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A plague o’ your house!

All I can do to post this and go back to bed.
Warning, this is likely going to be a very boring entry for some, since I talk mainly about a home-improvement project I’ve been working on. However, when I stared writing about it – the words just kept coming, so I think it’s a good topic.

Saturday I started feeling odd, that sensitive-skin achy-chill feeling I get at the onset of a fever. Ignoring the obvious signs, Sharaun and I headed over to Pat and Cynthia’s place for a good ol’ fashioned because-it’s-summer drinkin’, swimmin’, and eatin’ party. I felt good throughout the soirée, my pre-fever feelings either ignored or temporarily gone. Later, Sharaun and I were the first to leave, as she was feeling pretty tired. As soon as I got home, the fever feeling came back. And now it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m laid up. A fever of 102 accompanied by a raging sore throat. I’m glad I wrote this before I started feeling crappy.

You don’t know how many times I’ve gone out in the backyard to “finish” the pavers/porch. I’ve been at this “almost done” phase for a long time now. I’ll be honest, I’m not finished because the project has bested me mentally, it’s presented me with it’s final challenge… and I’m convinced I will not be able to finish until I’ve proven myself its intellectual equal. Yes, this is an inanimate porch made of bricks we’re talking about, but it’s had me stumped for months now. I’ve been wracking my brain over how to solve the problem, and just don’t know what to do. This morning, for instance, I went out and stared the thing down again. I took some measurements, kicked around the same two or three ideas I’ve had since I discovered I was in a jam, and then drove up to Lowes in another futile attempt to find something that would work. What, you ask, has been able to keep me so beat-down? I’ll tell you. But first, you may need a crash-course in paver installation.

Pavers are just bricks, that’s easy. To “install” them, you first mark off the intended area, usually by setting up a border of bender-board or special paver-retention border. You then lay down a bed of base material within the border, usually gravel. Then, on top of the base, you lay down a layer of finer sand as a secondary base. In my case, I skipped the gravel+sand combo and went with decompose granite as a single base material (you could argue that DG is a lot like sand+gravel anyway, and it packs as solid as cement if you wet it a little). Anyway, after laying the base, you then level the entire area, ensuring that you’ve got the proper slope away from the house for drainage. After leveling, you just lay out the bricks like a puzzle, cutting in the edges with a stone saw. Once all the pavers are laid, you make a pass over them with a plate compactor. Now compacted, you brush sand over the entire thing and make another pass with the compactor. Finally, once the things are compacted and set with sand in the cracks, you brush a layer of “finishing” sand over the thing, which can be bought colored to offset the stones and make the whole thing look awesome. As an optional step, you can paint the entire thing with a sealer to bring out the color of the stones and protect them from the elements.

Man, that was boring, right? For the most part, I followed those steps. I’m at the point now where I’ve got my pavers all laid out, nice and level (well, OK, pretty dang level for a 1st-timer DIY job), and ready to be plate compacted and sealed. However, I’ve got one tiny problem… my retention border. See, when I began the porch, I marked off my area with neon orange marker paint, and then installed a border of bender-board held in place with stakes. I filled in this outline with DG, and set to leveling. After leveling, the bricks were cut and laid, and now you’d think I’d be ready to compact and we’d be done. But no… I’m not. Why? Because my border is not right. In some places, the height of the base material plus paver stone is more than 6″ off the ground – with the bender-board just high enough to retain the base. What I don’t know is, how to make sure that the stones stay in place – what border to use? Maybe it will help to see it (this is how obsessed with this problem I am):

Paver problem

See what I’m saying? They don’t sell paver border that’s taller than about 2″, and my pavers are set much higher than that in some areas. I’ll admit, I’ve tried to solve this thing several ways. I could “build up” the ground outside the pavers, so the border would then be tall enough to hold them in place. My problem with this though, is that I think a built-up “artificial” ground level outside the pavers wouldn’t be “strong” enough to hold the border down (you “nail” it into the ground with large metal nails/stakes). I’m going to have to bring in an inch or more of topsoil over the entire yard anyway… so maybe that’s the best idea. But I still doubt that hammering stakes into newly laid topsoil will give me as sturdy a hold as I need.

Option 1

Then again, I know someone who also did his own pavers, and his solution for this problem was to pour a 4″ concrete border around the entire installation. It’s a brilliant idea really, and it actually adds a nice decorative touch to the installation because the sometimes imperfect-cut curves of the paver line are masked by the smooth curved edges of the concrete. Plus, you can do a colored concrete border that nicely offsets the stone color if you want to get really fancy. If I did that, the base+paver height off the ground would be irrelevant – since I can pour as high as I want. To be honest, this is the route I’ve been leaning towards. My buddy did it with nothing more than bags of cement, a wheelbarrow to mix it in, and a smoothing trowel. I’d have to setup the forms around the porch, but that’s not too big a deal.

Option 2

Well, there’s my quandry… and I still haven’t moved on either idea. I guess that’s because I know, before I can even start down either path, that I have to go around the porch edge and move all the sprinkler heads back a few inches. See, in another novice mistake, I brought the sprinklers right to the edge of my porch border, and they are now too close – and won’t allow any kind of retention. So, I have to dig them all up, cut them back, and reattach all the heads. Ughh….

Also this weekend, I learned that my keygen’d version of Windows XP will no longer do Windows Update (and before you ask, yes – I am aware of the javascript hack to get around this). The point is, some months back, I actually bought a legit copy of XP Pro and had planned on making my previously hacked version legit with it. Come to discover that my hacked version is the volume license version, and I can’t just change the key to a Pro key. Not wanting to re-install Windows, I figured that as long as I actually owned a legit version my conscious would be at ease. Then, I’m locked out of Windows Update. So… time to fix this. I did a repair install of my legit XP Pro over the top of my pirated XP VLK (but not before doing a complete system backup first, I’ve learned my lesson). Worked like a charm.

Goodnight.

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I feel like I deserve a beer tonight

Stop the ride. I want to get off.
Friday! Friday! Friday! I feel like I deserve a beer tonight. For a week well-done or something. Yeah, or something, I need a beer for “or something.”

Slow week in the writing department, breakneck week in the working department to blame. Pulling late nights every night so far, becoming all too accustomed to coming home from work, relaxing, computerless, for an hour or so while I eat dinner, and then hopping right back online to do this and that. I’ll tell you what, as brutal and unceasing as it’s been – I really do feed off it. Somewhere deep down, I find a perverse enjoyment in feeling important – the age-old sin of pride festering right in my puffed-up chest. My mouth complains about working long hours half because I don’t like it and half because I want others to hear it. I’m just a braggart at heart… someone who’s trying to avoid letting the fact that he’s got a big head show outwardly. Always feigning humility, I hope it works. But really y’all, isn’t “feigning” just a precondition for humility? It’s a conscious thing, not an inborn one. So, while I do hate it, I do love it. Figure that one out.

I’m still somewhat surprised that the crew over at PF haven’t written up the Most Serene Republic album. I’ve about worn the grooves off the thing (I know, grooves are old-school, but it’s a good expression), and I’m wondering if they’ll dig it as much as I do. It’s one of those fantastic, but relatively unaccessible LPs. Things like the Arcade Fire and Bloc Party are not only super, but arguable fit for commercial consumption. Things like the Most Serene Republic, however, really aren’t. The style isn’t consistent enough, and those used to happening-packed 3min pop nuggets may get confused with the meandering and often seemingly aimless song structure. But… none of that matters to me. That album is the toppermost of the poppermost, as John would say. If you’re interested, you can get a good idea of what to expect from this sample clip. I’m not afraid to make the halfway call and say that the race for 2005 is so far neck-and-neck between this and the Architecture in Helsinki album. Oh, and in case you’re really interested, I figured out how to direct-link to 1min clips of every track on the album. Yeah, that’s right – no one is safe from my “View Source” javascript reverse engineering mojo.

If you keep up with my travels… you may recall that I was supposed to be boarding a plane for Shanghai today, but I’m not. I canceled the trip. Sharaun’s first real appointment at the baby-doctor is this coming Thursday, and they told us they’d be doing an ultrasound and listening to Lil’ Chino’s heartbeat. For a while, I was actually considering missing that. Can you believe that? Thinking about it now, I don’t want to miss that for the world. I’m going to try and get a cellphone recording of the heartbeat while we’re there – and knowing me it’ll be online the next day. I remember when I was in middle school, I paid entirely too much for a still-sealed copy of John & Yoko’s rare “Unfinished Music No. 2 : Life With the Lions” LP on the avant-garde Apple offshoot, Zapple. Since the music hadn’t ever been issued on CD at the time, I simply couldn’t resist the urge to completely ruin my investment by slicing through the 25 years old cellophane and putting the virgin plastic on the turntable for it’s only spin while I recorded it to tape. The LP sucked; sucked bad. All John’s whacked out Zapple stuff did. But there was one “song” that stuck with me. Called, appropriately, “Baby’s Heartbeat,” it was a recording of their (sadly later miscarried) baby’s tiny heart swisha-woosha-swisha-wooshing blood through his tiny developing body. I thought it was fascinating. I wonder what I’ll feel when I hear Lil’ Chino’s… part of me thinks I’ll be stricken dumb with awe, while part of me thinks I’ll take it in stride. Whichever it ends up being, I’m ultimate-glad that I chose to stay home for it.

It’s 11pm now and I came back here to try and write another couple paragraphs, this sentence is as far as I got.

Goodnight.

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chapter two


They say bad things happen in threes. Not sure if that’s true for good things too, or maybe just “things” in general. I guess if you lose the bad/good qualification, the statement doesn’t make much sense: “things happen in threes.” Sure they do, and fours and eights too. Good things, to me, though, have indeed seemingly been happening together. I may even talk about one or two in today’s entry.

Let’s get right down to it then: we’re having a baby.

We created life. I wrote this the day I found out:

Your birthday will be in February or March. Which means you’ll likely be an Aquarius or maybe Pisces or, in China, a Dog – not that I hold with that kinda stuff. I will be 29 when you arrive, a good age for a father, right?

I thought about you when I called my pops on father’s day and it hit me that it would be my last non-qualifying one. I thought about you when I remembered our non-refundable tickets to World Cup in Germany next year. I thought about you and how much I’ve been away from home for work this year. I thought about you a lot when I was drunk in a seedy club at 3am in Manhattan; and how I feel like I’m ready to be done with that scene and wished you were already here so I wouldn’t have been there.

I kinda think I want you to be a boy, but I won’t be mad should you choose a vagina.

I’ve already started thinking about converting the spare bedroom into your nursery, about whether those little outlet covers are just 1st-time parent paranoia, about diapers, and high chairs, and carseats. Your coming arrival has got me thinking about all sorts of things I’ve never considered before… Money; you make me think about money.

I guess I wonder the same things as most people… and I guess, in reality, I know the answers to most. I mean, things like how our relationships with our friends will change. I know the answer already, it’s just kind of sad to realize that a whole way of life that we’ve become accustomed to over the past few years is coming to and end. Then again, it’s the most exciting prospect I’ve ever dealt with… not the changing relationships part, the creating another human part.

Like billions and billions of humans before us, we’ve managed to do our part in sustaining the species. It’s an amazing prospect, really, and completely mindblowing. To think that there is a completely “new” human, growing up from what I’d consider essentially “nothing” somewhere inside my wife’s own body. This thing is busy transforming from nothing into something completely amazing. It will come out as a working thing, and I’m sure one day when it’s a teenager it’ll love that I referred to it as such. “Thanks dad, I’m a ‘working thing’ huh?” But really, I’ve long been staggered by the thought of babies. What an amazing process, how incomprehensibly complex and precise, how perfect that it just “works.” Oh, we’ve been reading books and doing our research and whatnot, and, man, I can see how you could potentially get really freaked out that it might not “just work.” I mean, it’s amazing how precious this little developing thing immediately becomes to you, even if it looks more like a tadpole than a human right now; you want to protect it and the vessel carrying it like they were the Crown Jewels.

I remember reading somewhere that, in the old days, expectant Chinese women would work tending the rice fields right up until they went into labor, and, after popping out their new child, would return to the paddies as soon as they could walk. That’s interesting to me, because it tells me that, at some fundamental level, pregnancy is supposed to work. I often find myself falling back to the “caveman argument.” It’s something of my own invention, really, but, I always catch myself thinking things like, “Cavemen didn’t have toothpaste,” or, “Cavemen didn’t know about cholesterol.” Likewise, cavemen probably didn’t do much in the way of prenatal care… yet here we are, living proof that their lineage survived. Makes me think that the process has been designed to just work, designed not to go wrong. Not that I’d use that as some Christian Scientist cult-think and forgo the benefits of modern medicine… it’s just a point of comfort for me with all the potential fear-mongering out there.

In other news, I continue to work myself ragged. I’m not kidding. I’m working till midnight most evenings, trying to do my best to suppress the list of “to do tonight” things that I pile up during the day. Semi-related, work promoted me to a management position. It’s not the reason I’ve been working so hard, but it sure isn’t helping. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not going to start talking about work in depth here, I firmly decided against that on blog day one, but I figured the promotion is having a big enough impact on my life now that it’s worthy of documentation. Anyway, it’s exciting, and a bit daunting, to think that I now have people who “report to” me, whatever that means. I’ve never been a control freak… and I still maintain that I’ve managed to coast to success with the help of luck more than skill or knowledge. Call it humility or whatever, but I know my deep-down slacker core, and it is alive and well. Underlining it all, though, is a intense feeling of accomplishment. I feeling of vindication, like I’ve been formally recognized for doing well, officially acknowledged in front of my peers as someone who’s worthy of leadership. Maybe that’s a bit big-headed, but it’s honest.

So, those are my two big things. I’ve been keeping these couple things to myself for over a month… trying to write around them and come up with other things to talk about, even though they’re really the only two things that’ve been on my mind at all. Work has been all-consuming from a non-emotional standpoint, and Lil’ Chino (what we call the growing child in my wife’s belly) all-consuming from the emotional side. I’m not sure to what extent either happening will or won’t change the blog, but it’s kinda silly to think there’ll be no impact at all. Blogging with-child will at least give me plenty to write about, and blogging as-manager will likely reduce my already slim “grindstone” category… as I’ll likely be more guarded where I may have previously been somewhat candid.

I wanted to mention that, at my ten year high school reunion this past weekend, someone I literally hadn’t seen in ten years told me that they’d been to this very page. Now, I don’t know if said person is a recurring visitor, but it was an interesting statement to hear. It of course made me happy, being the attention-feeder I am at heart, I always love to hear about unknown readership. I shouldn’t try to pawn it off as some amazing thing, after all, I did link our classmates.com profile directly to sounds familiar… so it’s not all that far-fetched that someone I went to school with might happen here. Continuing on the reunion theme, I wanted to give it a proper writeup.

I thought it was excellent, although I wish we’d had more time to socialize. There was a dinner even the first night, which Sharaun and I were able to attend in full, as well as an after-party that night. But we had only ten short minutes at Sunday’s “kids invited” BBQ, which is where I really wish I could’ve spent more time catching up with those whom I didn’t already know what was going with. The first evening’s after-party made me a bit sad… to see some folks seemingly still stuck in that endless cycle of booze and dope, despite the fact that they are nearing their 30s and now responsible for children as well as themselves. The drugs in my hometown are plentiful, to say the least, and it’s all to easy to get trapped in that scene. I didn’t like seeing mothers whose children were asleep in beds far away puffing on joints or coming out of the bathroom in threes. I dunno, I guess that’s the real world, or something… I still don’t have to like it. Not that I’m knocking you, dope-smoking mothers, should you be reading this… you can do what you want and may be a stellar parent – you’re bag just ain’t my bag, that’s all. We’re still cool.

I shoulda split this one up over two days, to at least guarantee some posting consistency… but I didn’t. Before I go, someone at work turned me on to this homemade thing the other day and I thought it was pretty funny. Maybe that means I’m a huge nerd…

‘Night.

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my testicles hurt

Mercy me.
I used to joke with Sharaun that I must have some sort of internal “timer” that finds me visiting the emergency room whenever it runs down and resets for the next time. Sitting in the crowded waiting room now, I can remember the last time I was in a place like this – nearly a year ago. Hospitals suck. They suck bad.

This weekend was a whirlwind of travel. Sharaun and I flew home to Florida for our ten year high school reunion. Took the redeye into Orlando, leaving Thursday arriving Friday, and then flew back to Northern California Sunday morning. The trip wasn’t as long as I wanted, more run-run-run than relaxation, but it was good. Without going into the long of it, the short of it is that we had a great time. Saw some folks I literally hadn’t seen in ten years. Cheap beer and wish-I-hadn’t cigarettes filled two social-centric evenings with old friends. Since we were in Florida, we dined primarily the standard hot wings, southern barbecue, and sweet tea fare – stuff you just don’t get here in California. Fried alligator tail and Bud Light make for one hell of a fine southern meal.

I guess I’m not much in a writing mood. It’s late, I’m grumpy from flying and not getting enough sleep for the past three days. My Economy Plus seat wouldn’t recline on my last connecting flight home, which made getting my much-needed rest more uncomfortable than it could’ve been, and then our luggage somehow ended up on a flight coming in four hours after us. Since it was after 10pm, the next time they could deliver it to the house would’ve been mid-morning tomorrow (Monday). All Sharaun’s bathroom junk was in there, and it’s her first day of school with her new class tomorrow. That means we’d have to make the 45min drive back to the airport just hours after leaving, to stand and wait by the carousel for our bag to come off some flight we weren’t even on.

This place is somewhat surreal. Is it my imagination, or does the societal underbelly seem to need “urgent” medical care more than others? Right now, there’s a completely skeezed-out woman making a series of frantic calls on the payphone trying to locate some cigarettes. Something about leaving the older kids at Taco Bell and taking the younger kids home, then coming back for the ones left earlier. Bottom line though, is that she’s got to get those cigarettes. She’s got a pot-leaf embroidered on the right back-pocket of her size-zero jeans from Gap – Crack Whore. The young girl in pink terrycloth pants at the registration counter has multicolored hair and is giving her profession as “MT,” massage therapist. Cigarette-woman’s hands are soot-black, and her feet shoeless. I feel completely out of place sitting here with a portable computer on my lap. Emergency rooms are sad places, I don’t like them at all.

‘Night.

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hiding from bullets

My little brother.
I miss my little brother. I don’t want him to go to Iraq.

Sure, I put on a strong face and talk tough about statistics and how low the likelihood is of him being hurt… but to be honest I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to him. I feel like we still need a few years… y’know… for our brother-to-brother relationship to really firm up. I guess I wish he wasn’t going, that he was staying here. It makes me sad that he’s going. I wish he didn’t have to experience the war and being apart from his wife and family. I don’t want him to have to kill anyone, or hide from people who are trying kill him, or any of that.

Goodnight.

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ten years gone

Blimey.
Things are finally moving and shaking in places I’ve been waiting for them to move and shake. And that means I can start talking about them on Sounds Familiar soon enough. Until then, though, it’s the same-old same-old. The Gods of Northern California still have the oven on “broil,” and each day is so miserable I don’t even like being outdoors. Everything absorbs heat and then radiates it, the cars keep the garage sweaty well into the evening hours, concrete stays warm to the touch until the wee hours of the morning. Each afternoon I eagerly await that moment when I arrive home from work and can strip off the unneeded layers of clothes and get down to shorts, a t-shirt, and bare feet. As I’m pulling my shirt over my head, I imagine it as taking off an electric blanket, removing that outer layer of clothes that’s just been soaking up the sun. I immediately feel cooler. A man of my… stature… is not built for this kinda heat. Give me mild days and I’m happiest. You’ll know when that happens, as I start fawning over the Fallishness of things when those halcyon days arrive.

The house is a complete wreck again; one of those additive, snowballing kind of wrecks that just gets worse by the day… and more frustrating as well. I hate it. It begins pester me whenever I inhabit the place, my only escape being leaving for work each morning and letting it fester until I return again each evening. For all my complaining, I’m still sitting her ignoring it as I write. Oh, it’s there, looming right behind me; the menacing shadow of an ironing board left out for days, a table still in the wrong place from painting, unfinished half-painted walls, looking like the march of the yellow fungus growing on them is stalled in rough lines. Ack, I do hate it you know. I’m pretty anal when it comes to things like neatness… and I don’t think that’ll ever change about me. Sharaun, on the other hand, has about as high a tolerance for clutter as kids these days do for rubella (whatever that is). I’m trying to resign myself to the fact that it’ll never change, and if I want to have the place be ever-clean, I’m gonna have to pony up and maintain it that way.

Back to Florida in three days. Ten years have gone by and it’s customary to re-convene with your graduating high school class. I’m not looking forward to having such an abbreviated trip “home” (I do still consider the place home, for whatever reason), but I am, in fact, looking forward to the whole business of reuniting. Thinking about it, ten years doesn’t seem all that long – but when I think about what all I’ve been through since my last year of high school… good lord it’s been a long time. Flashback to 12th grade, and you’d find a skinnier me, fooling around on his long-time girlfriend with the willing. Trying to do right by his newfound religion and thinking only the slightest about college and “a future.” Things were looking up, my folks had given me the little red Nissan for graduation, and I’d managed to score my dream job hawking wax at the local mom-‘n’-pop record store. Having moved on from fast food and go-fer positions at the local CPA, I was ready to tread the cheap carpet of the retail world. Breezing my way through the no-more-challenging-than-high-school community college curriculum and blowing the multiple-scholarship windfall on things I can’t remember. Man, those were some good days. Lots less to worry about… that’s for sure. My biggest daily concern is when Jeremy would get home so we could go smoke menthols on the porch and catch up.

Did you know I won a cruise to the Bahamas at my “keep-’em-sober, keep-’em-alive” school-sanctioned graduation party? Yeah, I totally did. And, since I was 18 at the time, I could totally go too. I took Jeremy, and we road-tripped down to Miami to catch the smallest cruise liner I’ve ever seen, the no doubt affordable Dolphin IV. Three nights, four days. My first night on board I hit the triple-7s and took $450 back to the cabin. We had a great time, sleeping in hammocks on private islands, smoking triple-price-for-the-whiteboy Cubans, parasailing, and getting robbed by a local named “Deuce” (really). And although I know many look back on their own with detest, my high school years were not that bad at all. I had a good time, and I’m actually kind of exciting about seeing some folks. I’m sure I’ll be writing about the whole thing, as it’s bound to produce some good material.

As I go, I thought it was interesting that, despite JK Rowlings’ insistence that the latest Harry Potter book not be released in electronic form, entrepreneurial pirates have manages to scan and proofread the entire book – producing a complete and accurate copy within twelve hours of the book’s on-sale date. What’s more, they’ve also made an audio-book version available… all within one day of the books release. Things like that make you wonder, is there really every going to be a way to “secure” any kind of media? Makes me think that, despite various industries’ attempts to protect their content, the pirates will always be one step ahead of them. Seems the best you can do is change the public’s opinion what constitutes “stealing” in regards to digital media… an uphill battle, it would seem.

OK then, g’night friends and lovers. Until tomorrow.

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wheelchair love is cool and all

Summer summer summer, turns me upside-down.
Today I’ve got a lot of images, some of them big. At first, I considered shrinking them so that those of you with smaller screen resolutions wouldn’t have the site layout being all messed up – but I decided at the last minute that I didn’t really care. So, hope you enjoy this Monday’s entry.

What LP sets my heart a’ pitter-patter these days and nights of summer? This week, it’s a little gem called Underwater Cinematographer by yet another Canuck collective – The Most Serene Republic. Lead croon has a very Gibbard-esque voice, and you can even sometimes hear strains of Gibbard’s work here (Death Cab, Postal Service, etc.). But I don’t want to pigeonhole the band… as they definitely have a varied sound… and really kickass drumming at times. Plus, they scream courses… which for some reason, I love. You give me a studio full of people standing 10ft away from the mics screaming a ragged course at the top of their lungs, and I’m going to buy your album. These guys did it twice, and in a less-freaky way than the Polyphonic Spree’s saccharine-cult mantra version (which I also totally dig). Survey the scene for yourself here, headphones required.

This weekend Saturday was bliss. I swam all day in the pool at Pat’s house, ate some grilled hamburgers, and then ended the night by watching the hotly anticipated remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Yeah, it totally does… I wish that’s how it actually went down. Here’s the real story:

This weekend Saturday was bliss. With weather.com reporting the high that day at 108° F, Pat had called and asked if Sharaun and I wanted to come over to his place for some swimmin’ and grillin’. Sounded like perfect summer fun to me, and it would actually be the first time I’d be able to confidently go swimming without fear of death. I headed over, wifeless, due to headache, around 2pm. Shortly thereafter, we were in the water. Together, we balled our fists and shook them at the summer swelter, symbolically, of course, by drinking cold beer and lounging in the tepid pool. Hour by hour we defied the shimmer of heat on the horizon, beer cans amassing at the pool’s edge at an alarming pace. Before I knew it, 6pm had arrived and more folks had shown up for the cookout. Oh, and I had made an even trade: swimming in the pool for swimming in a drunken haze. Stumbling inside, I managed a burger and a half before laying down on the floor for some rest. Waking up, I wasn’t in any shape for a trip to the theater… so Sharaun took me home where I crashed on the couch alone. I missed the movie, which really bummed me out. I woulda done better for my day by drinking a little less and making the movie… but I guess it all worked out OK. I still had a nice summer day, and my liver got a workout.

You guys wanna hear some crap? Sharaun got her degree right, her Masters in Education. Spent extra time and extra money at school to get that graduate degree. Right now, we’re still paying that thing off – as graduate tuition is like 3x normal in-state tuition. Anyway, she got this degree while we were back in Florida, and would we have stayed in Florida – she could’ve immediately started working at any public school with a Florida teaching credential. We, however, did not stay in Florida; we came to sunny California – for my job. Upon arriving, she learned that her two Florida-earned degrees didn’t hold much water here on the West coast. In order to begin teaching, she’d 1st need to apply for an emergency credential (good for three years) and then take some test. She passed the test, a yawner that most high-school grads would do fine with, and scored her emergency teaching credential. And, for the next two years she applied and interviewed at every school district around. Despite the news’ constant blathering about California’s “teacher shortage crisis,” she wasn’t able to land a job to save her life. Finally, a long-term substitute position was her foot in the door and she scored a full-time position. And, for the past three years she’s been teaching on that emergency credential.

Now we’re caught up to the present, and her emergency credential is expiring. Thing is, the process by which out-of-state degree holders earn “real” credentials is insane. There are a couple options, all of which will cost us considerable amounts of money and her considerable amounts of time and stress. The constant between the options is this test she has to take, the CSET. Far from the high-school yawner described above, this is a comprehensive test which covers a variety of topics – and is not easy in the least. Y’know, I can talk about it all I want and you probably won’t get the proper appreciation for the level of absurdity I’m trying to convey. So, here, painstakingly excerpted from the practice tests online, are some of my favorite questions that California kindergarten teachers are required to answer to obtain their credentials:


I feel like I should know this – but I don’t. I think I could make an educated run at it, but I don’t know it for sure. Oh, I have a bright yellow notebook at home that contains all my notes from 9th grade World History with Mr. Hines – it’s likely in there… but it didn’t make it from there to in my head with any sense of permanence. Here’s another:


Double-header here, fit better with the layout. Re: 43, the Radical what now? I swear I never even learned this. I couldn’t even come up with a good educated guess on this one… does that make me stupid? That second one has got to be a trick right. Even if I had ever heard of this thing, all these would sound right to me on test day. You know, you don’t learn California history if you don’t go to primary school in California… Let’s see what else we got here:

Using my knowledge of geology?! What the… oh yeah, because I would have, of course, studied geology extensively in my pursuit of a degree in teaching elementary school. And here we go:

OK, now, for real. Shut up. Just shut the hell up. These things are making me more and more angry as I go along. Soon enough I’m about to jump out of my CSET desk and jam my two #2 pencils in the proctor’s eyes. This test is so stupid. And now… I’ve saved the best for last… my personal favorite:

Oh. My. Word. What the crap? What class, exactly, would’ve prepped me for this question? Music theory? Every person aspiring to be a teacher in California must be able to read music and identify melody, rhythm, and form. Stupid-ridiculous.

Were she the graduate of a California college, with or without a masters degree, none of this would be required – none. But because her degree is from out of state, she has to jump through innumerable hoops before she’s declared “fit” to teach the budding young’ns of Northern California. I’m all for holding teachers to high standards, but this crap is pretty ridiculous to me. Sure it’d be great if all our teachers, K-12, knew how to prove the Pythagorean Theorem – but I’m pretty sure you can handle 3rd graders just fine without the knowledge. Whew! Now that I’m done venting…

That’s it. Nothing more. Until tomorrow, goodnight.