I don’t really recall despising good old Dennis Hastert. As I recall, after that asshole Newt Ginrich resigend as House Speaker, the Grand Old Hypocrites were going to elect some other dude speaker, but it turned out he’d been diddling a few females to whom he was not married, and what with them having recently elevated Bill Clinton’s extramarital indiscretions to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, they felt they needed to appoint somebody safe instead. Enter former high school teacher and wresting coach, Denny Hastert.

Now, of course, we learn that poor old Dennis was being blackmailed by a mystery person from his past, and is apparently willing to face multiple felony charges (and nine years in prison – thoug of course we know that people like Denny don’t actually go to prison) rather than come clean on what he was up to all those years ago in Yorkville, IL. It would of course be unfair to speculate what would be worth a few million dollars in hush money but, well, I’m sure I’m not the only person out there in the world to add up the words “high school,” “wrestling coach,” and “Republican,” and come to the conclusion that Coach Hastert may have been hittin’ the mat with an underage boy.

Not saying that’s what he did, of course – it’s pure conjecture at this point.

Of course, we’ll probably never get the full story on any of this because, at the urging on the former Speaker’s attorney, prosecutors agreed to amend the indictment against Denny so as not to explicitly mention the nature the “prior misconduct” that led to Hastert trying to hide the illegal withdrawal of some $1.7 million from his rainy day retirement fund. Which of course is exactly how you or I would be treated in similar circumstances.

But if he wasn’t engaged in a bit of man on boy love, then his attorneys didn’t do him any favors, ‘cuz let’s face it, that’s what everybody’s gonna be thinking.

Speaking of thinking, I think I’m awfully happy that today is Friday. As I’ve mentioned before, these short weeks seem to last longer than the full ones.

And goodness knows, this is gonna be one really short weekend coming up.

It was really nice to have been off for the past four days. I hope you were able to get some time off (sorry you had to work, Andy) and enjoy the holiday. I got about a quarter of the things done that I’d hoped to do, which means it was unusually productive time off. I’d really like to see this country go to a rotating 4/3 work week. Four on, three off, three on, four off, etc. That seems fair to me. Things were pretty warm here on Monday, but it was ungodly hot and humid yesterday, so our pet deer spent most of the day relaxing in the shade by the driveway.

Since the air conditioning here at work seems to be functioning, I’m almost glad to be back today. Almost. If I had a window (even one with a view of the parking lot), I’d be reasonably content. But I don’t, so I’, not. Thank goodness it’s a short week.

In other news, our Governor has scored a bit of a coup, if the rumors are true. It seems that he’s about to have the NY State Board of Regents rubber stamp MaryEllen Elia as the next state commissioner of education. This is a woman that was too incompetent for Florida, if you can imagine that.

Elia was fired by the Hillsborough Board of Education last February in a 4-3 vote…. [C]ritics complained about micromanagement, a top-down style, lack of transparency, and complaints from parents of students with special needs. One board member who voted to dismiss her “accused Elia of creating a workplace culture of fear and bullying, and failing to pay enough attention to minorities, including Hispanics.” Others, including parents, said that her disciplinary policies had a disparate impact on African American students.

Fear and bullying? Lack of transparency? Gee, I wonder what Cuomo sees in her?

Hillsborough County received about $100 million from the Gates Foundation to design and implement a value-added measurement system for evaluating its teachers. Its plan apparently included a promise to fire the 5% lowest performing teachers every year. Florida has a harsh style of accountability, launched by Jeb Bush and carried forward by Governor Rick Scott and the Republican-dominated Legislature and state board of education.
[…]
She is a strong supporter of the Common Core.
[…]
So, New York, once a bastion of liberalism, is getting a state commissioner who supports value-added testing and school choice, like John King. This aligns with Governor Cuomo’s agenda of “breaking up the public school monopoly” and using test scores to evaluate teachers.

The biggest news in the state in the past year was the historic success of the Opt Out movement. Last year, 60,000 students refused the state tests. This year, nearly 200,000 did. If MaryEllen Elia is state commissioner, will she raise the stakes on testing? If so, don’t be surprised if 400,000 students refuse the tests next year.

So, Sue, sounds like a good time to come out of retirement, no?

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning here. Not especially warm, at the moment, but a lot warmer than it was yesterday morning, when the day started off at a near-record low of 34 degrees. But it’s sunny out there, the sky is blue, everything else is green, the grass is cut and the weeds have been whacked so everything looks nice (which won’t last long), and as I write this, a young doe is strolling around in the yard outside my window.

This isn’t all that unusual (though since winter ended, they’ve typically stayed outside the fence), but this particular deer (well, I mean, I assume it’s the same one – she isn’t’ wearing a name tag or anything) has been hanging around here for several days now.

I got home from work Friday evening and saw her laying down in the tall grass in the shade just outside the fence. As I said, this isn’t all that unusual, so I didn’t think much of it, other than to make a note to make sure she was gone before I took the dogs over to that side of the house. She was there for quite a while, and at some point I saw her up and walking around, when I noticed her kind of nuzzling a couple of bunny rabbits, which seemed pretty strange because I’ve never seen a deer making friends with bunnies before.

Upon further review, I realized that these weren’t rabbits, but little baby deer. I didn’t want to get too close and scare them (plus it was really cloudy and dark out and nobody seems willing to buy me this 800mm lens), so I couldn’t get any really great pictures.

The good news is that I have today off. The bad news is that it starts out with a trip to the vet for two of the varmints, and continues tomorrow with the other one. The last trip was 3 weeks ago and it set me back $300, as Peggy tested positive for Lyme and therefore required not only the $30 yes/no test, but the more expensive $80 test that gets sent to the lab. Bud was already positive and still is, so he got his first lime vaccine, and gets his booster today, while Peggy gets her first one and her other vaccines, after having had 3 weeks of antibiotics. The it’ll be back to the vet in three weeks for her booster. Fritzi goes tomorrow, and I have no doubt that he’ll test positive as well, so I recon we’ll do it all again with him. I’m diligent with the FrontLine Plus and I check for ticks all the time but I guess that’s not good enough. I really hate ticks. We never used to have this problem up here, but I guess it’s just the way things are gonna be now that Al Gore has perpetrated the whole climate change myth on us.

Now that we’re fully into graduation season (because there’s a dearth of actual news around here, the lo-cal paper website is filled with prom photos – I guess I’m getting pretty old, because they look like a bunch of little kids playing dress up, except I don’t remember the girls looking like that when I was in high school. Must be the hormones in the beef), I would like to impart one simple word of wisdom to our new high school and college graduates:

FROM

From, as in “I graduated FROM college.” It’s not “I graduated college.” You don’t graduate college, the college graduates you. I’m not sure why this irritates me as much as it does, but for some reason the words “graduate college” are like fingernails on the blackboard (do they actually have blackboards in school anymore?). If they include this in the common core test, then the test is 100% worthwhile. In fact, I don’t don’t think you should be allowed to graduate from high school (let alone college) if you don’t understand this.

Two things: it’s “NEW-CLEE-UR” and “graduated FROM college.” That’s it – everything else is just extraneous information.

Oh well, time to go check the skimmer basket for frogs, I guess.

Oh, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY VERNON!

It’s not only the start of a glorious work week, but it’s also the start of National Hospital Week (though I’m sure everybody’s already aware of that). For those of us who work for hospitals, this means a couple of things. First off will be a series of daily e-mails from our “C” level administrators (what the “C” stands for is a matter of individual interpretation) telling us how vital our institution is to our community, and what a wonderful and vital job we all do (as opposed to the other 51 weeks of the year, when we’re all a bunch of assholes, I guess). As if that weren’t enough, they also force the mucky-mucks to distribute trinkets to the little people while personally thanking us for the jobs we do.

This morning, I saw a group of them gathered in front of the entrance to my building, so I immediately headed for the alternate entrance. Sadly, there was another group of the fuckers lying in wait at the other, so I was trapped into saying good morning and thank you very much for this plastic travel mug. Nothing says we appreciate you more than a plastic travel mug – and, hey, just because I have about 50 travel mugs and really neither need nor desire another one (especially some plastic piece of shit), it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. At least this year’s trinket was made in the the USA (first time I’ve seen that since I’ve been here). I’ll give it a place a place of honor in my otherwise sterile, windowless office.

In other news, we actually got a little rain yesterday evening! Not a ton of it, but enough to at least temporarily knock some of the pollen out of the air, which is much appreciated. Things have been really dry around here – our sump “pond” is just a pit at this point, and last week we have about five brush fires in one day (and when we’re getting brush fires around here in the beginning of May, you know things are bad). Plus, it’s been hotter than hell.

In order to cool things off, we decided to get the pool open. This seems to have worked it’s magic, as a cold front is supposed to come through tomorrow, with a predicted high temperature of 58 on Wednesday (which, coincidentally, is the temperature of our pool water). It’s the first time in the five years we’ve been doing this that the water wasn’t thick with green algae (not counting the first year, when it was literally black – I was expecting the Gill-man to reach out and grab me). It’s just a bit cloudy, but that should clear up well before the water is warm enough to swim in.

I also got the grass cut for the first time this year, and we put a small dent in our piles of mulch and stone, but not much. I have so many things to do before winter, I’m a bit overwhelmed at the thought of it all. So I’m not gonna think about it.

Oh well, time to get back to work. On the bright side just two weeks ’til Memorial Day!

I’m currently suffering from a post three-day weekend hangover. Not in any way alcohol-related, of course. Just from having three warm sunny days spent, for the most part, out in the fresh air and then having to get up and come sit inside my box within a box staring at a screen attached to a box. This really blows, to be honest. But I’m actually starting to believe that winter is finally over in these parts, and I took the major step of moving my hat, gloves, snow brush, and ice scraper to the trunk of my car (that’s as far away from me as I’m willing to let them get – after all, we’ve had 8 inches of snow on Mother’s Day, so we’re not out the woods yet).

I did, however, get the mower all sharpened up, greased, and on the tractor. This is always a (literally) painful process that’s better not to do more than once a season. John Deere has a commercial for a tractor where you just drive over the mower and it attaches automajically. If that actually works, I want one. Sadly, that’s not in the budget.

Speaking of budget-busting, I spent plenty of money this weekend – and not on anything fun. The folks who lived at my house before we moved in left us a dump cart with beat tires, and I’ve been meaning to get new ones for it for about four years now. So I finally got some. The wheels were different, of course, so I had to make up spacers for them and I didn’t really have the right size stuff laying around, but I made do. I won’t be towing it on the highway anytime soon, but it’s good enough.

I also needed a drawbar in order to use it with my tractor, so that was another $40. Then the cart hitch had a smaller hole that I had pins for, so I had to go buy a hitch pin, only to find that the top hole was bigger than the bottom hole. Why? I’m certain there’s a reason, but I don’t know what it is. But it works.

Sunday was a big day, as a load of fencing showed up at 9:00 thanks to the good folks at NEMF. I asked the driver if he got to meet Paul McCartney when he was visiting with his wife, but he said he was busy working while all the dock people were slacking off with Paul that day.

He did mention, though, that his wife’s daughter goes to SU, so they’re in the areas relatively frequently. Not that I’ve ever seen them around.

But, anyway, it’s back to work today for a five-day week locked indoors. The only good part about being inside is that it’s a bit easier on my allergies, which have definitely kicked in to high gear. I guess that’s the punishment for not having a foot of snow on the ground.