This came home with Emma today:

On the afternoon bus ride on Wednesday, Feb 23, 2005, the bus driver reported that Emma was talking on the bus and continued talking after he asked her to stop. The assistant principal had to get abourd the bus before it left campus to get the students quiet and orderly. Instructions were given for all students to be quiet and to travel the bus route that way. Emma chose to continue talking after the bus driver asked her to stop. This is Emma's third bus referral about misconduct on the school bus.

Emma is suspended off any bus transportation vehicle sponsored by Chatham County Schools for ten (10) school days. Emma can begin riding a school bus again on the morning of Monday, March 14, 2005.

I'm so very glad that Pittsboro Elementary School has solved all of their other problems and is now cracking down on the incredibly malicious act committed by the most wicked of children: talking. That's right, talking! I'm not sure what Mary Stephens, PES's Asst. Principal has against Emma. This is the second time that my six year old daughter has been suspended for something that seems to be utterly inconsequential. Once again, the school punishes the parents and not the child. Shouldn't the punishment fit the crime? This, to me, seems like a public execution for jaywalking.

In related news, this weekend Woods Charter School is having an open house. We intend to be there at 9am Saturday to take a look at their facility, meet the staff and begin the registration process. Can anyone think of a reason why Emma should continue to attend PES? I certainly can't.

It sounds like a "...walks into a bar" joke, but I was the one that was walking-- into their offices. I had to cash in a valuable sick day. Those are a precious commodity indeed, but these things needed to be done.

I did better at the eye doctor than I expected. The doctor reported that the "interesting" scar on my left eye hasn't changed in the two years since our last meeting. There was talk of a biopsy last time, but after three visits in the past five years with no changes, he's convinced that it isn't any cause for concern. I assured him that I'd call him immediately if it started singing showtunes or applying for unemployment. My astigmatism in the same eye has decreased somewhat. I asked if this would prove to help my depth perception at all. We did a depth perception test while waiting for my eyes to dilate from those damnable eye drops. I didn't do very well, and he explained to me that sometimes when children have depth perception problems, they can be corrected. By now, though, my adult brain is essentially hard-wired to interpret the things that I see as I currently see them, and there is little hope that I can gain the depth perception that other adults have. Also, even if I had corrective eye surgery-- for which I may not qualify, since I have an astigmatism-- it wouldn't improve my depth perception anymore than my corrective lenses already do. This means I can tell how far away things are better than a blind person, and somewhat better than a person with one eye. I don't have anything on most two-eyed adults, though, and I'll never be able to see one of those stereoscopic hidden pictures. On the bright side, I'll be getting new glasses soon. I hope they look alright on my face. I was nearly blind from the eyedrops when I picked them out, and then blinded by the total expenses of the visit and new spectacles on my way out.

After the eye doctor, Alicia took me to our family doctor to check out my ears. Dr. Corey couldn't find anything conclusive in my ears beyond some irritation in my left ear. My sinuses were inflamed and my throat was irritated, and he quizzed me on some recent illnesses. He suggested that I had something he called a "super-infection." He prescribed a serious course of antibiotics and instructed me to contact them if I got worse or didn't get better. By this time, I was ready to go home and crawl back into bed. The day just wasn't going well-- a super infection, and no chance to judge distances like a normal person. I decided to keep my chin up and press on with the next two stops. Why not? Being normal is boring, anyway.

I grabbed some documents from the office, dropped the Netflix off at the post office and Alicia and I went to the newly expanded Pitt Stop for lunch. It appears that their prices have been expanded as well, but it's still a better meal than most of the other options in Pittsboro. Our next stop was the Credit Union, where we hoped to refinance our truck. We bought it in late 2003 after Alicia's accident since the car had been totaled and our finances weren't in the best shape. We took the best loan we could get, which was only slightly better than no loan at all. It took about an hour and a half for everything to get sorted out and for the paperwork to be filed. We left after signing a new loan with less than half the interest rate of the old one, and a one month break before we have to start paying. Not bad, and maybe even nice enough to make up for the fact that I'm a freak of nature.

Every night at 12:30am, my telephone rings. When I answer it, no one is there. If I hang up, it rings again. This has been going on for months, and I'm sick of it. To add to the mystery, each night after I *69 to see who the mysterious caller is, I get a different number in my local exchange. Tonight it was a residence on Silk Hope/Gum Springs road. A couple of weeks ago I got several different numbers from Big Hole Road. The Big Hole is a serious source of local legend and that weirded me out a bit.

Now, though, I'm no longer excited, surprised or concerned when the phone rings at 12:30am. No, I'm not worried that there is a robber at the nearest telco switch, pinging my line to see if anyone is awake. I'm not frightened that zeta reticulans are calling to invite me to tea. No, now I'm just peeved. I intend to do something about it, just as soon as I can get a living, breathing human being from the local telco on the phone. Of course, my local telco is Sprint, so it may be more likely that the reticulans invite me to tea.

My ears seem to be doing a bit better. Tomorrow morning my eyes will be sucking. I really, really hate getting my eyes dilated at the eye doctor. I hate eye drops. I hate things getting anywhere near my eyes. I hate lots of things, I guess. The good news is that I'm taking a sick day tomorrow so that I don't have to spend seven or eight hours in front of a monitor after I have those godawful eyedrops put in my eyes. That's what I did last time, and it wasn't a very pleasant experience.

Today was pretty eventful at work. Some suspicious login attempts were discovered in logfiles on a number of machines. Our hysteria became somewhat muted when it was pointed out to us that the logins were coming from our new network monitoring solution that is currently in testing. Oops!

Aside from that, there were the usual assorted network management jobs, database operations, file manipulations, hardware tests and customer support tasks. Good times! With all the things coming at me from various directions, however, I wasn't able to make any progress on a large project, the deadline for which is looming.

I've always had a little trouble hearing, especially out of my right ear. As the weekend passed by, however, my hearing got progressively worse. I'm not quite sure what's going on, but I really don't like it. I think it may be a combination of my allergies, a cavity and some random virus. Ok, I'm just speculating. Who knows what the heck it is! I'll enlist a doctor for a little help figuring it out if it doesn't start turning around tomorrow. I'm taking a sick day on Tuesday so I can get my eyes examined. I really need some new glasses. It's been two and a half years since I got these, and they're in rather poor shape. In fact, if they weren't made with flexon, I probably would have had to replace them sooner. I may be able to get new lenses and forgo the new frames for another year or two. I'm definitely getting some prescription sunglasses this time around, though. Maybe that will motivate me to spend more time outdoors. Back to my ears... I hope they get better quickly. I've never been able to hear well, but being mostly unable to hear at all is scary.

After proofreading: this entry is hopelessly disjointed. I don't really feel like editing it to death though, so it'll have to do.

Last week, UPS delivered small package to my house. It was in a brown carton with a nondescript label. Inside, I found an onyx Game Boy Advance SP and a letter thanking me for my participation in a contest I entered several months before. I bought myself a copy of the NES Classic, Legend of Zelda, and planned to enjoy it immensely. That is, until Emma commandeered it. Now she already has a small collection of GBA games, and I have nothing. I decided I was going to do something about it.

I don't have much faith in my ability to win another game system so quickly after this one showed up, so I figured I'd try something new. I've been following the "Free iPod" craze for several months now. To get a free iPod, notebook computer, flat screen or whatever, one signs up for an offer then gets several other people to sign up using their referral link. After the required number of offers have been completed, the free item is shipped. I've been getting the majority of my information from Gratis Offers Guide and the GOG forums. Today I took the plunge and joined a conga line there to see about getting a free Sony PSP. In this sense, a conga is where someone makes a post with thier referral link, other people sign up under that link, and as the required number of offers are completed, the referral link is updated to reflect the first person in the conga. It works out rather nicely, and although the people that sign up later tend to get the short end of the stick, I'm only nine or ten spots from the top on this very new list. With that in mind, I think I might actually score some completed offers out of it. I've got a few weeks though, since the PSP won't be available in the USA till mid-March.

My referral link, if anyone is so inclined, is http://www.FreePSPs.com/?r=15373817

I've been fooling around with the template a bit. Those of you who visit this site in Firefox know that the layout is hopelessly fubared in that browser, which is a bit of a disappointment. I have no CSS skills whatsoever, which is the basis for this template that the lovely Jenny selected. I have toyed with the locations of the elements a bit and changed the alignment of some of their contents a bit. That went fairly well, so I'll probably try to do some bigger changes to see how Firefox behaves. I've also added a little something from Google on the table to the left, mainly because I wanted to see how their program worked. Certainly not because I have any illusions that people visit my site, much less that anyone is willing to click any links on it! I'll keep tweaking it, though. Perhaps if it behaves better under Firefox, people would be more likely to read it!