I guess there's always clodhoppers?

Take care of yourself, and give Keryx a hug for us.

Hi Iggy! I remember you, and I'm glad you stopped by.

Wow, it's really coming along!

Our new weird frontrunner these days is Nico ("neeko")--we've have three of those this summer, all short for Nicolas, plus one Neko, short for nothing.

I know it's been said, but your skills are just so cool.

Oh man, I envy you, getting to watch it for the first time. Make sure you have no distractions when you watch the last episode of season 1. It is a fucking doozy.

I have always been a bad influence on those around me, it's true.

I've discovered The Horne Section and it is vastly improving my mood. (NSFW language)

The school board has nothing to do with funding, or the unfunded legal requirements imposed at the federal level. In Texas, you can propose a "bond" to local voters, in which residents may agree to pay some amount extra in property taxes for a few years that goes straight to the schools--but aside from the difficulty of getting people to vote for higher taxes on themselves, those bonds are specifically prohibited from ever covering teacher salaries. And that's how you end up with nonsense like the local suburb voting to build a fucking pool in 2 of the high schools, when they simultaneously cannot afford to hire more teachers for those schools.

You want to know how bad it's gotten, trying to hire teachers since COVID?

My kid's school (kid singular now, since the older one is off to college) had an upper level math teacher who was retiring last year. Cool, fine, he gave plenty of notice. Only they couldn't find a qualified replacement. At all. With the new school year approaching, they begged him to come back for one more semester. He agreed, but made it very clear that this was just for one semester.

So they lowered their standards to look for anyone who was even medium-qualified for this level of math, figuring they could train. Still absolutely no candidates. They couldn't even find anyone who could teach lower-level math, in the hopes that they could force one of their existing teachers to upgrade.

With January now approaching, they started looking at completely unqualified people--i.e., folks who had never taught students before, but at least had some kind, ANY kind, of math credentials. And finally, they hired this guy, we'll call him Mr. Bob.

Now, Minifobette has been telling me stories all semester about how weird Mr. Bob is, but mostly it's seemed like he's just very awkward, with a deadpan sense of humor that the kids don't get. Like, when he said he doesn't listen to music because it's the gateway to the devil, that's just him trolling the high school kids, right?

But no. A week ago, one of the kids saw a handwritten list of students on Mr. Bob's desk. The kid asked what the list was for, and Mr. Bob had a full fucking meltdown in front of them. Turns out Mr. Bob is severely schizophrenic, and the list was of certain students in the classroom that he believed weren't real.

So now the class is going to be covered by a substitute teacher for the rest of the school year, and no more math will be learned. And they still have no teacher for next year.

I think it's very common to feel guilty about not feeling "sad enough," even when there isn't estrangement at play. No one gets to tell anyone else how to do grief the right way. I'm glad we get to be here for you in whatever way you need.