Weekend Plans Post: School’s Out
My boss spends about half of his time coding and so he has dispensation to work from home on the days that he’s pounding away at the keyboard. One of the things I try to do when he’s in his basement coding is bring over some of those McDoubles when I’m on my way to work to force him to take a two-minute break and actually eat something. Well, when he and I talked in the morning, he asked if I could bring over something for his kiddo as well who was experiencing the joys of THE FIRST DAY OFF FROM SCHOOL OF THE SUMMER.
She was set up with the playstation in the basement and Netflix Kidz and a set of press-on nails so she had more than enough entertainments at her fingertips and when I dropped off the burgers, we all ate and discussed what she learned over the past year, what she’s looking forward to learning next year, and how she already knows how to read cursive.
I finished my burger and said that I needed to get to the office and she immediately said “NO NO NO! FIRST YOU HAVE TO GO TO THE BEARD SALON!!!”
Then we had to get back to it and I got to enjoy banging my head against a server with a network conflict while she was enjoying the basement.
This weekend will be one where I will try to see Saturday as a mini-oasis in the desert of summer like the kiddos enjoy instead of it being just another weekend like every other weekend.
We’ll be watching friends of ours graduate to the next level of belts in their Tae Kwon Do school, we’ve got a game night scheduled, and the usual suspects of chores and errands.
And I can’t wait.
We should do this thing where there are a *LOT* more 3-day weekends over the summer, though. It’s not right that the kids have school off and we’re stuck banging our heads against bare metal. We need another weekend in each month, I think. Maybe that would get us to where we should be.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Snug”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
Tomorrow: Metric and Garbage “open” for some other group.
Saturday: A visit from an old friend from these very pages!
Sunday: Brunch and Holst’s The PlanetsReport
That sounds like a great weekend.
I saw Garbage last summer when they opened for Tears for Fears. Aside from the Bond theme they did and I’m Only Happy When It Rains, I didn’t know any of their stuff. That Shirley Manson sure can carry a tune, even at her age.Report
Speaking of 3-day weekends, this weekend is King’s Birthday weekend down here, the first time the holiday has gone by that name.
I’ll be playing some board games with friends on Sunday, and I’ll probably start actually planning the D&D campaign I want to run next year.Report
School’s almost back in for me. I (perhaps unwisely, but it was needed and no one else seems able to cover it) am teaching a class in general linear models methods for 3 (maybe 2, if her work schedule conflicts?) grad students.
I haven’t seen an official contract but if this goes how typical summer teaching for classes of less than 10 goes, I’ll be making about $500 a month on it. Most of which will probably be eaten up covering benefits/TIAA deductions.
I’ve already had MULTIPLE e-mails from the students about logistical problems. I hope I don’t regret having offered to do this.
So either today or tomorrow I need to go in and review. I’m tempted to take a day and just go do something for myself, and if I do, it should be today, because tomorrow’s supposed to be heavy rain, and our bad drivers are even worse in heavy rain.Report
My last few weekends were pretty shot. 3 weeks ago I was recovering from a back injury. 2 weeks ago I was travelling for work. Last week I was recovering from travel and trying to get the yard in shape after 3 weeks of neglect.
This week should be a little more relaxing. I have a board games tomorrow. I just got a copy of Unfathomable, the reimplementation of Fantasy Flight’s Battlestar Galactica with a Lovecraftian theme. Hopefully I can get it to the table.
Beyond that and the normal chores, I will just do whatever tickles my fancy.Report
Oh, man. I *LOVE* Unfathomable.
If you’ve never played it, I kinda recommend playing it without the “cylon” the first couple of games until you get the tempo of “what beating it” looks like in the first place. Because the first time we played, we played with a cylon and died *REAL* early.Report
The Shakespeare in the Park people are doing Pericles, Prince of Tyre right next to Front Range Barbeque (the burnt ends are out of this world) and we were going to go…
But…
Well, you know. It’s not one of the big five. So I did some quick googling and the first half of the play seems to have been written by George Wilkins and so we figured that we’ll see what they’re doing next year instead.
Here’s the best line in the play, if you ask me:
Now you don’t have to go either.Report
I wonder if our Shakespeare festival is gonna go this summer. I haven’t heard anything about it – a couple years off because of COVID, one of the real leading lights behind it passed away, we live in a state that seems bent on defunding education and the arts…. I hope it’s still going, and I hope they put on something I’m willing to sit for a couple hours in a room with strangers to want to see. (The best production I ever saw of a Shakespeare play was at it, about 10 years ago – it was a re-set of Twelfth Night in the Louisiana Bayous circa 1900. It was AWESOME and they even got in a Boudreaux joke…..)Report
A decade ago, we saw Othello. Maybe it was the summer before that.
Anyway, I read the handout pamphlet they gave us before the play like it was a tract and I saw that the guy who played Iago had never been in a play before. HOLY CRAP IAGO HAD NEVER ACTED BEFORE WHAT THE HECK and Maribou pointed out that, no, he had never been in a SHAKESPEARE play before.
And, still, Iago is one heck of a first role. Even if you’d been in plays written by others, prior.
Anyway, the guy was pretty good.
All that to say: I hope it picks back up. There are always some gems in there. Even if everybody around you thinks that this kinda sucks compared to the bear baiting.Report
Whilst out and getting McDoubles for those who needed sustenance, I was listening to the local college station and they happened to play the best song off of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness:
I hope you like it as much as I did, while I was sitting in the drive-thru line.Report
They played it on Conan.
Report
But I knew exactly where I was
And I knew the meaning of it all
And I knew the distance to the sun
And I knew the echo that is love
And I knew the secrets in your spires
And I knew the emptiness of youth
And I knew the solitude of heart
And I knew the murmurs of the soulReport
Had ribs at my daughter’s Friday evening. I’m taking the older two granddaughters on Wednesdays this summer to give her a break. I told granddaughter #1 that we would be writing a story to go with the little monster fairy tale pictures I drew for my kids when they were small (example here). Her first question was “Can I write it in cursive?” Grandaughter #2 is more interested in coloring copies of the pictures.
I had already been thinking about drawing more pictures in the series. I stopped at Jerry’s Artarama on a bicycle ride this week to buy a new pen, as all of my good drafting pens seem to have been lost at some point. All of the brand names have changed over the last 30 years, but fortunately one of the clerks was knowledgeable. I was looking at one of the old 11×17″ paper originals under magnification, and to be honest, I’m not sure that I can still draw some of the finely spaced lines any more. Combination of hands not being as steady, and vision is worse.
My son with the graphic design degree previously told me to get with the times and do it on a computer tablet. “Just zoom in to where the lines are comfortable,” he said. “Besides, if you mess up, digital ink erases.” I bought a Wacom One display. It works fine with my Linux desktop computer. There’s a plethora of drawing software for Linux. I’ll have to spend some time trying to get at least one of the programs to work the way I want to work.
An inch and a half of rain so far today and it’s still coming down. It’s only June 4 and we’re up to the average June total already.
Game 2 of the NBA Finals tonight. I’ll be watching to see if Nikola Jokic and the rest of the Nuggets can be as dominating as they were in most of Game 1. Shaq says that Jokic is the best player on the planet just now.Report