Come Waste Your Time With Me

As I was driving home today, I saw the strangest sign spinner. He was the MOST enthusiastic sign spinner I had ever seen. I always wonder what inspires some sign spinners to be so enthused making $7 an hour, but this one was magnificent. There used to be one by my first apartment here at Flamingo and Wynn. He had to dress as a clown in the 115-degree summer, and I often saw him sitting on a crate, smoking a cigarette and listening to headphones. When I saw today's young man throwing his sign dozens of feet into the air and then catching it seamlessly, I thought of the apocalypse, because here is a character who makes his every move like it's his last. I also thought of Dr. Martin Luther King's advice to "be the best street sweeper you can be," and of my former student who handed me my morning mocha through the drive-thru window, and how she is the best mocha-maker at that particular mocha-making chain.

As I was driving IN to work (just before the mocha, matter-of-fact), they were talking about the apocalypse on the radio. If I leave my house during a certain 3-minute window of time, I get to hear "brain dead trivia." Sadly, a google search to hyperlink it results in nothing. Somehow the subject of 12/21/12 came up, and the on-air personalities joked that they each knew a few people who were taking this...I won't call it hysteria...instead, I will continue to call it...industry...seriously. They said, "I can't wait to call them on 12/22 and ask if I can have some of that extra water they've stored."

No, *****. That water is part of my normal emergency plan, so step off.

And the radio announcers are not alone. The U.S. government has officially stated that "the world will not end of 12/21/12, or any day in 2012." Check it out. After all, if the government says it, it must be true. Apparently NASA has been receiving tons of letters from frightened children. Um...I have enough trouble finding apocalyptic fodder for this blog...WHO is telling children that the world is about to end??? NASA is attempting to debunk the "rumors."

Incidentally, the same google search that revealed the NASA news also revealed several random and unflattering photos of...yours truly. Would that I had that many more than my 5 loyal readers, that I should warrant being a google search result. Perhaps it's a fluke born of the fact that the search is coming from my own ip address. If it's NOT a fluke and you try it, please be amused by the Flaming Marshmallow 2012 photo taken on Mt. Charleston by Miss Gokey.

I'm going to miss Mt. Charleston.

Anyway, the trivia revolved around the following question, of possible interest to one of the hardest workers I have ever seen, this afternoon's sign spinner: people who do THIS tend to make more money than those who don't. I'll reveal the answer in my next post.

Although I am a day late again, I have definitely not been wasting time. The title of this post is actually from a Phish song. This evening I have cleaned the kitchen, sanitized the dishes, made a favorite casserole from Molly Katzen's Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook, trolled for chocolate chips, located a recipe that calls for chocolate chips, and graded two whole crates of interactive notebooks. Next up: the candy canes. My tree only has the lights and tinsel on it, still. But first, I must take an 8-hour nap, lest I collapse.

I like to call what I'm doing, "apocalypse nesting," which I don't think is a bad thing.
In closing, I will say to you what I say to my students each day:
Manage your time, kids. Manage your time.

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!

Product Reviews

I recently attended a professional development in which we read a portion of the 1992 article, "Jihad v. McWorld." Part of the after-class online discussion component, because one of the professors conveniently forgot to upload a question for us to answer, was to comment on how "Jihad v. McWorld" compares to our contemporary American political parties. I answered that the parties are not different and that both support a McWorld of ugly consumerism that I myself also support because McFlurries are delicious and I would like to keep my cell phone in coltan for as long as possible.

So, in a nod to the McWorld that we live in, I offer the following reviews of products I have acquired as part of my apocalypse gear. I tested these products this Memorial Day Weekend (thank you for your service, veterans) during a camping trip to Mt. Charleston, where it (drum roll please) *snowed* on my head!

I finally got to use the ThermaRest camping mat that I bought for $3.50 at a recent REI garage sale. Oooh a contest!!! Ima totally use my ThermaRest again and try to win me some stuff! ah-haha. Maybe. There's a lot going on between now and June 11 when the contest ends.

I am so impressed with the boosting power of the ReVIVE solar charger that I purchased a combination solar flashlight/radio/NOAA radio/cell phone charger. The jury is still out on that. Out of the box, the radio worked really well, but after a few hours of cloudy charging on the mountain, not so much. The flashlight still worked like a charm, though.

I also unwrapped my first Emergency Fire Starter (thanks for the tip, Gokey!) on this particular trip to the mountain. I eyeballed it with suspicion for three full minutes, but then three minutes after THAT, thanks to a generous handful of dryer lint, I had THIS:

And this kept us in not dogs and s'mores.

AND that's about all of the products I've been able to afford in the past few months. I've lived up to my Being Useful resolution by reviewing them, and a few more, on amazon.com. There is however something else I learned during my trip to the mountaintop, which I will share with you-all now:

YOUR APOCALYPSE BAG IS USELESS IF YOU HAVEN'T PACKED IT.

Remember all of the little check marks I put on the Na'he list? YEAH. I have all of those things, but I only have a small number of things in the grab-as-you-head-out-the-door bag. In fact I had to make a memo in my cell phone (thank you, Congolese miners!!!) to throw the games and the paper/pen into the bag. I'll do that now.

I cannot say enough about the value of field-testing your apocalypse kit. Not only does it simultaneously make you feel prepared (ThermaRest) and show you how unprepared you are (games), but it also gives you a chance to breathe air untainted by the smog of the McWorld below, which we seek to escape even as we are entangled in it.

We were able to see verdins in the trees, white-tailed antelope ground squirrels, whole families of deer, wild horses (sorry, I simply COULD NOT help it), and burros to boot!

Summer's coming! It's so close that we can taste it! Happy Camping.