A Long Week

It feels like forever since I last posted. After everything last week I was exhausted, and then we had our annual neighborhood Chanukah party, which involves a lot of housekeeping and shopping. that was Monday and the rest of the week was a blur.

Here's a quick roundup of what's been going through my head:

Regarding the steroids in baseball happening, I really could care less. If anybody was serious abut trying to clean up, all the sports, professional and "amateur," would band together and pool money and come up with a system that at the very least would make it expensive and difficult to cheat. It's like anything else, you can't make your car impossible to steal, but you do whatever you can to make it require specific skills and/or equipment so that any old idiot can't do it. If it cost a lot, most people couldn't afford to do it. The current patchwork system is just stupid.

Saw a terrific movie on DVD. It's called The Lookout and it's one of the best things I've seen in a while. Good story, excellent acting.

Getting ready for vacation. Of course the main thing that one mostly does to get ready for vacation is work, because that's what makes you need the vacation in the first place. The craziest thing about making a packing list thses days is the number of chargers you need. I made a list off the top of my head and had about a half dozen things, but it keeps getting added onto. We have 4 cameras and a video camera (ugh, ugh, ugh!) and every single one of them needs its own stupid battery charger. Plus cell phones (rented because Verizon phones don't work where we're going), computers, ipods, maybe a portable video player or two. Then of course the whole thing has to be adapted to foreign electricity. And I'm sure there's something I'm not thinking about.

Had parent conferences at school this week. I like parent conferences, though that may not be the majority view. I think the main complaint is that we have to do a full workday and then do anywhere from 10-20 meetings in the evening, but since I usually try hard to understand all of my students, meeting the parents is a helpful step.