Sunday, January 22, 2006

Under Pressure 

It's easy to procrastinate here. There's wood to stack, kids to play with, trails to meander behind the house. At night, when the kids go to bed, there's IM, the blogosphere, the newly-instated iPod to pimp.

Never made it to the Worcester Ecotarium yesterday -- Willow was a bit too stuffy, too cranky for public consumption -- but we had the in-laws in all this morning, for hangout and a scrummy brunch at the only real restaurant in town.

Managed to finish this year's Best American Short Stories collection, which I'm counting as book 3 in my 52 Books series, in and around the rest of it. And the wife and I stayed up to watch a couple of West Wing episodes and Richard Pryor's Live from the Sunset Strip, a seminal work which comes off as unfortunately dated, just like my father said it would.

Even showed her the right way to peel a banana, a discovery which is absolutely stunning, and leads to far too much time trying to figure out how humans managed to acculturate to the "stupid" way while monkeys sat and laughed at us. (My guess: the stem looks like a handle, so we overthink it. But now that the secret's out, will the meme move far and wee enough, retrain us all in "this genius monkey technique"?)

Yet despite my self-destructive best, I nonetheless managed to finish 90% of my end-of-term grading in just two 2-hour bursts of hyperfocus.

It is an immense relief to realize that grading at the middle school level is going to be a good 50% easier than high school ever was. I'd set aside tomorrow evening on emergency reserve, but it looks like I'll be able to get a good night's sleep for once instead. Now all I have to do is ascribe 150 discrete conduct and effort grades, and submit the gradebooks from within the school network. Piece of cake.

posted by boyhowdy | 7:35 PM |

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