Building Castles on the Beach

As milestones go, I'm sure this is pretty lame. Nevertheless, I'm going to celebrate it. And you can join me as I post the equivalent of a sitcom clip show . (Check out that link if you're not familiar with the term. Or visit this TV Tropes site that I've been wasting my time with enjoying, reading some cool stuff about how TV, or fiction in general, is written.) (Speaking of tropes, that's the first time in fifty posts that I've used the blogging convention of crossing out a phrase to be funny. I still can't decide if that's cheating or if it's clever. But I did it anyway.) How about some self-aggrandizement : As I write this 50th post, I have 49 followers. Wouldn't it be poetic if this post brought the fiftieth? (Hint, hint) Much more poetic than hitting 5000 page views, anyway. A couple of weeks ago, dozens of backlinks showed up on a couple of my posts and suddenly in the space of just a couple of days, my view stats went to the moon....

It's not often that a teacher gets treated on the company dime. Sometimes we get bottled water at a faculty meeting. And most Parent Conference nights we get a free dinner from the school cafeteria. If it's in English, Spanish, and French, it's international. But every once in a while, a school district will invest in a program that's all about improving student performance, and someone has to be trained in order to implement said program. Rarely is an actual teacher sent to a conference instead of an administrator, but in the case of the International Baccalaureate Programme (and that "e" at the end of the word "programme" shows you how "international" it is), teachers need to know the curriculum to teach, so they are sent to get the training they need. I have actually had the good fortune to attend the same training in Florida two summers in a row: Last year to learn what to teach in the first place, and this year because they cha...

This is all Jolene's idea from Been Writing . It's just an excuse to share some work as a writer, but I'm game, even if I don't really understand the point of a blogfest, per se. The rules are simple.  Pick any five lines or any five SHORT exerpts from one of your WIPs. If you're feeling shy, and don't want to share from your own work, share from something you LOVE. I can do that. I have a completed manuscript called Trendy Poseurs Go Home , about a high school graduate drifting toward nothing, and if you want to read more about that, you can click the link or the one to the right and visit my author site. Instead, I will share some lines from my new work in progress that I am currently calling Something About Ghosts and Aliens . A young boy named Marcus witnesses something extra-ordinary in the woods outside of his grandmother's house, and his older brother, Evan, is never the same. This leads to Marcus's discovery of the Ghost living in the a...

Can you allude to this song without intending any drug reference? You tell me: If you listened to the song all the way through, then the segue to the next bit might make sense. Otherwise, nevermind. Write your own opening. Xander is a good eater. I've mentioned before how his mother and I had to learn to feed him because he was such a small thing at first. And apparently we grew so adept at the job that he gained off-the-charts weight. Actually, he was still on the charts, just not the preemie charts. He was gaining weight so fast that he was heavy even for his gestational age, which means that even if he'd gone to term, he'd still be little hefty. He kinda looked like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Tyke. From his birth, we fortified his breast milk with formula to give him the calories he needed to grow and catch up. He accomplished the growing part. We cut back on the supplemental formula, but recently the breast milk supply began to diminish. Now we give him a half-and...

Totally unnecessary. A couple of weeks ago, we took Xander and the girls to see an outdoor presentation of the musical Footloose by a local theater troupe. It was a poor production, and if they ever do make the movie-based-on-the-musical-based-on-the-movie, whether Zach Ephron is in it or not, I hope they don't include the song about Willard's mother. Nevetheless, Xander was rapt. He stared at the clumsy dancing and listened intently to the off-key singing. But it was nothing compared to taking him into a movie theater. (Now, if you haven't read the other posts about our recent trip to Las Vegas, you should go read about Xander's  first time on an airplane  and his  first time in a swimming pool  now.) During our Vegas time-out last week, we met up with a couple of friends from home who were also taking advantage of a free Vegas stay, only they were comped at the Bellagio, a few lavish steps above the Red Rock resort, where we were. The second nigh...

I learned how to count cards from these guys, just not how to place a bet. During our recent trip to Vegas, I was left to my own devices for much of the daytime. The eventime was filled with food and friends and that's the post to come. But I couldn't just sit myself down at a blackjack table and while away my 401K. For one reason, I wouldn't know how to actually make a bet in a casino any more than I would know how to build a carbon dioxide scrubber just because I saw them do it in Apollo 13 . I don't even understand how the slot machines work now that they're all digitized. The other reason I wasn't basking in the debauchery of Sin City was that I had a child in tow. While the Mommy was at her conference, the Boy was with me. We stayed at a "resort" called Red Rock, which is a long ways from the Vegas Strip on the west side of town near actual mountains and big rocks that are red and stuff. Not that once you're inside you see any natural fo...

We took a jaunt over to Vegas last weekend. Mommy had to work at a conference at a fancy resort in the desert, so Daddy and Son went with. Further posts about more of Xander's firsts are forthcoming if you want to stick around. Also, we didn't remember our camera, as we are wont to do, but I took a few pics with my crappy phone and those might be included later. About the airplane generally: if you thought the seats were cramped when you’re all by yourself, wait until you have a floppy six-month-old on your lap. You’re used to having a variety of items within a moment’s reach: bottles, towels, toys. Anything you need to keep the boy happy. But once you’re on the plane, you’re trapped for the next 90 minutes--or longer if they decide to get everyone loaded 30 minutes early and promise you'll take off early but then you sit there in the cramped plane on the tarmac when you could have had more time in those wide, black vinyl seats at the gate where there's room to run an...

Yesterday the blogosphere was all abuzz about this article in the Wall Street Journal called " Darkness Too Visible ." The author makes the claim that fiction for teens is too dark and disturbing. The internets disagree. My Master's Thesis was a YA novel. (Plug: As completed it was called  After Graduation , but you can see here the revised version called Trendy Poseurs Go Home .) My thesis defense committee was made up of three professors who have all published YA fiction. They were each helpful mentors and facilitated my writing in every way they could. When I went in for my official defense, however, the first thing they asked was how I could uphold my novel as literature. I stumbled around for a few minutes muttering something about how Adolescent Literature (as it was called back then) is a valid sort and, um, meaningful to a--ahem--variety of people, when they stopped me. I was embarrassed and confused because I thought they were belittling my choice of genre whe...

I wrote most of this just after school one day several weeks ago but never posted it. You should read into that to tell you something about the year I (we...most teachers at my school...in America) had. I post it now simply because with the passage of time I don't feel the negativity like I felt (see below re: title). Now it's basically just a couple of anecdotes about how your day goes as a high school teacher. The title above is a line from a Nine Inch Nails song. I'm not going to tell you which song. If you know it, you know how it feels. This week, I'm at school at 7:00 am, I don't leave until after 5:30pm, and I'm not even coaching this year. My IB students are presenting oral assessments this week. It's an after school requirement. So I get home and I'm wiped out. I have no energy. I don't want to play with the boy. I don't want to grade papers. I don't want to write. While I was off duty (on my paternity leave ), I would have all ...

Is this better than a baby photo? A blog award is a funny bird. On the one hand, it's wonderful to be recognized. It's a ego boost and proof that at least one person out there actually reads the words you put down and doesn't just skip to the cute photos of your baby, or worse, a dead British phone booth . (If you click on that link right there, you have to promise you'll read the post, not just look at the pictures.) On the other hand, most blog awards are merely chain letters that beg to be broken. At least the blog awards don't come with a dire warming of doom that if you don't follow the directions and do exactly as they say within 48 hours the Rapture will ensue and you won't be invited. Still, I can't bring myself to ignore them entirely. Chanel at Fabulously Neurotic , has repeatedly made mention of my blog and she has recently urged the bloggerverse to pay it forward. So I will. But I will only follow some of the rules. And FYI, I now ha...