Dec. 13th, 2004

Weekend

Dec. 13th, 2004 07:23 am
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Five o'clock Sunday afternoon, while I'm pecking away on the Treeden Meets Salvatore chapter, the phone rings. I pick it up. It's one member of our D&D group, whom Piet and I thought was in BC on vacation as of Saturday.

D: Are we doing anything tonight?
Me: Well, since you're supposed to be out West already, Piet and I were expecting a quiet evening in. Do you want to do something?
D: We're not leaving until Wednesday. The others are coming over around 7:30. Are you guys coming?

The upshot was that we had a totally impromptu D&D game, to which we took the sprout for lack of anything else to do with her. She was good as gold, but still required quite a bit of running back and forth on mine and Marnee's parts, since Piet was DMing and couldn't follow her around as much.

Two evenings in a row, Elizabeth was up way past her bedtime. I'm scared about what will happen when I try to put her down just after nine tonight.

Piet, I remembered. Tell your mom not to let her sleep more than an hour and a half, otherwise we'll never get any rest tonight.

Anyway, I wrote two complete chapters this weekend, thoroughly reworked one based on comments made, and began the first of Kharaba's chapters. I'm making him rather paranoid. His first big scene involves him following Annarisse to the monastery, locating her by means of a spell within it, and spending some time trying to get close enough to hear what's going on. Just around the time he manages to climb the wall, she'll finish her conversation and he'll be left hanging, literally. Sorry, [livejournal.com profile] etherlad, your character's going to start off providing some comic relief. I promise to give him more important stuff to do later on.

My characters will set sail from Port Spar by the end of the week, hopefully, and next week's nap times will be devoted to the altercation at Salthaven and one more minor incident with the Corrado. I may also spend some of next week writing the ending - that is, taking the character journals, reworking them, adding the stuff I left out of them, and generally skipping over the boring stuff in the middle. :)

Question for those who have been reading the novel: In actual play, we sank a ship and took captive a whole crew of Zongoese merchants, whom Salvatore sold into slavery - for that matter, sold to the mines, a particularly vile form of slavery. I'm debating several ways of dealing with this. 1) Put it in, and have it cause a rift between Anna and Sal; 2) Leave it out until I see how the word count is; 3) Leave it out because it doesn't fit with the new persona/redemption I'm building for Sal; 4) Make Treeden the bad guy who sells them, over protest from Sal and Anna. I'm really torn here. Any ideas?
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Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence



You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well.
An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly.
You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view.
A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary.

You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.


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Or, A Blow-By-Blow Description of My Worst Impulse Ever

(Well, not quite the worst. One of the worst job-related impulses, anyway.)

Two weeks ago, I overheard the principal commenting on how no one had signed up to have their class put on the Christmas assembly. (We have assemblies every Monday afternoon, and each class has to sign up for two during the year.) I talked to my music classes, both of them, and asked if they wanted to volunteer. They did, so we learned one new Christmas song, brushed up on the other two, learned the French words to one, and generally got ourselves ready. The music part of this assembly went absolutely fine. They sang well, I managed to fit in most of the chords that were supposed to be there in spite of my cold, stiff hands, and things were good.

Then I decided that three short songs, totalling eight lines of music, were not enough for an assembly. So I typed out Elizabeth's "Snow What Fun" book (thereby breaking a whole bunch of copyright laws) and photocopied it for my grade 5's. This was where the problems began.

First, it was too long. I should have had several groups of four or five kids doing each stanza. Second, the stick-puppet snowmen were way too ambitious. Not the construction; that was fine. No, the problem was the metre sticks. We managed to find enough, and we managed to tape them to the backs of our snowmen, but my kids could NOT manage to stop PLAYING with the darn things long enough to actually recite the poem!

We got to the line that goes, "They greeted each other with hugs and high-fiving." I wanted all the snowmen to rise up over the heads of their puppeteers, high-five in the air, then sink back down to below head-level before the laughter stopped so we could go on with the next stanza. My kids would not settle down for it. It took nearly a minute to get everyone's attention again after the two attempts to practise that bit.

After two more episodes like that, I gave up. I picked eight people who had not been fooling around, divided up the lines amongst them, had them leave the group and stand at the front, and they recited instead of the whole class. I broke a cardinal rule of assemblies in the process: everyone has to have a part. I didn't care. I was not about to reward that kind of behaviour with more attention from the audience.

So my kids missed social studies, math, most of French and one recess in order to get ready for a part in an assembly that most of them didn't do. Meanwhile, I strained my voice again, I missed my own lunch entirely, the custodian was so upset with the state of my room that my kids didn't get to go outside and play as I had promised they could until they had cleaned it, and everyone involved has a headache.

When I told the kids of the change in plans, I had one kid (Mr. Talkalot, for those of you following this journal over the last several weeks) tell me the problem was my own lack of patience. I came closer to truly losing it at him than I have come all year. These kids don't realize it, but they've never seen me lose it. So far, they're the only class I've ever taught that hasn't. I don't do it often, because it doesn't work; generally, whatever the situation was to cause the explosion will be worsened by it.

So, lessons learned before I assign this post to my memories for the NEXT time I volunteer for an assembly:

1) Give myself and my class more than a week's notice.
2) Choose several small items rather than one big one, and have them divide up to work on them.
3) Have the practising done BEFORE the day of the performance. (In my defense, the problem was not my planning so much as my illness; much of this would have been done on Friday if I'd been here.)
4) DON'T VOLUNTEER FOR CHRISTMAS ASSEMBLIES. There's a reason why no one else did. They are hell. There's too much going on the week before Christmas to make practices any fun at all.

I'm going to do something calm for forty-five minutes, like mark math tests. And I'm not saying another word to anyone until I pick up Elizabeth.
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Two workouts in three days. If I manage one more during my afternoon "off" on Wednesday, I'll be in good shape for the week. The goal is to have my clothes fitting the way they were in October by the end of December. Biggest possible roadblock to this plan is wrapped in tin foil in my fridge, awaiting steaming and white sauce. In fact, there are three of them to be eaten within nine days. But the exercise is the key here. I have got to work out at least six times over the holidays.

Elizabeth has started singing along with her Carmen Campagne CD. She knows large sections of the Vache song, which is about milking a cow. It's hilarious, actually. They do the basic, nursery-rhyme version, then the La Bamba version: "A la vaca, la vache bamba." She gets right into it, with one of her stuffed animals dancing along with her. She also knows a lot of "A Saint Malo," which is a traditional song from Normandy that I just love. One of these days I'll use it in class.

I made it through an impromptu dinner at my dad's, for which I am very proud of myself. I managed not to say much during the discussion of the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage legislation. Elizabeth charmed the socks off her grandad and her uncle Jon, and for the first time in my memory, I got my brother to admit that in this round of bargaining, my union had not one, but two really good points against our board of ed. I don't think my brother has ever before in his life agreed with a union position on anything, but when our board is being so dumb about stuff like fifths disease, it's hard to find any fault with the union's position. Now if we can only convince the public of that when we begin a work-to-rule campaign in March. . . *sigh*

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