Monthly Archives: March 2005

At home, Tember knows that there are several no-nos with Eileen. One, you don’t wake her up in the morning. Two, you don’t bite her, ever. Three, you don’t lick her in the face. With a similar lack of formally training them, Eileen has somehow conveyed to the landlords’ children that she is not to be asked for help with English homework. I, however, get asked on a regular basis. Just as Tember routinely wakes me up, bites me, and licks my face.

Today’s homework was to convert active voice sentences into passive voice sentences. Being an English teacher, I tend to overestimate people’s familiarity with such simple grammar points. Still, I think I’m pretty fair and patient in dealing with the 17 year-old Spanish-speaking daughter of our landlords. She makes it very tempting to just give her the answers, however, because she is kinda thick. My latest strategy is to hopelessly explain the grammar to her in Spanish, give her an example, and then provide her with a diagram by which she can do whatever task it is she needs to do without actually understanding what she’s doing. Something like this:

I kid you not when I say that I drew a similar diagram for all ten of the active voice sentences. One would assume that after, I don’t know, three, four, five such examples, you would catch on. But no. Actually, for the last one, all I did was draw lines and arrows. I didn’t even write down the words. I could claim that I had some sort of educational purpose for this, but really it was just my way of saying, “Give me a break. You gotta be able to do this by now.”

I know some of you women out there are thinking, “well, she obviously has a crush on you.” C’mon. Give me some credit. I’ve been working with adolescents for the past how many years of my life? Trust me. She’s just not that smart.

I had my last day of the class cycle today and I’m officially on vacation! We celebrated St. Patty’s Day in my classes and I’ve posted some pics in the Coppermine in the “work scenes” folder. I also posted some random pics in “home scenes.”

I was in the gym today, riding the recumbent bike for 50 minutes while reading 30-some pages in Kavalier and Clay – a routine I’ve established to meet my book deadline for K&C. Eileen would have read 50 pages in that amount of time, but I don’t care. My reading comprehension is clearly better. Anyhow, about 10 minutes into the reading/riding I absent-mindedly fingered my nose, which had been bugging me since the end of my morning class. In fact, earlier that morning, right after class, I was trying to disguise a potential booger mishap and so was looking down, sniffing, and swiping my nose (all very casually), when Westra asked me, “Are you sick?”

“No,” I said, looking up at her, still imagining a potential monstrosity hanging from my proboscis. As soon as she looked away, I did a quick face-swipe with my sleeve.

I was not thinking about the morning’s previous nose-related incident while I was reading at the gym, but I remembered it immediately after I pulled out a little boog (and just to ensure it was less conspicuous, looked around the gym to promptly make eye contact with anyone who had seen it). I don’t think anyone saw me, but regardless, I was stuck there with a nose souvenir and 40 minutes left of my workout. Perhaps it’s a testament to my work ethic that I wouldn’t have allowed myself to stop the workout for a mere booger. Of course, the it’s-because-you’re-lazy argument is probably just as convincing. In any case, I put the damn thing in my sock and then forgot about it until just now. There. I’ve said it.

Okay, so the comments are working again. For the time being. Do me another favor: if you are reading this, send me a quick comment. Consider this a survery with one question: Are you reading this? Thanks.

So I’m using a page called flickr.com to post the photo of Tember below. Do me a favor. If there’s anyone out there who can’t see Tember, let me know. At the risk of getting a bunch more spam in the comments, I’m opening up the comments section again . . . I think. So try using the comment link at the bottom of this post. Thanks.