I'll get over it

Periodically -- not often -- I have a conversation with someone I know, and that person says something that makes me reevaluate the entire relationship.  Our perspectives are drastically out of alignment.

It's very weird to find out, sometimes after many years, that what I thought was so, isn't.

I think about asking for clarification.  Did the person really mean that?  But I've found in the past when I dredge up stuff like this, the person usually doesn't even remember saying it.  A sentence that has been reverberating in my brain for days, that I keep trying to parse, to assign some meaning to that doesn't re-write the relationship -- it was just something to say, something tossed off in the course of the conversation.  So I don't think there's much point in bringing it up.

Then I step back again, and think, does it really matter what was said?  Does it really change the relationship?  Can't I look at our shared history and see what actually is, and not get all over-analytical with it?  Actions speak, but if the motivation is opaque, what then? Does it really matter why people do what they do, or does it only matter that they do it?

I know it's pointless, but I keep worrying this like a loose  tooth.  Whenever I have nothing else to keep me busy, my thoughts go back to it, fruitlessly.  I'll get over it.  As far as the rest of the world is concerned, everything is OK, even if I'm not feeling that way.  Eventually, I will.

in that groove

It seems every week when I speak to my Mom, there's really nothing new to talk about.  Nothing major, anyway -- we are in the groove.  Sure, RE started last week for me (looks like 21 students, too soon to tell what the personality of the class will be), and the kids had a recital yesterday (they acquitted themselves well, but not well enough by some lights), but other than that? We're well into the school year routine, that groove that could so easily become a grind.

Work is killing me this year.  I keep thinking (and saying, to different people), this is my third year teaching the same curriculum with the same materials, but I'm working twice as hard.  Part of that has to do with de-facto managing the math teacher who is covering one of the 8th grade science sections, but a bigger part of it has to do with our new schedule.  We are supposed to identify students for intervention (academic, behaviorial, whatever) so they can get the time/help they need to make up their work or understand concepts, or whatever.  Exactly how or what we are supposed to do to identify these students was never explained, so I've worked out a system where I review grades every weekend, print out missing assignment reports, and get those to the students each week.  However, that's not enough -- students that fail an assignment or quiz are required to re-take it.  How?  When? I've spent countless hours setting up online make-up for the nearly half of my students who need them... but a bare fraction has completed the online work.

I believe the system could work, but the staff was given no training whatsoever on what we have to do to support it.

Add to that our new requirements in our daily lessons (language and content objects posted, explicit vocab instruction, Common Core standards...) most of which I was doing anyway, but now I have to document -- yeah, that's not a groove I'm in, it's a grind.  

In happier news, continuing the diet is doing good things.   Yesterday we took the kids to dinner at The Cheesecake Factory and yet this morning my weight was down to its lowest point in I don't know how long (133).   OTOH, Friday afternoon I had a small decaf Americano and then DH and I went out for Thai food, and by bedtime my hands were so swollen I could hardly get my rings off.  Was it the dairy in the coffee?  Something in the curry? The rice? I have a hard time thinking it was the rice with the Thai food. I only ate about a half-cup, total.

My g/e doctor was facinated by these results -- particularly the RA in remission.  I reminded him that I tested negative for celiac by biopsy (the most accurate test).  He replied that I could still have a sensitivity to wheat, which seems borne out by my experience.   He was OK with the DGL and D-limonene (I just started another round), but I don't think he paid too much attention to that information.  My throat still feels sore but not lumpy, and after not being able to sing at all last weekend, yesterday I could sing in both high and low registers comfortably for the first time in ages.  I asked for an H. pylori test and should get those results later this week.

I'm vaguely uneasy about my latest walk-through evaluation at work, which was terse to the point of ridiculousness, and negative about a lesson I considered very successful.  Then I got parked in a useless professional development session Friday afternoon which left me even more unsettled, but I'm putting that on the incompetent facilitator. I'm also agitated about how intervention is managed.  Just now I need to think about what to do about these things, if anything.  So far I'm just keeping my head down and doing my own work.  What I really have to decide is if that's the best long-term course of action.

...and it's back!

Even after buying a new Toshiba laptop last Saturday, I still kept trying to get the old laptop back online.  I limited my efforts to one-thing-per-day, and multi-tasked while I was at it.  I was very motivated to get the old machine back up because having to port my iTunes library and re-install Rosetta Stone -- just those two things alone -- were looking to take an entire day that I didn't have.

So Thursday, I finally tried un-installing the virus protection software I had installed, and of course that was it.  (rolls eyes, throws hands up in air, sighs exhaustedly)

A short list of the things I discovered through web searches, that I tried unsuccessfully:

- Apparently, this is a problem that Vista-running machines have had going back to 2009.  Microsoft knows about it, and has a "fix" that addresses it, that resets the DHCP flag.  Didn't work for me.

- Updating the Wifi adapter's drivers did nothing except delete all my saved network access keys.  Fortunately, the only one I didn't have available (for work) the tech guys at school put back on there in about 3 minutes.

- Disabling the wifi adapter, rebooting, re-enabling the adapter did nothing.

- Editing the registry to reset those DHCP, IP-getting, etc  flags didn't help either.

- Command-line stuff to reset the winsock didn't help, but the suggestion in that forum's long, long chain of comments that it had to be the security software finally penetrated.

- The only way to successfully uninstall the virus software is to boot in safe mode so it doesn't get loaded into memory on startup.

I'll back-fill this with links, etc later, but just now I've got to go retrieve one of the offspring from a sleepover.

¡Estoy contenta, mi equipo esta trabajando de nuevo!
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