Random Thoughts, Notes, & Incidents

After kind of a gray week of the "June gloom", the sun is out this morning, and the birds are singing, and it's really good to have a day off.

Leslie's done teaching for the year; last day of class was Thursday, and she only had minor paperwork to do yesterday. We'll go into school for a couple of hours today to clean up her classroom, but that's it until August. (Actually, "that's it" as far as going into work is concerned. She does have some classes to attend herself, as well as next year's planning to do over the summer, but it's at a slower pace and doesn't involve chasing after small children and their parents.)

Hopefully, beginning next week, my work will be more pleasant as well. It's now been two weeks since we did the lay-offs and other cuts, so people better be taking advantage of this beautiful weekend to get over it, and return Monday with a better attitude than they've had recently. I've been doing what I can to keep morale up for the folks on my staff, but in the end it's up to each person to manage their own morale.

Just finished reading "Fates Worse Than Death" by Kurt Vonnegut. It's a sort-of autobiography from 1991. In truth, it's a series of essays and speaches he'd written over a certain period, connected with notes, memories, and historical sketches from his life. It's funny, brilliant, inciteful, and just a little bit scary.

Here's a book, twelve years old, talking about the very contemporary issue of a president named "Bush" creating pretenses for going to war in Iraq. I sometimes forgot he was talking about the elder Bush, it was so applicable again now.

Happy Flag Day.