A-h-h-h-h, the joy of weekends...
Baby girl had a sleepover Friday night, so me and mama had ourselves a "date night!!!" W-o-o-o-o-o-o-o h-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!!! Over these past ten years, we have rarely used baby sitters (given that she is ours and all, and that sitters ain't cheap as they used to be), so real "date nights" have been few and far between for us. Getting ready for our night on the town, I decided that I was rockin' my new Merrell mocs that had just come Friday via UPS. Mama, of course, looked beautiful, as always. After dropping our daughter off at her friend's house, we went to Bonefish Grill where we enjoyed a nice meal. I guess, that is, if you call three orders of "Bang Bang" Shrimp a meal. You see, when we make up our minds that we like something, we really like it, and our taste buds become relatively tunnel-visioned. From the bar, mama ordered her standard potable, the pomegranate martini. I spotted a craft beer called "Arrogant Bastard Ale" (how ironic) on the drink menu. I love micro-brews, so I decided to give it a try. When the waiter came out with it, I swear I thought it was a bottle of wine. It was a monstrous, 22 ounce bottle of beer boasting a prodigious kick (7.2%, whoa...). Fortunately, our movie start time was still an hour away, so I took it slow and savored it. It was really very good, though NOT necessarily $11 good (...however, it was, after all, almost two "normal" beers, so I guess it wasn't as expensive as that $8 Chimay that I once consumed...dang waitress didn't even bother to tell me it was that much until I ordered my second one...guilt over greed, I suppose). I was somewhat puzzled by the name of this ale, however, and could not, for the life of me, recall having agreed to any endorsement deal for it with this brewer. I chuckled to myself at the thought of an endorsement deal. So many of the people that I have brief encounters with in life develop just that impression of me. I really don't know why I emit that aura. In reality, I'm actually rather shy and suffer from relatively low self-esteem. When it comes to having to interact with most other adults, I'm somewhat socially inept, almost hermit-like I've always rationalized this attribute as being the by-product of my having spent most of my adult life interacting with teenagers rather than other adults...but I think that my aloof, if not completely standoffish curmudgeon routine is probably just a coping mechanism for my inner inadequacies.
After dinner, we drove to the theater where we saw The Dilemma. It was a riotously hilarious portrayal of the quandary that a best friend finds himself in when he witnesses his dawg's wife cheating on him and then struggles with whether and how to break the news to his pal. While Vince Vaughn looked really rough in the flick, he was as funny as ever playing the best bud caught between a rock and a hard place. Highly recommend the film. We had a really nice night together...alone. I look forward to our next "date night." It's good to be "us" instead of just mama and daddy...but that's good too.
Watching Fox and Friends either Saturday or Sunday morning, I heard them do a story about former D.C. school chancellor (we call 'em superintendents in these parts), Michelle Rhee, and her nationwide initiative to get school systems to rely upon performance evaluations, rather than tenure, for making RIF (reduction in force...in other words, gettin' rid of folks) decisions. While I loves me some F&F and a cup of coffee (several actually...been using my new Keurig what Mama got for me playin' Dirty Santa at Christmas) on the weekend, I have always found the otherwise conservative personalities to be somewhat liberal and anti-school when it comes to school-related issues and stories. I'm not really a proponent of tenure (in fact, I have gravitated toward advocacy of merit pay), but on this day, the hosts went way beyond that discussion to generalize that young teachers are all the bomb and that teachers nearing the "twilight" of their careers are basically all skating their way to the finish line, doing as little as they possibly can. Alisyn Camerota made the on-air observation that the grizzled veterans barely managed to "grunt in my direction" when she was a school girl. Being eighty-four work days from retirement, I took exception to their sophomoric (get it?) generalizations. I hammered out an email telling them that I would like to say that on my last day as a teacher I would do the job as well as I did it on my first but that doing so would be a lie. It would be a lie because on my final day I know that I will be so much more effective, so much more skilled, so much wiser, more passionate, more patient, and more invested than I could have possibly been all those many years ago when I began in this profession. I proceeded to share with them that we educators would just have to muddle through, endeavoring to persevere to do the best that we can, however inept it might be, to deal with the challenges and obstacles that education faces today, especially given the fact that all of the really smart people had obviously gone into broadcast journalism. I would have thought that avoiding such sweeping generalizations would have been taught in Journalism 101.
Other weekend highlights...Duke (Blue Devils Men's Basketball) won Saturday afternoon. Duke basketball is one of my passions. Since I gave up coaching almost four years ago, watching Coach K and the boys is how I get my satisfy my "basketball jones." I've been a fan since watching them in the 1978 NCAA tournament. After suffering through UGA and Auburn basketball throughout college, I realized watching them that was how basketball was supposed to be played. We've been mired in our usual mid-January shooting slump and really haven't played very well, except in spurts, in a while. Still, the season has a long way to go, and there seems to be lots of room for growth...Let's Go Duke...repeat...
A-h-h-h-h, the simple joys of weekends..."date night," morning coffee, "cheesy, piggie" hash brown casserole, watching a movie or the game, doing the wash, playing a game, walking on the beach, sleeping late... it's simultaneously amazing and sad, to some degree, that our lives are so centered upon such a relatively small fraction of our time here on earth...
Baby girl had a sleepover Friday night, so me and mama had ourselves a "date night!!!" W-o-o-o-o-o-o-o h-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!!! Over these past ten years, we have rarely used baby sitters (given that she is ours and all, and that sitters ain't cheap as they used to be), so real "date nights" have been few and far between for us. Getting ready for our night on the town, I decided that I was rockin' my new Merrell mocs that had just come Friday via UPS. Mama, of course, looked beautiful, as always. After dropping our daughter off at her friend's house, we went to Bonefish Grill where we enjoyed a nice meal. I guess, that is, if you call three orders of "Bang Bang" Shrimp a meal. You see, when we make up our minds that we like something, we really like it, and our taste buds become relatively tunnel-visioned. From the bar, mama ordered her standard potable, the pomegranate martini. I spotted a craft beer called "Arrogant Bastard Ale" (how ironic) on the drink menu. I love micro-brews, so I decided to give it a try. When the waiter came out with it, I swear I thought it was a bottle of wine. It was a monstrous, 22 ounce bottle of beer boasting a prodigious kick (7.2%, whoa...). Fortunately, our movie start time was still an hour away, so I took it slow and savored it. It was really very good, though NOT necessarily $11 good (...however, it was, after all, almost two "normal" beers, so I guess it wasn't as expensive as that $8 Chimay that I once consumed...dang waitress didn't even bother to tell me it was that much until I ordered my second one...guilt over greed, I suppose). I was somewhat puzzled by the name of this ale, however, and could not, for the life of me, recall having agreed to any endorsement deal for it with this brewer. I chuckled to myself at the thought of an endorsement deal. So many of the people that I have brief encounters with in life develop just that impression of me. I really don't know why I emit that aura. In reality, I'm actually rather shy and suffer from relatively low self-esteem. When it comes to having to interact with most other adults, I'm somewhat socially inept, almost hermit-like I've always rationalized this attribute as being the by-product of my having spent most of my adult life interacting with teenagers rather than other adults...but I think that my aloof, if not completely standoffish curmudgeon routine is probably just a coping mechanism for my inner inadequacies.
After dinner, we drove to the theater where we saw The Dilemma. It was a riotously hilarious portrayal of the quandary that a best friend finds himself in when he witnesses his dawg's wife cheating on him and then struggles with whether and how to break the news to his pal. While Vince Vaughn looked really rough in the flick, he was as funny as ever playing the best bud caught between a rock and a hard place. Highly recommend the film. We had a really nice night together...alone. I look forward to our next "date night." It's good to be "us" instead of just mama and daddy...but that's good too.
Watching Fox and Friends either Saturday or Sunday morning, I heard them do a story about former D.C. school chancellor (we call 'em superintendents in these parts), Michelle Rhee, and her nationwide initiative to get school systems to rely upon performance evaluations, rather than tenure, for making RIF (reduction in force...in other words, gettin' rid of folks) decisions. While I loves me some F&F and a cup of coffee (several actually...been using my new Keurig what Mama got for me playin' Dirty Santa at Christmas) on the weekend, I have always found the otherwise conservative personalities to be somewhat liberal and anti-school when it comes to school-related issues and stories. I'm not really a proponent of tenure (in fact, I have gravitated toward advocacy of merit pay), but on this day, the hosts went way beyond that discussion to generalize that young teachers are all the bomb and that teachers nearing the "twilight" of their careers are basically all skating their way to the finish line, doing as little as they possibly can. Alisyn Camerota made the on-air observation that the grizzled veterans barely managed to "grunt in my direction" when she was a school girl. Being eighty-four work days from retirement, I took exception to their sophomoric (get it?) generalizations. I hammered out an email telling them that I would like to say that on my last day as a teacher I would do the job as well as I did it on my first but that doing so would be a lie. It would be a lie because on my final day I know that I will be so much more effective, so much more skilled, so much wiser, more passionate, more patient, and more invested than I could have possibly been all those many years ago when I began in this profession. I proceeded to share with them that we educators would just have to muddle through, endeavoring to persevere to do the best that we can, however inept it might be, to deal with the challenges and obstacles that education faces today, especially given the fact that all of the really smart people had obviously gone into broadcast journalism. I would have thought that avoiding such sweeping generalizations would have been taught in Journalism 101.
Other weekend highlights...Duke (Blue Devils Men's Basketball) won Saturday afternoon. Duke basketball is one of my passions. Since I gave up coaching almost four years ago, watching Coach K and the boys is how I get my satisfy my "basketball jones." I've been a fan since watching them in the 1978 NCAA tournament. After suffering through UGA and Auburn basketball throughout college, I realized watching them that was how basketball was supposed to be played. We've been mired in our usual mid-January shooting slump and really haven't played very well, except in spurts, in a while. Still, the season has a long way to go, and there seems to be lots of room for growth...Let's Go Duke...repeat...
A-h-h-h-h, the simple joys of weekends..."date night," morning coffee, "cheesy, piggie" hash brown casserole, watching a movie or the game, doing the wash, playing a game, walking on the beach, sleeping late... it's simultaneously amazing and sad, to some degree, that our lives are so centered upon such a relatively small fraction of our time here on earth...
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