Memorial Day Weekend

Saturday: the wedding/arraignment. This actually went beautifully once we got there. The traffic on 95 was a raging nightmare (not accidents, just stop-and-go for no apparent reason). So we were about 15 minutes late for the church service (FIL and GF were about a half hour late). Getting to the Italian Center reception was no problem, though, and it was very nice. This week, the bridesmaids were appropriately dressed (no poles needed, unlike last week's wedding with the girls poured into and falling out of their dresses and obvious total lack of undergarments of any kind), and the reception was lots of fun. Danced my ass off with UJ, and that was hilarious. He probably couldn't move today. He was announcing that his knees were trouble on the dance floor, but he was still going. There was a candy bar (6-8 different kinds you could come up and put into little take-home bags) at the end, and the last dance was the "Jackrabbit Slims twist contest" track from Pulp Fiction, which was really fun. I ended up dancing the last one with the Don, who was bombed and adorable.
Took The Boy and the Drama Queen to see Shrek 3 today, and we had a wonderful time. First thing in the morning on the weekend is a good time to see a flick. They both enjoyed it a lot, as did I. After that we went to North St to see the cousins and swim. DQ had a nap, and hubby took The Boy to the Don's for the post-wedding shindig. I stayed at the house, had daquiris all day and had dinner with UM and the little girls as the O-Man had to go back with his mother for part of the day to go play with friends. Since I was in the pool most of the day it was pretty relaxing. UM and I neither one cares about having anything fancy -- it's "what's in the fridge? Should we check the freezer? can we throw it on the grill and not get anything dirty?" Makes things very easy.
Have to get up tomorrow to make pie for dessert. Found one more bag of cherries from last year in the garage, so that will make FIL happy. Have to make something beyond that, though.
Finished reading Terry Trueman's 7 Days at the Hot Corner and Jerry Spinelli's Eggs. Both awesome books, but for different levels and very different reasons. 7 Days will be fab for the 8th grade. Have to craft a very particular booktalk for that one, as it deals with homophobia and an HIV test -- but in a way that's very realistic and not sexual. Eggs is going to be wonderful for 6th and 7th grade, esp for alternative family situations and dealing with breakdowns of traditional family. I loved it because it shows how resilient kids can be even when they don't want or mean to be.

Join the Club, Honey

That's what I told me dear retiring evaluator and OFL in the meeting when they shut the door and said, "We wish things were working better with you and Eeyore." This was after ten minutes of me going through the stats of the media center for the year, improvements, successes, plans for next year, OFL poking fun at me for what I wrote, etc. All THAT went well.
And then we had to deal with the elephant in the room: what do we do with that limp noodle of mostly-but-not-quite-enough incompetence? After a few more stellar examples from this week and me saying "Help me. I am not going to scream and yell. I am not going to turn into Marvaline the Wonder Bitch. What am I supposed to DO about this? How do I motivate her to do a better job?"
General plan for next year is that

1. OFL will take over evaluating, and
2. He will also attend media staff meetings (yes to monthly, maybe to more than monthly if needed). If we have more than monthly and OFL cannot attend the extras he will get the minutes.
3. Divide and conquer duties and make those divisions public and recordable on the monthly reports and meeting minutes. That's going to involve some alterations to the monthly reports so that what's actually happening and who's responsible for what are both clearly visible.

The hope is two-fold: I will be more motivated to step back and let what happens happen -- and not get stuck putting out fires (if she fucks up I will let her stew in it until I get a specific request to fix whatever it is -- and that's got to be noted somewhere in the meeting minutes or the monthly reports). Eeyore will be more motivated to accomplish her tasks and perform her professional responsibilities (READ, go to meetings and not leave in the middle) because there will be public accounting going on of what she does on at least a monthly basis. I have no idea what happens if this doesn't work. I guess that's up to OFL.

Eeyore had her year-end eval also. Friday morning she casually said, "You know, I have my meeting with ___ today. I don't even know what time it is, and I haven't prepared anything. Oh well." I didn't say anything. Just stared at her. Frankly, I was a bit shocked, especially since Eeyore was working on getting tenure this year. For someone who exhibits paranoid tendencies on a regular basis, you would think she would have made some effort to prepare for that. Apparently it ranks right up there with reading books, figuring out what should go on the website and preparing for classes and teacher projects. None of that shit gets done either.
I saw her after school, and I said I had to go pick up The Boy at 3:10. Eeyore decided it would be a good idea to try to start a serious conversation about how "I want this to work. I know we had a disagreement a few months ago [hmmm...you think?] but I think if we divide responsibilities it will be fine.....blah blah repeat and rinse [I look at the clock, it's now 3:08, crap] and I stopped her to say "Why don't we have coffee on Tuesday morning before your first class and discuss that? We have a lot of work to do here -- now and next year." Told her I had to leave and ran off before she could drag that out any more. Don't know exactly what was said at the meeting she had, but it couldn't have been all peaches and cream the way she was talking and blabbering on.
This weekend we have the Stamford wedding/arraignment, then two days of family time. Hopefully things will go well across the board. It's getting WARM!

and what WILL tomorrow bring??

All set for the meeting tomorrow... finished my end of the year eval paperwork to take in, and this year I started with a top ten things that were great this year and top ten things that sucked about this year. That didn't quite work -- too many on each list. Switched "sucked" to "drove me crazy" just so the drones at personnel wouldn't redflag me right off the bat (as if that doesn't happen every year given what I write). I don't care. I'm tenured. Even though they had a lawyer come in to tell us how easy it is for the district to fire us (what a great staff development presentation THAT was), the reality is that people in my field with my experience, degrees and credentials are pretty damned hard to find. I have no problem saying exactly what I think -- because I know they won't fire me unless I steal shit, murder someone, or tell the superintendent to go fuck herself in nine kinds of graphic detail. Even then they'd probably decide I was ill and send me off to SilverHill for a nice couple months therapeutic vacation. Well, maybe not if it was theft, but I wouldn't do that. Mouthy, yes, larcenous, no. We'll see how the meeting goes.
There was homemade chocolate cake in the office today ... it was goooooooooooooooood. I skipped lunch yesterday so I rationalized it as part of my week. Let me hear a rousing, "riiiiiiiight."

End of the Year stats

It's May, and I have my end-of-the-year meeting with my evaluator this Thurs, and a scheduled meeting with OFL and The BossLady downtown on the 5th to discuss progress this year and budget items/plans for summer and next year. I spent four periods today crunching numbers and sorting through data to get a comprehensive picture of what was accomplished this year.

• The average age of the library as a whole has dropped from 22 years to 16 years
  
• Circulation is up to over 7600 (from 6900). If I did the math correctly we're up almost 11% over last year.
  
• We spent $15,000 from the budget on books and resources for the library
• We spent $2,120 on new furnishings from the bookfair account (our comfy Costco chairs)
• We spent about another $2,000 on books from our local bookstores
• We had two major authors visit: Stephenie Meyer in September and Peter Abrahams in March
• Out of 68 booktalks this year, I did 59 solo. I did three tandem with Eeyore (that does NOT work) and the other six she did herself. Given that those were with three teachers who have all specifically said they do not want her doing booktalks with their classes again, we're going to run into problems next year.
• We have a top ten books checked out of the media center list, and a top series checked out of the media center list. I'll post those later -- they're still on my desk at work.
• I met with the 8th grade team, Eeyore met with the 6th grade team, and we are both supposed to meet with the 7th grade team Thurs to get feedback and requests for next year.
• I figured out that I reviewed or recommended almost 60 books online, and I read over 200 more this year. That's pretty good given the load of shit I had to deal with.
• I have a working website for my teaching materials, a book reviews page, I rebuilt the middle school summer reading website for GPS, and I've been recommending books to the Language Arts Dept for possible inclusion in the curriculum work this summer.
• I learned to use social bookmarks through del.icio.us, have a bloglines account to handle all my rss feeds, and am going to post the scenic Washington photos I took on Flickr.
  

It's been a long strange year in the Hundred Acre Wood. I am much better with all this webmaster shit than I was last year, but have given up primary responsibility for that function to Eeyore -- who persists in doing it halfassed (and occasionally FUBARing it, like last week). It irritates me to no end to know that. Next year is looking more and more crazed, with the advent of the e-learning portals (read: customizable nightmare for teachers, students and parents). Eeyore didn't even bother to stay through the final webmaster meeting yesterday and so has no fucking clue what any of this is going to be like. Yet she insists "the web is MY job."
If I could figure out what she could do well, I'd ask her to just focus on that. She does okay with the 6th grade classes, but loses the 8th grade classes on a regular basis. Booktalks are a disaster and she doesn't read. I get complaints from the teachers on a regular basis that she is boring and that she doesn't do what they need her to do. We had a teacher this week doing research and Eeyore flatout refused to help her introduce the books to the kids -- even though that was what she had done last semester for her. Bizarre. I asked her to take the book orders we got this year and figure out what we didn't receive so we could look at percentages and reordering canceled items, and nothing has ever come of that. I need to make sure that whatever she is responsible for doing goes on the monthly reports -- so it's obvious to OFL and BossLady who's doing what and who's not doing what.
Is is June yet????

What's Worse -- Terminal Indecision or Common Incompetence?

I blew a gasket yesterday. Unfortunately, I didn't fire the salvos in the appropriate direction at Eeyore; I had the yoga mantra going of "have to spend every day with her for the next five weeks" and so I went down to the office and had my nuclear meltdown with OFL and his compadres. I went out to go collect The Boy and our Beloved Blonde as it was getting dark and stormy, and by the time I made it back I realized that Eeyore was completely incapable of correcting the mess she had made (of our school's online public face). So I sat down, googled the home page and printed the cache of it so I would get it right. And then I spent 45 minutes FIXING IT FOR HER. And I (and our Beloved Patient Blonde) missed Rick Riordan's presentation to do it. Eeyore was at my elbow for the first fifteen minutes or so until I gave her the job of fixing the original page she had meant to update when she screwed up the main one... and that (what should have taken three to five minutes copy and paste max) took her until I was nearly done rebuilding and relinking the entire front page from scratch. Eeyore suffers from terminal indecision -- she is virtually incapable of making a clear decision and then acting upon it. And thus anything left to her gets mired in an absolute miasma of waiting for someone else to get sick of waiting for her to do it -- and then do it for her. I had thought upon taking the job that this was partially because of the "my way or the highway and get the fuck OUT of my way" atmosphere of last year. Unfortunately, it appears I was drastically mistaken. There is a lot of announcing that things should change and that things are wrong -- but no follow-through, no action, no effort to DO anything other than moan and whine and point out ways that everyone else should do things. I have been kicking myself all day today thinking that I should have left her to stew in her own fetid mess yesterday (which would have gone very publicly into today). It might have been better long-term for me to have left her to deal with it and have to admit she fucked it up and couldn't fix it on her own. I just couldn't stand the utter incompetence ... and I really felt that it made everyone (including me) look bad. Thinking it through, I'm pretty certain of two things: one, this will happen again, and two, next time I will suddenly have many, MANY important things to do which will prevent me from bailing her ass out of whatever publicly leaky boat she has blown holes in.

225 of Them, 19 of Us ... I Survived DC

Got back last night miraculously around 8:30 pm. We had a great trip, especially on the ride home. We left DC a little after 2pm after the buses loaded, and we were expecting a hellride home with Friday traffic. Our drivers heard that both 95 and the Baltimore Washington pike were parking lots all the way through Delaware, so they found Route 301 north to take us up to Wilmington, NJ and the Jersey turnpike. It was probably a slightly longer route, but there was no traffic and we made good time. Our driver, Bob, told us that 301 is closer to the coast than the two major highways, and is more rural, so few people take it. Lots of farmland and woods ... very nice!
By the time we got to NJ and made two pitstops for restroom break and dinner, the really bad traffic was mostly gone, and we didn't get stuck anywhere. I think that was probably the easiest ride home ever.
DC was great. When we got in, we went to the memorials: WW II, Lincoln, Vietnam, Korea, Jefferson. We saw the Einstein statue -- that was fun! We went to the Pentagon City mall for dinner, and it was nice to let the kids run around some. Wednesday we went to the Capitol VERY early to meet Chris Shays and get a "before it opens" tour. It was really nice to not have to wait in a long line for that. His staff took a couple big group pics, and he spoke to the kids for a few minutes before our tours started. Our group went to the Holocaust museum before meeting everyone for lunch at the Old Post Office. After lunch we went out to Mount Vernon for the tour. They have a really cool movie experience describing some of the important battles and strategies Washington used in the Revolutionary War -- seats shake during cannon blasts, soap bubble "Snow" falls during the crossing of the Delaware scene, and fog rolls out at some point. They have some kind of vineyard there, so I got Steve a bottle of their red table vino. Have no clue how good it is, but I thought he would think that was a fun souvenir for him. We got to go back to the hotel (Best Western, not too bad) to change and rest a bit before dinner (Phillips seafood restaurant, buffet with some things that were safe for me to eat). After dinner we went to the Kennedy Center to see "Shear Madness" which was hilarious! The Kennedy Center was beautiful, especially at night. The kids were not quite tired enough after everything, but such is life. Thursday we went to Arlington to see the Kennedy graves, the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a wreath laying ceremony. We saw the Womens' Memorial building there, where they have the Faces of the Fallen exhibit. Artists (professional and amateur) take photos of the soldiers who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and create a portrait of the fallen soldier as a memorial. The portraits are displayed along one long wall, and people have left mementos next to the portraits. Some were heartbreaking -- wedding pictures, notes from the soldier's children or parents... the one that said "Merry Christmas Daddy, we love you" just shattered me. The kids behaved pretty well. We went to see the Marine War Memorial (Iwo Jima) and I got some great shots there. The optical illusion of the flag raising is amazing!
We went to the Air and Space museum for lunch, and that was a raging disaster. The museum was phenomenally crowded with school groups, and the food court area was so jammed my claustrophobia kicked in and I had to get out. I went outside and got a hot dog and a pretzel from one of the vendors and didn't bother with my lunch coupon. When the kids met us outside, we divvied up, and I took a group of about 10 to the National Archives to see if we could get in. The line was about 300 people long and it didn't budge at all, so we ditched that and went across the street to see the sculpture garden. The kids had a great time there! After that we met up with the rest of the group at the museum of Natural History for about an hour (in which we lost one kid for about 20 minutes, but she had enough sense to go to the security office and wait for us to find her). Back to the hotel again and we got changed for the dinner cruise on the Spirit of Washington. The buffet was decent, the kids were great, but the damn boat kept going in circles on the Potomac! I got mildly nauseous several times -- never bad enough to hurl, but I had to go out and get air a lot. They had a couple dance contests, and the kids were pretty funny. I managed to avoid the chaperone dance contest, which was won hands down by Senora Sam Juliano. The next morning we went to the Washington monument (again, avoided that one because I knew the claustrophobia would make me miserable). I had a ton of fun taking pics of the kids outside the monument, though. We went to the FDR memorial (kids misbehaved some and pissed off some old people, which was embarrassing), and then we went out to Hain's Point and saw The Awakening sculpture. Lunch was at Pentagon City mall again, and then we got on the buses to go home. The weather was great all week. The one really cool morning turned out to be the Arlington morning, so it was nice to walk all over and not sweat to death.
Memorable moments: the kid who earned himself the nickname "Captain Underpants" when he took a flying leap off the Jefferson Memorial steps and his shorts ended up around his ankles. He also managed to accidentally knock over a wreath in the Women's Memorial building in Arlington. Then there was the group at the WWII Memorial lying on the ground attempting to take shots of the Washington Monument appearing out of their crotches. I went over and used Jo Frame's infamous line: "You WISH!" before I told them that every grownup at the memorial knew what they were doing and it wasn't appropriate behavior for a memorial -- so get up. We played the Dating Game and Rumor Patrol on the bus, and virtually every movie the kids brought to watch on the bus was inappropriate (they actually brought Borat!). We ended up with Rush Hour and season one of Family Guy on the way home, which worked out well. Then there was the infamous bathroom incident on our bus -- one of the boys was in the (unlocked) bathroom on his cell phone, and I went back thinking there was no one in there and I could use the bathroom. Although he was fully dressed, he was convinced I thought he was in there jerking off! This of course was something the other kids found to be the height of hilarity.
We had some phenomenally immature behavior from some of the newer teachers... stuff I both didn't expect and was absolutely bowled over by (ie conniption fits over "but there's no seat saved for me!" at dinner etc). I put a muzzle on and didn't say it, but I was thinking "Put on your big girl panties and get the fuck over it." I'd definitely like to go again, though I really do hope that it will be with more of the 8th grade teachers and less of the *problematic* ones.