To add insult to injury

My ipod is dead.

RIP, little buddy.

We don't talk around here, we write notes.

Today I went to work and like everyday spen the first hour in the back, doing laundry, washing dishes, mentally preparing myself for the onslaught to come, you know, the usual.

I went up front to relieve a coworker so she could go to lunch. I sit down, get myself situated, and click on the lovely firefox icon, because I'm going to check my email.

The funniest thing happened. . . . Nothing.

I got an error message, and then the pop-up screen that said 'this site is blocked. Please type in your password to view the site.' I try several different sites with the same result, we have been blocked off the entire internet. I look at co-worker number one, who is on her way to lunch. She raises her hands at me shrugs her shoulders and says 'Yes, I know, don't even try, it's all off-limits.'

My jaw is on the floor. I look at co-worker #2 she nods in agreement and ever so slightly mouths the words 'I hate this place' to me and turns back to her desk.

After a full and exhaustive effort (type web address, hit enter, get pop-up screen saying I am blocked, hit cancel, repeat) We got nothing. No websites work except our very own site. Not even weather.com. I ask you, how threatening is weather.com?

Problem #1 with this:

We're not corporate. We're not big business. We're a small, locally owned, we have three people who work the front area on two computers. We have vast amounts of down-time. Time where there literally is nothing else to do, we are stuck at the desk. Up front we are checking people in and out, and scheduling appointments. We can be really busy for 15 minutes and then lag for an hour. All the receptionists are women my age or older, who i have never ever witnessed being unprofessional with the computer. No sound, no downloading games, no porn. Mostly I see email checking and facebook. Co-worker #1 is a mom who uses the computer to monitor her son's health while he's at school, because he has a few little things she needs to stay on top of. Every once in a while someone gets on icanhascheezburger.com, to have ourselves a good laugh. We were not abusing the interent, nor were we behaving unprofessionally, and had never been told by the spa director otherwise.

Problem #2 with this:

I am supposedly a frickin' manager at this place. I was not told about any of this until I could not get on the internet today. I had to go ask the Spa Director to come log me on because my computer froze, I had to restart and had to log back onto Citrix. This required interent access and after I went, got the director, LOOKED THE OTHER WAY while she typed the password, she walked back to her office not a word to me about any new changes. We fire and hire people, we sell new things, move inventory around, heck, even block the internet with NO MEMO to the manager? What kind of communication is this? Oh right.....it's not.

I find great amusement in telling everybody that my husband's students in high school have more freedom on the internet than I do.

So what did I do today? A lot of staring at the wall. I got up and looked out the window. I doodled. I thought about the book that I would bring tomorrow. I made a list of all the things I could have done had I had internet access. I sipped on water.

Maybe tomorrow I'll get an email about it.

This is why I don't teach right now. And also, why I fear for my husband's job at times.

Schools' report cards anger NYC parents
By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press WriterMon Jan 21, 2:14 PM ET

Thanks to heavy parent involvement and high test scores, Public School 321 in Park Slope, a yuppie neighborhood in Brooklyn, is considered a gem of New York City's public school system.
In the eyes of New York's Department of Education, however, P.S. 321 deserved just a B in the city's first-ever school report cards, which are based largely on how students score on standardized tests.

Such accountability efforts — widespread since the advent of the federal No Child Left Behind Act — have raised the hackles of parents and educators across the country, who fault the methodology and question the wisdom of tying test results to the job safety of teachers and principals.

Now parents in the nation's largest school system are voicing similar concerns about the grades, released in November as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's push to turn around underperforming schools.

"It really saddens me that this is how the Department of Education thinks that parents are best served, by boiling everything that happens in an entire school to a letter grade," said Lee Solomon, the mother of a first-grader at the Brooklyn New School, a sought-after school that accepts students only by lottery but got a C.

Educators have debated the push toward testing since No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002 at President Bush's urging. While some studies show that student achievement in reading and math has increased, teachers complain that they are forced to teach to the tests and to give up "frills" like music, art and recess.

A 2006 survey by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math.

Jim Devor, the father of a fifth-grader at P.S. 58 in Brooklyn — which got a D on its report card_ said students there were "strongly invited" to attend Saturday test-prep sessions but have no time to discuss current events like the presidential campaign.
"I'm appalled at how little my child knows about social studies," he said. "They're all obsessed with test prep."

Bloomberg, who is considering an independent presidential run, won mayoral control of schools in 2002 and has sought to make education reform a key part of his legacy.
James Liebman, chief accountability officer for New York City schools, devised the grading system for the city's 1.1 million-pupil school system.

Liebman said standardized tests are a good measure of whether students have learned what they should know.

"If children can't read and they can't do math, then the educational system and their school have failed them," he said.

For New York's middle and elementary schools, 85 percent of the grade is based on performance on standardized tests, while high schools are judged on graduation rates, New York State Regents exam scores and other factors.

The school letter grades are based on a complex formula that tracks students' test scores from year to year and measures each school against the system as a whole and against schools that are demographically similar.

A school with few pupils performing at grade level can get an A if its test scores improve, while a school where virtually all the students are reading, writing and calculating at grade level can get a C if its scores slip.

If a school gets a low grade two years in a row and scores poorly on a performance review, the principal's job may be be at risk.

Critics complain that Liebman, the system's architect, is a law professor with no background in education.

"All of their ideas are business ideas," said Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former assistant U.S. secretary of education. "It's about incentives and punishment. Those are not educational ideas."

But those critics apparently are in the minority. Liebman pointed to a Quinnipiac University poll in which voters said the grades were fair by a margin of 61 to 27 percent.
"It's a system to provide information to parents to make their own judgments," he said.
Not all parents believe it's helpful.

State Assemblyman Mark Weprin, a Democrat and a public school parent, said he worked to secure funding for a theater program but schools in his Queens district didn't want it between January and March because they're busy with test prep.

"This is hurting my son's education," he said. "It's all based on the faulty premise that school tests are measuring what kids are learning."

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

NBC=No Better Chumps?

The execs at NBC ought to be fired for making me watch Billy Bush announce the Golden Globes last Sunday. I mean really, compared to him, Nancy O'Dell looks like frickin' Isaac Newton.

Whoever told him he could do a little commentary (without any writers helping him) in between the nominees should also be sat in front of a TV showing that fiasco of an hour on loop so they can know just what kind of a major tool they put on TV.

Food- Sometimes it CAN make you feel better

Last night When I got home, my sister-in-law and my brother-in-law, Becca and Joey, had made delicious baked apple dumplings. I am not kidding, these things were delectable. They were, in the words of Will Ferrell/James Lipton, 'scrumptulescent'.

And today, my dear friend Rachel who works with me, and feels every ounce of 'uck' I do about the job, brought me a decaf mocha. She knew it was decaf because she made it at Starbucks and brought it with her.

And then I coudn't even drink the coffee I had bought.

This past week has been frustrating to say the least.

No really, that's the very least I could say about it. If I wanted to say more, I could call it absolutely exhausting, ridiculously hard, or even throw in some made up words like re-donk-ulous, cringe-tastic. Or just go the VH1 route and call it the worst week ever. Take your pick. Any way you slice it, I'm ready to move on.

It's mostly at work, and it's mostly things I have no control over. Things like other people's greed, and shiesty-ness. (I love to use that word but am not sure how to spell it. Shiesty? Sheisty? Does the 'i' before 'e' rule apply in made up words?)

Anyway, A lot of this week has required literally pumpimg myslef up to go to work. Giving myself little pep-talks in the car in the parking lot and pretending that it's normal. Buying myself little treats when I make it through a day. And lots of kitteh-snorgling when I get home at night. Because who can feel bad whan you've got Kitteh faces to love?

I guess my problem is I just don't think people should dislike their job. Or hate their job. Or take out their aggression on Monday, which is just another day of the week. I kind of loathe the fact that I have to have a job, any job at all, to make money. I can't stop and say 'You know what? This isn't fun anymore, so....I'm out.' We just don't live that way. I have to pay AT&T for the phone, KCPL for the heat, and Time Warner for cable and internet access that allows me to put off other more important things. I can't stop and find something I actually like at t the moemnt. Which is harsh, because when excatly do we get to do that? When in my life do I get to sit down, find out what I want and do it? I already blew my chance in college....and got a degree I'm still trying to figure out how to use. Or if I will get to use it all. It didn't neccessarily pay for me to go after what I wanted in college. I'm still stuck in an hourly wage job, desperately seeking something else.

***Warning: This little daily piece of writing has becoem a little more about my pathetic job and my sad state of affairs than I wanted it to be originally. Continue at your own risk.***


I think when you grow up, you learn lessons you donr wnat to learn, and the one I am learning lately is no matter how hard you try to fight it, your job defines you. When you meet someone you say 'I'm so-and-so and I do____' It would probably be a better representation if I said 'Hey, I'm Emily and I love my husband, making mosaics, and various shades of the color green'. Really. That's way more who I am than my job at this point in my life.

so to come full circle and actually make reference to the name of this entry, yesterday certain things would not be at work (i.e. people ) and so I knew the day would be much better. I bought myself a chocolate muffin and a turtle mocha to pep things up even more. It was going to be a great day.

Except.

I didn't check and they didn't have the convenient little sticker on top that said it was decaf. I say convenienet because that really helps OCD people like me have some reassurance that there will be no shakes-inducing caffeine in their beverage. So I had to throw it out on the off chance it was going to make me sick.

So it was only a slightly better than average day, which is what you get when you rely on food to make you feel better.

Happy New Years

There was no way Opal was actually putting the tiara on. We may or may not have actually tried. Several times.


Peace to you an yours this year!!