Moving right along

I'd been worrying about the last month of my lease here, but that may not be an issue. Depending on what school district hires me, I may not have to be in Virginia and ready to rantteach until after Labor Day, which would be just fine with me. Right now the two districts I'm looking at (Fairfax and Isle of Wight Counties) start on August 20 and September 4 respectively, so if I get signed by IWCS (LOL HAMS) I can have the movers pick up my stuff in the last week of August and leave as soon as they've hauled off all the junk and I've cleaned up the place - most likely with an assist from Merry Maids.

So I'll be around until August, it looks like, which means I won't be going "Fuck Wells" until the end of July. This will be good for the Cardboard Box Fund, which will get an extra shot of cash right before I pillage it for debt reduction & moving expenses, and good for my teaching applications since I'll be able to take that second Praxis exam (for Spanish) before I head down the Interstate and out of town.

Frankly, I'm really hoping I get hired by IWCS or somebody like them. While I'd be taking a slight cut in pay (about $1-2k) because I'd be starting at the bottom of the pay scale, that would be more than compensated for by the much lower cost of living there. Fairfax County, not so much. Pay's higher there, but since it's in the Washington DC metro area all the costs are higher too, and I badly need to be in a low-cost area for a few years while I'm hacking away at the humungous mass of student loans I'm carrying.

Moving right along

I'd been worrying about the last month of my lease here, but that may not be an issue. Depending on what school district hires me, I may not have to be in Virginia and ready to rantteach until after Labor Day, which would be just fine with me. Right now the two districts I'm looking at (Fairfax and Isle of Wight Counties) start on August 20 and September 4 respectively, so if I get signed by IWCS (LOL HAMS) I can have the movers pick up my stuff in the last week of August and leave as soon as they've hauled off all the junk and I've cleaned up the place - most likely with an assist from Merry Maids.

So I'll be around until August, it looks like, which means I won't be going "Fuck Wells" until the end of July. This will be good for the Cardboard Box Fund, which will get an extra shot of cash right before I pillage it for debt reduction & moving expenses, and good for my teaching applications since I'll be able to take that second Praxis exam (for Spanish) before I head down the Interstate and out of town.

Frankly, I'm really hoping I get hired by IWCS or somebody like them. While I'd be taking a slight cut in pay (about $1-2k) because I'd be starting at the bottom of the pay scale, that would be more than compensated for by the much lower cost of living there. Fairfax County, not so much. Pay's higher there, but since it's in the Washington DC metro area all the costs are higher too, and I badly need to be in a low-cost area for a few years while I'm hacking away at the humungous mass of student loans I'm carrying.

My eyes are bleeding

I just finished translating the tentative Convergence programming grid into Excel and color-coding it by the number of panelists signed up for each panel, and I had to close it up after about an hour or so because my eyes were starting to hurt. (Good thing I was done with it.) This is with pastel cell shading; I can only imagine what my poor optic nerves would be like if I'd used brighter colors. Anyway, this is the lead-in to an entirely predictable final appeal for panelists; thaadd did manage to convince me that spamming the staff lists of AD and Convergence with a GoonFleet-styled "X UP FOR PANELS YOU F*****S" would be met with incomprehension at best, so you get this instead. Here's a preliminary version of the grid with appropriate color coding: red indicates no panelists, yellow 1, blue 2, green means the panel is staffed up and ready to roll. So look it over, find something you'd like to talk about that's coded red, yellow, or blue, and e-mail me.

No work on the programming this morning since my co-head is beset with connectivity issues at home and a cellphone that holds a charge about as well as you'd expect a $15 phone from Target to hold one. Went to the Detour meeting, disappointed a number of people by not bringing things they hadn't reminded me to bring, and left about 3:30. As luck would have it, I heard from thaadd right after I dropped off jamestrainor so I grabbed a McMeal and headed up to Roseville, where we hacked on panels and related issues until about 6 when she ran out of steam; not too surprising since she's been working on this stuff since 10 AM.

I guess I'll grab some more water, take a break from the computer for a little bit, and then play a little EVE before hitting the rack.

My eyes are bleeding

I just finished translating the tentative Convergence programming grid into Excel and color-coding it by the number of panelists signed up for each panel, and I had to close it up after about an hour or so because my eyes were starting to hurt. (Good thing I was done with it.) This is with pastel cell shading; I can only imagine what my poor optic nerves would be like if I'd used brighter colors. Anyway, this is the lead-in to an entirely predictable final appeal for panelists; thaadd did manage to convince me that spamming the staff lists of AD and Convergence with a GoonFleet-styled "X UP FOR PANELS YOU F*****S" would be met with incomprehension at best, so you get this instead. Here's a preliminary version of the grid with appropriate color coding: red indicates no panelists, yellow 1, blue 2, green means the panel is staffed up and ready to roll. So look it over, find something you'd like to talk about that's coded red, yellow, or blue, and e-mail me.

No work on the programming this morning since my co-head is beset with connectivity issues at home and a cellphone that holds a charge about as well as you'd expect a $15 phone from Target to hold one. Went to the Detour meeting, disappointed a number of people by not bringing things they hadn't reminded me to bring, and left about 3:30. As luck would have it, I heard from thaadd right after I dropped off jamestrainor so I grabbed a McMeal and headed up to Roseville, where we hacked on panels and related issues until about 6 when she ran out of steam; not too surprising since she's been working on this stuff since 10 AM.

I guess I'll grab some more water, take a break from the computer for a little bit, and then play a little EVE before hitting the rack.