shepherd's pie

had to have a heart-to-heart with my 10s. we had three periods in a row together this morning, and the middle period was art. and they left a disaster of paint clots, paper towels, painty brushes and so on in the sinks with scungy water. i was, how you say, enraged?

i am not the baroness of the art room. but perspective: acrylic paints left to dry in a brush overnight takes a good half hour of rinsing, massaging and soaping to clear out. the same painty brush left over the weekend begins to cure the paint, which is permanent. for printmaking with stencils, we have only ten brushes in the school... huge paintbrushes with a 1 to 2 inch diameter bristle head. if they cure with paint, they are garbage. so it isn't about me, although i don't enjoy sinks blocked up with clotted paint. i am trying to keep the room useable.

so our heart-to-heart centered around my job as a teacher. they understood, for a few minutes, why they need to treat the materials (and their teacher) with some care. and to their credit, when i took them all back to the art room to clean it up, they did a great job in a short time. so i have forgiven them. this time.

thanks to Ryan for the good chat this evening. and thanks to him, i have settled on my next book: East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. I began it a few years back, but then life interrupted, so now i will finish it. maybe even by the time of my first chin-up.

about that: last night at the school i was able to pull myself up the last little bit, but i still can't do a full chin-up. However, I can do that last bit of the pull-up, and hold myself there for ten+ seconds. Pepe thinks i can definitely do it by Christmas - he thinks I might even be able to do two! If i can, and you happen to be seeing me over the break, I might even show you. just don't ask me to do it from a signpost when I might have been drinking. i am not a frat boy.

one funny thing that happened when i was working out last night was that that little muscle that i grew last week got pulled. so it hurts to sneeze and i am suspended from further chinning-up until i can do a sit-up again. the pull happened when Pepe made me laugh in the middle of a lift.

there is a place in this world where socks and chapsticks go to retire. only the good die young.