:TESTO:On Monday the other teacher of Networks resigned, for reasons of his own.

He's using up his sick days and coming in once a week between now and the end of February, leaving us (the school) unable to hire a replacement until then. That means a month and a half of subbing, for which I am morally obligated to provide lesson plans, because my colleague the jackass deserter sure as hell won't.

I'm trying to convince Oberlin CS alums to bite at the soon-to-open position, but those as are qualified mostly have higher-paying, lower-stress jobs already. And nobody wants to move in mid-February.

So, crap. My own classes were going well, and I was happy with my balancing of workload and self-time, and now I've got this to juggle.

*And* Liz is buying a house, and so Liz and Nat are moving out sometime this spring, leaving me with the need for a roommate or two.
The possibility of convenient co-incidence is there, that whosoever takes over for the runaway teacher might need a place to stay. I remain open to that chance, but seek less passive solutions to my predicament.

I don't want to do a roommate search in the middle of the school year, but I must.

Foo. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I open the door...
...and step into a world, fogged and still.

Lights glow through slate-blue soup, amber ghosts at the edge of sight.
Buildings loom, grey shadows that resolve to Victorian towers,
to impossible constructs of steel and glass.
They fade behind me, and I walk along the harbor.
No difference marks the water from the sky, there is no distant shore to be seen.
Tallships appear beside me as I walk, high masts lost in the mist.
Gulls wheel and break, patterned like the clue to a puzzle.

I pass the frozen forms of great lizards, bones leering past a deep blue globe, two stories high.
A small granite shrine in a grove of evergreen sits, incongruously, just off the red-brick path.
A stone of black marble is etched in a familiar, indecipherable script.

Distant machine-sounds, rumbles and squeals and groans,
are carried through the fog from realms beyond my vision.
A ship's mast rises from the earth, circled by aged pillars of wood.

A metal birds-nest, twice as broad as I am high, rests atop a brick warehouse. A great iron bird in the shape of a cello stands on the ground (five floors down) and peers into the nest. Fog obscures the far side of the harbor (where I began), and the silent rows of houses, and also the green hill, terraced like a Mayan pyramid and peppered with old cannon and white marble men, passed just moments ago.

I reach an imposing building, a block of sand-colored brick. Its cobalt gate-columns are topped with amber lamps, like miniature lighthouses.
Broad blue windows reflect the fog. Steam murmurs from a padlocked grate.

I open a door - it whispers open, and shuts with a suck of air.

The world of fog lingers through windows, the bright white light of inside is eeire. The halls are empty, and my footfalls echo. I pass darkened rooms behind bright-red doors, hearing the secret pulse of an empty building. One door opens - with a silence-breaking beep and a click - and closes behind me with the sound of clockwork .

I'm faced with rows of curious machines, tangles of wire and tools and scattered paper, their margin-notes scrawled in a hasty hand. Books with battered spines lay in piles, on bookcases.

I open a book... :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I'm running away to Oberlin.
A two-night jaunt, on a whim this long weekend. I look forward to it, and anticipate being slightly rushed come Monday.

The new quarter starts Tuesday. My 11th graders will be beginning 3 chapters on the ins and outs of Ethernet, and switching. I may be able to compress the material down, up til now (with more important and distinct chapters), I've been averaging two weeks per chapter. How do you make Data-Link layer protocols engaging?

The matter is easier with my 10th graders. The next two chapters in my curriculum/text cover the "Network Operating System", devoting a chapter to Windows 2000 and a chapter to "Linux and Novell Netware". I plan to emphasize the Linux, and even start there, and enjoy a leisurely tour of that environment, probably with the aid of Mr. Ubuntu, although I've noticed rather sluggish performance from the machines' optical drives, so I may need to reconsider that.

(I appear to be doing rather useful-to-me-and-boring-to-everyone-else writing about plans for the unit to come, in the context of my web log. Apologies, O reader! I cannot undo what is written. Hang in there, it gets better)

We'll take small dips into the Linux-world first, navigating through the command-line and configurating various useful things. We'll talk about the classic file hierarchy, users and permissions, and a bit about Open Source. The documentary-film Revolution OS comes reccomended, I may show some or all of it.

Uch. Enough of that, it was enough to get the ideas out of my head. I'll let them sit here for a bit, then I'll put them back in tomorrow, before the plane ride.

Today, a few students and I rearranged the classroom. Issues of cabling (power and LAN) remain, but what the heck, it's networking-class, and neccessity is a famous teacher.

The best part of today was a fantastic music-sharing between me and they. They really dig Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, although they don't care much for Piano Man. Quite a bit of the Music Kids Listen To These Days is quite nice, not nearly as much angry shouting as the fragments that bleed from headphones would have me believe.

Tomorrow, I run away to Oberlin. And I'm spending most of my time planning what I'll do when I come back home to my school.

This is good.
I don't feel the driving need to escape from teaching-in-Baltimore that I did last year, that filled my breaks with exhausted relief and my return flights with anxiety -- I am proud of my job and my students and my life.

(Even so, when I get on the plane I'll put Baltimore away, and steep myself in Oberlin for a while, and not think of the stuff above until I'm on the plane back.) :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I'm having a blast playing Scrabble by email with my parents and sister --- and not just because I'm winning. This has been the most pleasant, dynamic, and all-round high-scoring game of scrabble I've ever played - by the game's second round, there had been two 7-letter bingo's: I opened play with Gobbler, for 78 points, and next turn my sister rocked the hizouse with Wizards, played at the end of Gobbler, for 96ish. All plays have been universally high-pointed and clever, with but a very few beneath 15 points, and most of them coming from the heavier end of the dictionary - 5 and 6 lettered wonderwords, like Death and Rattan, Zoned, Wheat, Dreary, Yeoman, Joule, and even Opaque.

The game is nearly over, with me just scoring a 42-point whammy on a triple-word corner, having on the previous turn narrowed my sister's sorcerous lead to but a point. I've broken 200, and my sister has two letters left in her hand. This link may not linger after the last turn is played, but here's the board at present: http://thepixiepit.co.uk/cgi-bin/scrab/p4/r7/crossword.pl?board=David,_Kate,_Barry,_and_Faith

I highly reccomend the pixie pit (.co.uk) for your next electronic scrabble game.

All four of us are very into the game. We're taking our turns enthusiastically, bantering by email between them. The board has remained broadly spaced, nearly uniformly filled (which is unusual, in my experience). This is a natural optimization of bonus-squares, and you can almost see the words orbit the diagonals as the game moves out from the center. Perhaps in normal, time-crunched (and wine-laden?) games, players are too rushed, forcing their hand. Or the perspective-view of the board clouds their union with its pointful geometry, and those double-letter scores aren't nearly as appealing. Or maybe the letter-randomization algorithm is better than real life, so the physically heavier consonant tiles aren't as poorly distributed in this electronic version. (I can't speak for the others, but I had a fairly steady stream of letters from all corners of the alphabet). :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I went to the New Year's Eve / Birthday party of Forest, friend from college.
Rather, I tried to go there, but (finding myself on a residential street corner in DC) discovered that the street number I had written down did not map to a house occupied by Forest. Thus a block's walk to a pay phone (really gonna get one of those flippy-talky-handy-things soon), and an unanswered Forest-phone -- I had only his cell's number, and his cell was not in his possession. Flash forward several quarters' deposit, a few aimless walks up and down the block I thought Forest lived on, until I suspected that Nat and Liz would be home from their New Year's Eve dinner date, whereupon I called home to have them check the invitation email Forest had sent us, and it turns out that I had almost completely miswrit the house number! Thankfully, the most significant digit and the street itself were correct, so a three-block walk corrected the matter, and I enjoyed a nice night of drinking and talking and hanging about with peer-aged people I didn't know very well. Some of them were very drunk, and a few were mathematicians. The mathematicians (two theorists and a geometer, to follow their self-naming) were officemates of Forest's, and showed up late (after midnight), and we talked about all sorts of things, from cell-phone cameras, through collapsible paper polygons, and on to Serbian folk songs about carrots.

Followed by some of the better crashing-on-a-couch sleep in my experience -- the hour was late, but not so late that I couldn't wake up 5 hours later feeling refreshed. I didn't really feel the late night until on the light rail home from BWI  (having gotten a ride that far from Forest, dropping off his gal for her plane, preceded by a nice omlette at a bookstore-cafe, on either side of which hanging about with the house-folk and guests (including the character known as Ballard, childhood friend of Forest), in a quiet and interesting post-party morning), and after a short nap, I'm back on track for one last day of planning and exam-making, before returning to the adventure of Digital Harbor.

Count the prepositions, if you dare. :ENDTESTO: