolo - it’ll put hair on your chest. the pizza margharita is also excellent.

it’s 12:30am on saturday night. i’m dead. my stream is getting weak. be well, friends.