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I had another interview today. It went well; you know, no drooling or inappropriate scratching on my part. That's all I'm going to say, because I really don't want to get my hopes up.

Normally, I am not an overly violent person. However, I promise you that if the hillbillies down the road do not stop revving the engine on that crappy truck, I'm going to turn the neighborhood into a Quentin Tarrantino movie. Every afternoon, the two greasy fat guys take off their shirts and begin working on something that was once a pickup truck, but is now a rusty pile of shit. They do this while about a half dozen tiny, dirty kids pedal up and down the road on their tiny, dirty bikes. Now, my dad is (was?) a mechanic, and I have no problem with people working on old cars. I don't even care what it looks like. What I object to is the constant "RRRRRRRR, sputter", "RRRRRRRRRRRRRR, sputter". This has been going on since early April. I would say it's time to call the coroner and pull the sheet over the patient.

The tiny, dirty neighbor kids are terrified of me. I kept getting ants in my mailbox, and couldn't figure out why. The mailman said that sometimes he finds food in there. So, one day, I was sitting on my patio when I see the kids on their bikes stopped in front of my mailbox (we're rural, so the box is at the road, several yards from the house). I watch as one of them starts to put a half-eaten apple in my mailbox. I yelled something about calling the postal authorities, and that being a felony (amazing how they recognized THAT word). Well, they all took off as fast as their filthy little feet would pedal, leaving the tiniest, dirtiest little girl behind. This kid couldn't have been more than four years old; she still had training wheels on her bike. She was pumping those pedals furiously, and looking over her shoulder like the flying monkeys were after her. Just as she got to the top of the hill, her feet slipped, and she rolled back down, right next to where I was now standing. I used my scariest "teacher voice" and said, "don't ever do that again, do you understand?" Her eyes were as big as dinner plates, and she nodded, then pedalled away again. They haven't bothered my mailbox since.

This is just a thought: we should teach IM as a language in school. I was talking to one of my former students online the other night, and I laughed at how annoyed some of my collegues would be by the conversation. "Student: sup... Me: nm u... Student: sk8d 2day... Me: kewl": you get the picture. Can you imagine if someone from fifty years ago saw that, they would think it was either a foreign language, or two crazy people who couldn't type. Just something that struck me.