Faith pretty much sums it up with her comment.  Of course Gabe’s teacher can’t do anything but look at the book’s answers and use them.  She does not have the ability to think for herself.

First off let me start this by saying that Gabe gets about 15 minutes of instruction on what a proper noun is and 15 minutes more on how to use it in a sentence.  At that point they move on to something else.  The next day they’re tested on it.  Is it just me or does this seem incredibly stupid?  Anyway, that’s why not all the letters are capitalized.  His teacher didn’t quite explain that all letters of a proper noun are always capitalized.  Oy.

This one is my favorite.  It truly shows just how, well, STUPID, his teacher is.

…and this is the public school system that is supposed to be training and teaching the next generation?  I wish that they’d spend half the time on actual learning as they do on the other crap that comes along with school like DARE and “How to spot safety hazards at home!”

Anyway, all I’ve got to say is that if you’re planning on sending your kids to school in the St. Louis Public School district, don’t.  If, like us, you can’t afford private school then I pray that you can supplement your child’s learning at home, and correct the mistakes that the teachers make on a daily basis.

I’m not going to publish the teachers name here… yet.  But next week after parent teacher conferences if I don’t get some sort of satisfaction from her, then there will be hell to pay, and the least of it will be on this blog.

Besides the joy of drunkenness and good music that Rock Band will be bringing to the table on Friday night the thing I’m most looking forward to is the gaming group getting together again.  I really didn’t think I missed getting together and doing geeky nerd things and making new inside jokes while tooling around in each others imaginations, but now that it might become a reality again I realize just how much I missed it and how excited I am for it to start again.

So with all of these fun things in the works, plus the plannings of a kick ass anniversary for Faith and I, November could be a very fun month indeed.  Gaming goodness, here I come.

I’m sick of all the drama out there.  I’m sick of people who can’t leave well enough alone.  I’m sick of people who poke and prod and hurt and rage just to get a response from other people.  I’m sick of people who are selfish enough to think that they bear no responsibility for their actions or their world.  I’m sick of people arguing and fighting over nothing.  I hate that to carry on a discussion with ignorant you have to “sink to their level”.  I’m just pretty fed up with humanity in general today.

There are some notable and important exceptions to that statement, but not nearly enough.

Two Fridays ago I stayed home with the family and enjoyed the quiet life of having three kids in school.  It was a great day and we had a lot of fun until I picked Micah up from school.  On the way home the Mini decided that the drainage grate in the road was too big of a hurdle for it to clear without incident.  Of course seeing the grate is a full three inches below the surface of the street it wasn’t entirely the Mini’s fault, but I guarantee the low profile tires didn’t help.  Anyway, it ended up bending one of the rear control arms.  We managed to limp home in the car, keeping the speed slow and steady, but it’s completely out of action now until I get a new part and do the swap out myself.

That lovely incident ate up quite a bit of the money we had saved for Archon, but we still might have been able to pull it off until our sitters cancelled.  Yes, sitters is plural.  My mom was our first line of defense, but she ended up getting the flu, which we prefer not to have in our house ever again.  With that we fell back to Faith’s sister, who had agreed to watch them for at least one day or night.  Unfortunately, her husband’s grandfather died last Thursday, and they were going out of town for the funeral.

I’m not upset and I don’t blame anyone for anything that happened, but it really seems that fate wanted us nowhere near Archon this year, so thoroughly did it destroy our plans.

Ah well, there is always next year.  Maybe we’ll even be able to have costumes ready a few months in advance!

To all those we missed – Hope you had a blast.

Bush at his finest

This really does it for me.  Whenever I need a laugh at work or at home I turn to this image and a smile creeps back onto my face. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.

Fer me, Fable be a true adventure. I got t’ be seein’ myself change from a child t’ a young adult t’ a man who then got old. True, th’ first two phases weren`t long, but they be long enough t’ make me feel like ‘t be me character in th’ game, nay jus’ a character. I loved th’ graphic styles, th’ environments, th’ different feels that all th’ zones had an’ th’ story, while cliché, be still a good romp. Sure thar be a wee minor annoyances, a large bung hole here or thar, but I still hadn`t enjoyed a game that much since… Chrono Trigger, an’ that be 1995.

So wi’ all that spake, Fable II has a lot t’ live up t’, but readin’ th’ previews an’ knowin’ Peter Molyneux`s past games I be nay too worried. C’mon an’ hurry ye up release day!

Considering the day I had, I’m surprised that this is what’s most on my mind, but in the end I am my most harsh critic.  I HATE forgetting things.  Sigh…  Maybe it’ll come back to me in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow and I’ll be able to get a few words down to remind me with the dawn.

Speaking of the dawn – I’m going to be getting up earlier to get some biking in before work.  After all, whats the point of having a mountain bike made for racing if you’re never going to ride it?  Of course I’d like to get a new seat first, but who knows when that will happen.  My poor tailbone is in for some rough times

I received this email over the weekend from a friendly acquaintance. It should help sort out some questions you may have. The subject heading on the email was “I was confused but now I’m not”:

This took some figuring out

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re “exotic, different.”

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers — a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track — you’re a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

Attend five different small colleges before graduating, you’re well grounded.

If you spend three years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a constitutional law 
professor, spend eight years as a state senator representing a district with more than 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

If your total resume is: local weather girl, four years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising two beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re very responsible.

If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner-city community,
then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America’s.

If your husband is nicknamed “First Dude,” with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

Let me just get this out in the open.  Our country is fucked up.  We are a bunch of apathetic sheeple with no sense, no drive and no ability to think for ourselves. 

How is it, that in today’s internet age, people are still willing to believe anything they see on TV or hear on the radio?  Can people truly not do some fact checking on their own?  Is it so hard to believe that *gasp* politicians lie to achieve their own goals (which probably aren’t yours)?

Maybe it just hurts to much to wake up and realize that you’ve been a pawn of the mainstream media and their agenda for too long.  Maybe it’s a little scary to realize that the status isn’t quo (thanks Dr. Horrible). Maybe people really don’t care about the others in their country who are suffering because of the hurt that Bush has caused to us and to the world.  Maybe we’re all doomed anyway.  I don’t know, but the whole situation is depressing.

All I know is that if things don’t change our family is doing the last sane thing there is to do and packing up to leave this country for one where the people are at least mostly sane.  

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

I tweaked a few of the theme settings of this new layout.  This made me happy as I have no formal training in coding or PHP, and yet I was able to sucessfully implement new code to change what I wanted without using any outside references.  This makes me think that I would like PHP a lot as I can reverse engineer it easily.