Law of Gravity

I went into Sporcle , and I hit "Random Quiz", and I got... Can you name the six-letter words with 'FF' in the middle? I got 20 out of 22. Not bad.  You can answer the questions in any order. Just type your word into the box, and the word finds the correct box. (If your word doesn't vanish from the input box, it's wrong. Delete and try again.)  Let me know how you do.

It was my fourth (and last) day in Mr. G's class. Being summer school, they had individual work (that they weren't doing, mostly), so I had a lot of time to sit and watch them. I had read my Entertainment Weekly , written three (well, this one too, so four) blog posts, and beta read thirteen chapters of a fellow blogger's book. I had also taken roll, kept track of all the classes, and made sure the classes' assignments kept up with what they should have been able to finish. I needed something else to do. I had recently (April-ish) replaced my school bag. I decided my IKEA clock needed a cozy. Let me back up a minute. I carry a small clock for days when the classroom has no working clock. My new school bag doesn't have a great spot to stash it. So, I figured I could knit it a clipped pouch to make it easier to access in the bag. And since I needed something to do while watching kiddos not work... I started the gauge swatch. I measured it and the clock. I figured ...

At the heart of much speculative fiction (and fiction in general) is a question. What if? On Tuesdays I like to throw one out there and see what you make of it. Do with it as you please. If a for-instance is not specified, feel free to interpret that instance as you wish. And if you find this becomes a novel-length answer, I'd appreciate a thank you in the acknowledgements.  😉 What if everyone wore name tags all the time?

The other day, I posted this on Instagram... View this post on Instagram Whoops. Made a boo boo. I’ll have to rip it back to fix. Tomorrow. #knittermistakes #knittersofinstagram #whoops #blunder A post shared by Liz A. (@zizirho) on Jun 18, 2019 at 10:13pm PDT ...and someone commented that they didn't see the mistake. On a venue such as Instagram, it might be difficult to see. But it's such a glaring error. I'm surprised it took me a couple rows to notice it. Here's another shot of the knitting in progress (before I've ripped out the error)... It's at the top. See it? Just in case, I marked this photo up a bit. In blue I've highlighted the mistake. In black is the way it should look... And it wasn't even a Friday night when I did this. Sigh. Ah well. It's an easy enough fix. I finally got a picture of the lightbox in action... I really like how easy the lightbox makes taking photos. I don't like how long it takes to set up and tear down. But...

"Friday! It's movie day!" Last block of the day. Second semester eleventh grade English. Mr. G had been out Thursday as well. The reason was mysterious--confusing texts to the summer school principal. Sudden absence. No plans... Movie day? I'm down with that, provided that they're not lying. (If we watched a movie every time a kiddo claimed the teacher had promised them a movie, all I would do all day every day is watch movies. Seriously. At least one student every day  claims this.) But, even if I had wanted to, I could not do a movie. I did not have a computer to hook up to the projector. (Once upon a time, every classroom had a TV and VCR. Then a DVD player. A couple years ago, all of them were removed. Now every classroom has a projector installed with speakers in the ceiling. One can hook up a DVD player to the projector--I've done this a couple times--but most of the time teachers just hook up a computer and stream something.) I do not carry a computer w...

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know what comes after the last day of school... SUMMER SCHOOL!!! Woo-hoo! Summer school started last Monday. My first call came on Thursday. When I got there, the summer school principal, Mr. E, walked me to the room. From what he said to me and to another passing teacher, it was clear Something Happened on Wednesday, and I likely didn't have much in the way of lesson plans. Perhaps I'll find out what happened later... As expected, there were no lesson plans. But it turned out the class had gotten books and had had a homework assignment the previous day. Okay, cool. I'd assign the next selection in the book (which turned out to be an excerpt from Antigone ). It was a first semester tenth grade English class. As we were getting started, a girl informed me that Mr. G (their teacher) had said they could finish the homework in class. I'm terrible at lie detection, but this was clearly a lie. It was in the way she hesi...

...in small claims court. As I promised last Friday , here are a few things I learned going to small claims court two weeks ago. In no particular order... Being a small claims court judge must be much like being a teacher. He gave us instructions that some ignored. He explained things clearly, but some still could not answer him. I kind of felt sorry for him. If you find yourself having to take someone to court, document everything. And have all the documentation in a logical order. If serving court papers, make sure to submit proof of having done so at least five days before your court date.  Be on time, but expect a long wait. It is illegal to charge more than 10% interest on a loan. (Not our case. A case prior to ours.)  Cases were heard by quickest to resolve first. (Of course if we could have come to a compromise, we wouldn't have sued...)  When your case is done, leave. (Papers were mailed out after.)  And then don't return, wailing how the defendant "thre...

At the heart of much speculative fiction (and fiction in general) is a question. What if? On Tuesdays I like to throw one out there and see what you make of it. Do with it as you please. If a for-instance is not specified, feel free to interpret that instance as you wish. And if you find this becomes a novel-length answer, I'd appreciate a thank you in the acknowledgements.  😉 What if time travel was possible and you could go back and change the timeline? But, once you finished, you could only return to the present time you left. What if it was impossible for you to access the new timeline you created?

The walking purse again...  I got out the lightbox and played a bit with the backdrop. Why did I wait so long to get a lightbox? It's sooooo much easier to get stuff lit well.  I photographed the purse again, because I finally finished lining it...  And now it's done.  Because I was asked, the purse is 6 inches wide by 4 inches deep. It'll fit a larger smartphone. (That's what it was specifically designed to hold.) The strap is about 36 inches long. All of these measurements are approximate as the purse has a little give, and the strap does stretch a bit.  (I have no idea what to price this at. $45 feels like too much, but $25 feels way too cheap. Let me know what you would be willing to pay for it. Don't worry, I won't expect you to buy it. 😧 Although, if you want me to make one for you, let me know. We can negotiate.)  And now I'm on to designing something new...  It's going to be a cover/case for a mini iPad. I'd explain what I plan to do, but it...

Last week we had our day in court. In case you missed it, in late January, on a Saturday morning at 1:15, I was awoken by water pouring through my ceiling and onto my bed . (I explained it pretty well in that blog post.) Drying out the ceiling and putting the room back together has taken a while. (I gave periodic updates here , here , and here .) What we have been waiting on is figuring out who's going to pay for it. Landlady has been fighting with the upstairs neighbors since it happened. The people upstairs rent the place from the woman who used to live upstairs, but had recently moved to an assisted living facility. The woman's daughter hired a management company to oversee the rental stuff. When the water incident happened, landlady contacted the management company immediately after the plumber left. (The plumber determined that the upstairs neighbors had to have overflowed something as he couldn't replicate the issue. He checked for a burst pipe and then if any of the ...

The school year is officially over, so that means it's time for my annual stats post. (It's an idea I "borrowed" from another blogger .) There are 180 days in the school year. I worked 164 of them. This is an all time high, beating the 163 days I worked for the 2016-17 school year. This does not count last summer , which was my busiest summer (18 subbing days, although most of those weren't "full" days), nor much of the jury duty of Mr. G at the continuation high school before the schools officially opened (that would be 15 days). This was quite surprising, really. At the end of the last school year, they laid off 55 teachers. When they lay off teachers, those teachers go to the top of the subbing list, which means us regular subs should expect to work less. But most of the laid off teachers got hired back at the beginning of the school year, and subs were in short supply. We worked a lot. Of those 164 days, I covered an extra period for 71 of them, and...

It was Monday of the last week of school. The eighth graders were on a celebratory field trip to Knott's Berry Farm . The teacher I was covering was one of the chaperones, and I was left with all of his seventh graders. Mr. S had one period of middle school leadership, one period of middle school theater, and two periods of English Language Development (read: English learners). As his leadership and theater classes needed a different sort of room, he traveled to a more academic classroom for the ELD classes. The room he used for his ELD classes housed health classes the rest of the day. It's the end of the semester, so the health classes are currently studying sexually transmitted diseases, something first period gleefully informed me of. (I knew this already, so I shrugged it off.) The classes' assignment was an essay about what goals they had for their summer vacation. And they were less than pleased to be writing. And sixth period... They were terrible in the usual sort ...

At the heart of much speculative fiction (and fiction in general) is a question. What if? On Tuesdays I like to throw one out there and see what you make of it. Do with it as you please. If a for-instance is not specified, feel free to interpret that instance as you wish. And if you find this becomes a novel-length answer, I'd appreciate a thank you in the acknowledgements.  😉 What if trees stored memories?

I finally broke down and did it. I bought a light box. I'd been making do with something I'd constructed out of poster board for almost a year now. Initially I wanted to see if it would help with lighting. It did. But it was flimsy, so I spent half my photographing time holding it up. I bought it about a month ago. I only just got around to setting it up and trying it out. I figured I might as well take pictures of the second walking purse... I'm rather pleased with how these came out. And I'm quite happy that all I had to do was set up the light box and not worry about the whole thing toppling over as I shot. This is my second attempt at this purse. (If you want to know why this is a walking purse, the explanation is here .) I made a few modifications. Mainly, I changed out the border... I have not lined it yet. As I finished the putting together of it just before the cold hit, I'll blame illness (although "just" before is rather stretching things). I pla...

Our school year has come to a close. This is very early for us. But in a case of "if you can't beat them, join them", the school district has adjusted the school year to be more in line with much of the rest of the country. Next week I'll have any stories from the last week of school (assuming I work any), with Friday serving as my annual year end stats post . Then it'll be on to the "summer schedule" until and unless I get any summer school assignments. (In the past this has been fairly light, but last summer I kept pretty busy. We'll see what this summer holds.) So, to close out the year (and because last week's classes were way too boring to write about), it's time for the annual presentation of the graduation daydream. Just to give this a little perspective this year, this was the year that niece graduated. When I first posted this , she had just finished the first grade. (Yikes, I'm old.) And I mentioned the entering kindergartners w...

Seventh grade science. It was a one-off period for me, and it appeared that the teacher was only out for that period plus the following. The kiddos were supposed to be working on study guides for their finals. Being seventh graders, they came in from lunch a bit wild. I warned them to sit in their assigned seats. But, I got howls from various kiddos that their seats were not vacant. One small, timid boy informed me someone was in his seat and would not give it up. So, I went to intervene. The girl was downright rude about it. She was new to the class, in her assigned seat, and the boy was a snitch. Some profanity was sprinkled in to this whole thing. The boy did get his seat. I got a glance at the girl's paper so I could let her teacher know who was so difficult. (The seating chart was far from accurate, which is probably why the teacher had hidden it from me. That's a whole other story.) I kept an eye on Yesenia for the rest of the period, but she kept it to kicking with her t...

The girl was sort of watching a video. Her computer sat on a nearby desk. She leaned over, watched something, paused the video, and then sketched something on her paper. Upon closer examination, I saw the video was instructions for how to draw a gun. And that's what she was drawing on her paper. I moved on. The boy was watching an episode of Ellen . I caught a glimpse of the show topic. I moved on. A second boy was watching a basketball game. Me: "What should you be doing right now...?" Seventh grade English. Their end of year projects were to create a slide presentation (as a group) and a "creative component" (as individuals) on a topic about protest and activism. The first girl's topic was Black Lives Matter. The first boy was watching an interview with the Parkland survivors. Other topics included #MeToo, women's rights, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and human trafficking. Clearly the second boy had been goofing off. Having computers in class for resear...

At the heart of much speculative fiction (and fiction in general) is a question. What if? On Tuesdays I like to throw one out there and see what you make of it. Do with it as you please. If a for-instance is not specified, feel free to interpret that instance as you wish. And if you find this becomes a novel-length answer, I'd appreciate a thank you in the acknowledgements.  😉 What if we had another "year without a summer"? ( It was a thing 203 years ago ...)

Last time , I spoke too soon... When I told my father all about my bed issues (see the above link), he interrupted my telling with, "Duct tape". Why didn't I think of that? Where we left off, I had put my bed back together, and it was all good. It was all good? Nope. Shortly after writing that blog post, I heard another thunk. Again from the bottom of the bed. So, nine o'clock at night, I stripped my bed, flipped up the mattress, box spring, et al, and retightened the brackets. But this time I added duct tape to both sides, just to make sure. That seemed to hold it. Although, I've been rather careful. The bed was not quite feeling secure. I would have checked everything again last weekend, but I spent the entire holiday weekend in bed with a cold. I didn't have the energy to do anything more. But this past Saturday, I couldn't hold out any longer. I needed to make sure everything was holding. So, back to taking everything apart. I'm getting rather good...