My Sweet Sweltering Mojave!

It's not Thursday. It's not even Tuesday. Via apathy, distraction, and a brief love affair with German movies, I managed to skip three whole blog posts, even though I swore while leaving Krista's house four days ago that I would attempt to backdate two that very afternoon.

I'm hoping that the magic of the internet will render it impossible for you to REALLY know when this post is being composed. Watch for similar deceptions after the apocalypse!

Speaking of...you may be aware that the Maya calendar ends on 12/21. Coincidentally, this is also the date that my teaching week ends before winter break. Which means that I'll be spending the apocalypse in Vegas. Thus this post's title. As I commuted home this afternoon, the temperature reader in my Subaru reported an outside temp of 102. Weather.com reports that my car exaggerated by 4 degrees. But weather.com has a vested interest in making people feel good. My Subaru does not.

Even if I were spending it in Indiana, however, I would still be warm. The first time I saw the little gadgets I'm posting about, I scoffed at them thinking, "as long as I have a copy of City Life and a baggie full of dryer lint, I can start a fire." And that's true. However, after seeing it work just one time during a trip to Great Basin, I was converted. The firestarter is a much more efficient tool for making and sustaining the force that gives life back to frozen appendages and makes marshmallows toasty, delicious, and possibly carcinogenic.

Here's the process:
1. Buy a fundraising candle from your favorite schoolchild and dig your melon baller out.

2. Fill the cups of a used cardboard egg carton with dryer lint you have previously harvested.

3. Set some water to heat on the stove while you attack the fundraising candle with the melon baller.

4. Pull a tin can from the trash (Vegas) or recycle bin (everywhere else) and get ready to float it in the warming water double-boiler style. (I took the liberty of hyperlinking "double boiler," because I get frustrated when tasks call for materials or ingredients and I have no idea what they are.)

5. Throw the candle shavings into the tin can.

6. Put your heat-resistant glove on and get to melting the wax.

7. Drizzle the melted wax over the lint in the egg carton.

8. Repeat the entire process several times until the wax just holds the lint together, ensuring it won't blow away if it is windy on the mountaintop. *ahem* I mean...if it is windy on the long and winding road you take to wherever it is that you will choose to go on 12/22.

Remember: your new preparedness toys may prove to be fairly useless if you don't take them for a test run. It is also still in the low 100s, so you'll want to do your test run in a place where nights are nice and chilly and you can wear sweaters and hoodies and possibly wool socks and funny hats.

*Flash forward: mountaintop/long, windy road...

When you arrive to the destination where you will build your fire, rip one of the cardboard cups off of the egg carton and position it neatly under your firewood. Because Miss Gokey made a carton full of firestarters in a demonstration lesson, perfectly integrating the Components of an Effective Lesson in an I-do-we-do-you-do scenario, we had plenty of firestarters and I used three of them along with a trusty Bic (because we've come to the time of our last year ever when it is prudent to conserve our magnesium, having practiced and verified that we can indeed use it) to come up with this:

while we enjoyed this:

(them's some Doritos @ 8,000 ft!)

and gazed upon this:

So, although the impending end of the world seems all-bad, preparing for it doesn't have to be. Stay toasty warm (or cool, if, like me, you're sitting on a desert patio tonight) out there, loyal readers!

Can We Talk About the Weather?

Using NLV and Las Vegas's brilliant network of surface roads, I was able to meet up with Krista tonight, because apparently we are planning a trip together! I refuse to tell you anything about it until it happens (unless you already know about it), because it will be really good blog fodder and I want your anticipation to build all the way up through Thanksgiving. I bring this up because at the end of our visit/planning session, we discussed how late our blogs have been posting recently.

On my way home, I stopped at my trusty CVS for provisions and hair dye. They were out of my preferred color, "spiced truffle." They have apparently dropped the truffles in favor of the pralines. I hate fashion. I have met the pralines before. I have a special word for praline. I call it, "orange." Therefore, I'll keep this post short because I have an appointment with something called "medium golden mahogany brown." Seriously!?!? A.k.a. "chocolate carmel." Post-apocalypse I shall use my handy teacher scissors to cut off my hair myself and let my natural gray do its thang with reckless abandon.

Whist trolling the aisles at the CVS, a day late and a dollar short I came upon the September issue of National Geographic. Cover: "What's Up With the Weather?" Photo: Huge tornado that Tom Skilling would call, "ominous."

Apparently, there were 14 extreme weather events in the United States last year, more than there have ever been. Each cost at least a billion dollars in damage, and worldwide the cost of weather-related disasters totaled more than $150 billion.

Signs and omens, kids, signs and omens.

Other news from above-the-fold: avoid armadillos. Apparently they cause leprosy.

I have been put in charge of finding a writing prompt for next week's departmental assessment. There's a video. I used to have a nifty youtube downloader tool, but I no longer have that. You can see the video here, but the children can't. The poor, poor children will have to...ugh!...read. Most students agree that maps will go the way of the dinosaurs. Most students don't believe in the upcoming zombie apocalypse.

To their credit.

We're going to ask them to write about it.

I hope that they do a good job. Wish us luck.

Clocking Face Time: The Nth Version

 MEDIA!!! Is SO distracting!
Case in point #1: today at Office Max. I was waiting to check out, started talking to the magazine rack, and ended up in a coversation with five different patrons of the North Las Vegas store about politics and politicians. Before I got out the door, the conversation had morphed into a debate over the virtues and vices of e-readers.

Case in point #2: I think my speakers just broke. They are making a sound similar to the sound the front passenger-side speaker used to make in my 89 Subaru. Thoughts of my 89 Subaru make me smile. Mentioning her reminds me that to you, readers, I am disembodied typeface possibly created while joyriding around the back of Frenchman Mountain.

Case in point #3: Tomorrow morning is trash pick-up. It's a good time to go through the junk mail pile and throw out all the bridal magazines. I've said it before, bridal shop. Make a note: I'm *NOT* the bride!!!

How, in our plans to prepare for the apocalypse, can we minimize the distractions that present themselves?

AND, dear readers, you can stop reading here if you'd like, the remainder of this post being dedicated once again to the confused psychobabble that has become my m.o. recently...

The point is that I was only in the North Las Vegas Office Max tonight (instead of the one in Charleston Commons, where no similar conversations have ensued) running errands in advance of attending the Division 28N Key Club DCM (monthly meeting) to chaperone the second 1/2 of the meeting with Miss Gokey's Mojave students while she left for her own Parent Night.

So, still and again, I find myself far from my village. You know the village that it takes to raise a child? Or, perhaps it is more apt to say that I live far away from my neighborhood, by which I mean...the people in my neighborhood. Haha. Of course, "far" is relative, and 13 miles never stopped me or anyone I cared about from saving someone broken down on the side of the road 13 miles away.

It occurs to me that I live in North Las Vegas, even though I sleep on the East Side. So, although my presence at the DCM was not strictly necessary, shiny uniforms. New haircuts. New ASL words (I can now say, "like a boss"). Witty banter. A hug. I love all of these things. So...why not?

One year ago, I would never even have considered attending a DCM. In fact, I would not drive onto the district-controlled property surrounding Mojave H.S. Why did I deprive myself for so long? Perhaps the most bitterly contested divorces are just like that.

Many thanks to Mojave Key Club and to Mr. Rael for scheduling Parent Night to coincide with a DCM. In the spirit of optimism, let us assume that we all live to at least the 2nd phase. It will be a difficult healing process. But we can do it. We can come out the other side to hear the old familiar screechy yell, "HOW DO YOU FEEL!?!?!"

No one can take the past away from us, and it is not our right to try to sabotage the future. When the 2nd phase arrives, all we can do is help one another rebuild from the ground up.

Teaching and Learning Relationships

Here you have it: the post I've been all cranky about for a good long couple of weeks! Prepare yourselves. It's agonizingly verbose.

Who knows how it will turn out? All I know is this: I survived my 7th Parent Night. The research on this fact is so solid that even the textbooks reflect it: the family is the primary agent of an individual's education. It is also every individual's most important agent of political socialization. Imagine my shock when that smart, quiet kid (who seems like he should be bumped up a level into Accelerated) walked into my classroom with one parent who was definitely totally wasted and another who may or may not have been.

Imagine the opportunity with which I was presented when the ADD 6th grade brother of one of my students marched up to my computer mouse and started playing with the freerice.com game I had projected on the whiteboard. "Is this Hungary?" he asked. "Click it and find out. Yay! It WAS Hungary. Good job!"
"What country is this?"
"How can you find out?"
He clicked it. I turned to his mother and said, "This is kind of how I teach."

The fact of the matter is that by and large, it is only the smart, motivated students whose families will show up for Parent Night.

So imagine my delight when that smart, motivated AVID student walked in holding an 8-month-old little sister with whom he was clearly and obviously totally in love. Delight that multiplied when he plopped her down into the chair where he sits and said, "One day maybe you'll sit right here," and a face-cracking grin spread over her precious lil face.

One day, maybe.

I am presently reminded of an e-mail that I have to send to the counseling office about one of my students. Soon, the school will open up a new section of World Geography and take some of my students away. It is vitally important to me that I get to keep her, because one special long-ago day, her father (whose mere presence in the same room as mine had an obscene talent for inspiring me to cry) put his hand upon my shoulder and said to me, "You are the first teacher I have ever known who has begged for my permission to KEEP a child in a classroom."

The past 35 years of my life have taught me, though, that those things which are vitally important to me are the very things that are likely to be taken away. There was a moment when I chose to try not to let anything be vitally important anymore. It's a script that I'm trying to flip. But in this particular situation, I vow to ride the wave and be okay with the outcome, whatever it may be.

The school day that ended with Parent Night was not the best day in the history of my career, so before the event I dreaded her father coming into my classroom. Surely, without a doubt...I would have burst into tears. Imagine, then, my illogical disappointment when that family was absent from Parent Night.

I respect and value the contribution to my life that certain people who love me have made.
"You have to let it go."
I respect and value the position of letting it go.
But I have much love for those members of my families, bio and chosen, who have agreed to disagree with that remark.

This afternoon I was blessed with a soliloquy from one of my esteemed new colleagues. I shared my heart with him and asked him the million-dollar-question. I have posed it many times before and will pose it many times again. Are we interchangeable parts, or are we unique individual manifestations of the human spirit?

Will the answer matter on the day the world ends?

For those of you who read this who have never been public school teachers, I pose this question: if you had had a different history teacher, would you have turned out to be a different person? The answer, about which I have no clue, has long been a mystery to me. It is an intriguing question.

My new colleague continued by announcing his theory that we would all sink if we didn't have each other.

We are all creative people, drawn to other creative people. This is why we sit around campfires basking in each other's awesomeness, asking each other what OTHER people do when they sit around campfires because let's be honest: clearly, no other campfire-sitters can come anywhere close to being nearly as awesome as we are. But they all ARE, aren't they?

The aforementioned esteemed new colleague shakes his head vigorously when I insist that Rome has fallen and we're headed for the next Dark Ages.

"No way. This is the Pax Romana," he says.

Is it?

******* Tuesday

In certain circles, there is a phenomenon known as "Suicide Tuesday." Suicide Tuesday has to do with Saturday night. You see, the joy of Saturday night can keep you going through Sunday and Monday...but when Tuesday hits, you realize that you are no longer "walking on slippery bowling balls" in one of the planet's most spectacular natural cathedrals. So you conveniently "forget" to write a blog post, hoping instead that your loyal readers will understand your irrational attachment to rocks and green things.

I still have things to say that I'm not saying, as our time potentially runs out, but the weather on this particular Suicide Tuesday helps me come closer than I have been able to in the recent past.

The time comes when the fodder is delivered from the Universe, and Selene and Yishay and Mr. Boldt post these photos on their facebook walls. (They ripped these photos off from local news sites.)

For sure the second photo is UNLV (pronounced "un-love").
I am grateful that I didn't have it anywhere near that bad. I don't understand this. I distinctly remember two resplendent days of constant rain that didn't leave the roads in this kind of shape. My theory is that the previous rain was inadequately absorbed into the desert pavement and the drainage systems suffered an unfortunate overload.

Bless James Wesley Rawles for putting an index in the back of his nonfiction book. Curse James Wesley Rawles for not including an entry on "floods" or "flooding" in said index. Curse the author of The Zombie Combat Manual for not including an index OR any info on flooding. Curse the Doomsday Dashboard (and the twitter feed that inspires it) for not even reflecting the remote possibility of flood.

So, tonight's glimpse into the earthly afterworld comes to us from author Erik Larson. He is describing the last days of Isaac Monroe Cline.

"He retired in 1935," Larson reports, "at the bureau's request, and opened a small art shop on Peter Street in New Orleans. He never remarried. He mourned the passing of slower days before cars and aircraft, but he filled his time to the maximum. He filled it with burnt umber and cerulean blue, linseed oil and turpentine, and the cold caress of ancient bronze."

Before I leave you with Isaac's own words, allow me to post a third image that came out of UNLV today.
Sure, it *may* be photoshopped. But still.

Now, reported speech from Isaac Cline:

"'Time lost can never be recovered,' he said, 'and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.'"

Rocks and Green Things

That's what this post is:

Another set of slides for my presentation-in-progress, entitled, "Why We Should All Retire To Springdale."
Wait, what?
That's not what this blog is about.
This blog is about the fact that none of us is going to get to retire. Because the world is coming to an end. Right. I nearly forgot. And, so I suppose this is what this post is:
Life is too short to wait.

Other things happened. A ROCK. RAINED. On my head. It was resplendent!

But the life goal that I accomplished over Labor Day weekend was the goal of walking in The Narrows in Zion National Park, a feat I discovered was possible in the fall semester of 2006, when a then-aspiring member of the class of 2011 informed me that he'd done just that. That day, as students' pencils flew toward my head with reckless abandon, I decided that before the world ended, I, too, would take a walk inside these "Narrows" of which my student spoke.

We couldn't go into the Narrows on Saturday due to a flash flood warning. But after walking to all three Emerald Pools and enjoying outsized ice cream cones at the lodge, we were happy to see that the flash flood warning for Sunday was LOW. So, on Sunday, in we went!

Most of the photos of me in the Narrows are not fit for human consumption. In the one you'll see below, that's my, "I'm smiling so hard my face is about to crack" face. I wish I was a better photographer. Next time, my cousin Josh or my friend Krista (who has hiked Angel's Landing, by the way, and I'm not jealous. I'm happy to see the world end while judiciously avoiding Angel's Landing!) will have to fold themselves into the back seat. I'm just glad the disposable camera was in my waterproof pouch when I bit it on the way back out to the Riverside Walk trail. (Out of respect for my perennial travel companion, Miss Gokey, I will let her go through all the shots before I go tagging her on the internet.) Enjoy!