Listening to: You’ve Got Mail Soundtrack
Reading: Ransom Julie Garwood
Weather: 70’s and sunny
Trivia: Why do we say someone is "full of beans?"
Because we're trying to indicate that they're an unusually zestful person. By 1850, every Englishman knew that any person who ate a regular diet of beans was full of energy. Even though there was no real evidence to back the belief, every veteran horseman was sure that beans constituted a unique kind of food. An animal regularly fed on them, it was thought, was noticeably frisky and energetic. Small wonder that any lively two-legged
creature seeming to have boundless energy was compared with a horse that was full of pep.
Cool word: espionage [n. ES-pee-uh-nazh]
To engage in espionage is to spy secretly on another party who is an enemy or a potential enemy. This other party can be a foreign government or a company or other organization, but not usually an individual. In the distant past, the prehistoric root spek- (to observe) gave rise to Germanic spehon (watcher). From that word, Old Italian had
spione (spy), which led to Old French espionner (to spy), the source of English spy. Later, there was French espionnage, the immediate ancestor of English espionage. Other words also branched out from the ancient spek-, including Latin specere (to look at), which gave rise to specimen, spectacle, spectrum, aspect, despise, expect, inspect, perspective, prospect, suspect, and many other words.
Flipping Out
I made a huge error on Tuesday. I assumed that I’d be able to write my entry when I got in from rehearsal. Big mistake.
Rehearsal was a horror show. I ended up not getting home until almost one a.m. and I was too exhausted to sit and write anything.
All sorts of huge problems came up Tuesday night, many of them technical staging kinds of things, which no one knew how to deal with. Except for me, that is. This is one of those times when knowledge is a dangerous thing. The thing that really gets to me though, is that these were questions I'd raised last July, and I was told not to worry it was all being taken care of. Turns out they spread all the parts of this so thin, farming it off to so many different people, that they never talked to each other to be sure the plan was coordinated and would work. It won't, so now I'm scrambling and trying to get the lighting and sound dealt with, and I'm trying to rewrite the script to include light and sound cues.
I basically flipped out at people Tuesday night. It was really ugly. Everyone was screaming at each other, then were screaming at me that I needed to do something about all these problems. I had worked out the timing of the entire show, so as to not have a lot of white space, and suddenly the raffle people have a plan to announce the winners during intermission and it’s going to take a half hour. No way. So I was trying to reach a compromise and they were shrieking at me.
Then the treasurer announced that she wasn’t going to bring the checkbook on Sunday to pay any of the people who are performing or the caterers, or the lighting people, and that we needed to give her the bills then and there. Excuse me? We don’t even HAVE the bills yet! And NO ONE told us that they had to be brought to rehearsal. The treasurer was screaming that it was our fault and we should have asked her what she wanted us to do.
Wrong. If there was a change in the usual procedure she should have notified us. We are not mind readers and were operating on past practice.
God I hate all of this.
I'll be so grateful when Sunday is over. I'm not even looking forward to the performance, and I had to learn ten new pieces of music for this.
I’m really glad that I have tomorrow off. I have some last minute details to take care of for the show, picking up some gift certificates and a few props. Although I’d rather just do things that I feel like doing.
My workspace at school has shown some improvement. I got the furniture moved around a bit, and was able to find time to get the computer set up and my desk back into a manageable place. The piles of work are still there (unfortunately) but at least it’s organized and I can find things when I need them, and I have room to think.
I actually made a slight dent in the testing as well. One boy is almost done, I only have to finish the writing samples with him, one boy is a third of the way through, and one girl is halfway done.
I’m telling you, it’s a nightmare trying to find time to test all these kids.
It’s not going to be a picnic writing the testing reports either.
I have a conference to go to next Wednesday, and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s all about computers and uses for them in the schools. The first session I want to attend is on using HTML, so I really want to go to that one. I don’t know what else I’ll attend, as none of them really make me want to jump up and down, but I’m sure I’ll find something worth attending.
I shouldn’t really be taking a day out of the building, but in many ways I really need a day away from the building.
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