Goodreads Bookshelf
Daily Life Update
Last night was my choirs' last performance of the year, the Evening with the Arts. It wasn't just my singers, though: it was the drama group doing some skits, it was some piano students performing, it was some kids playing in a rock band: it was a good mix of things. While waiting for the whole shindig to start, I was off in the wings on one side and Kapoo, the theater teacher, was in the wings on the other side. Knowing that this would be my last show at my current school really set me to missing Kapoo. In the first place, we have a good professional relationship: at some schools, especially ones as strapped for time as ours is, the theater and music teachers could be at odds, fighting for the students limited time, or territoriallly jealous of our spaces within the building. That's never been an issue with us, because we're both easy-going and understanding. More than that, though, he's a friend, a good one. If you've been reading my blog for a decent amount of time, you've heard about the fun we've had over the past four years (okay, I wasn't blogging four years ago, but you can infer it from the past two years). We get along very well. His first year here, we were neighbors, and we almost might as well have been roommates with as much as we saw one another. We not only teach in the same building, but we share a classroom to teach our other subject, English. The two of us and the art teachers are isolated in our own building off away from the normal teachers, but he and I see each other all the time, stopping down between classes or during free periods to gripe about students or share some new find on the internet, or just hang out.
Kapoo isn't always the most "on top of things" guy there is, but when it's coming down to crunch time, there's absolutely no one I'd rather have on my team. He's made a life out of the last minute, so he's quite skilled when it comes to working under a deadline--even if it's not himself facing the deadline. I know that when I need something at the last minute, I can call him in for help and he'll be there, no doubt about it, and no hesitations on his part, because that's the kind of guy he is, the kind who will always help a friend.
He's also the person who got me into blogging. For that matter, he sucked me into TV too. All sorts of media can credit their presence in my life to his presence. When we lived next to each other, we started watching Birds of Prey together--it was a short-lived (and deservedly so, but we liked it) show about the super-hero daughter of Batman and Catwoman. And from then on, we started watching together one new show each season. Usually because the show we selected got cancelled. He got me into Angel, it went off the air. Last year it was Lost, and fortunately that's still going strong. Virtually every Wednesday now, he and his wife come over to my place or I go over to theirs and we watch together.
So when I looked across the stage at him last night, I started missing my friend already, over a month before I move. When he started doing goofy things to pass the time (involving a monkey on a spring and what I believe was a rubber chicken), I missed him even more. When he started saying all sorts of nice things about me toward the end of the program, I nearly wept. But hey, it's an all boys school, so we keep our crying on the inside, thank you very much.
From the sublime to the barely-noteworthy...
Last week, I made hamburger gravy and mashed potatoes. This was comfort food, stuff mom used to make when I was growing up. Brown some hamburger with an onion, add flour and mix, add milk, add some salt and pepper and let it cook down to a nice thickness. Mashed potatoes will, of course, be made from scratch.
Today, I wanted to eat some of the leftover gravy, but I didn't have time to make the potatoes. And so, I made a sort of bread that I fried in a pan: just flour, salt, baking powder and water fried in a skillet. I wasn't expecting it to be much more than palatable, but it was actually pretty good. Not necessarily something I need to do if I have the time and the potatoes, but good enough to prevent me from feeling--today or in the future--too bad if I don't have the time or potatoes.
In preparation for my move, I took a number of books to a used bookstore and sold them, largely for 25 cents each. These were fantasy mass-market paperbacks that I liked quite well when I was a kid, but that I felt like I'd more or less outgrown. Stuff that I wasn't likely to read again that was just taking up shelf space for sentiment. I could probably, in fact, have stood to have gotten rid of more, because I'll still need lots of boxes and more bookshelves than I already own in order to move and accomodate all the books I own. The place I'm in now has bookshelves built into some of the walls. We'll see if I can bring myself to part with some more before the move.