pedablogical

Great. Everyone else gets cool pictures, and I’m the nerd librarian. Bonus. What a reason to live.

I have lovely new soffits, which have appropriate venting that I can actually see. The roofing owner mentioned that this would be one of the features of the new stuff. Now if I had gutters and pressured washed all the cobwebs off the house it might look normal. Though all the trim needs painted. Sigh.

Supposed to be another week or two before I get the gutters replaced. Another exciting odyssey. At least they cleaned up very well today. Even swept the front porch clean of all the garbage that fell when the soffits were ripped down. I can’t tell whether the plumber was here today. Nothing has really been moved that I can see. Who knows. I could go out to the garage for the step ladder and see if I can see up in the attic well enough to figure it out, but I’m not sure it’s worth the possibility of knocking more insulation down.

I added some images to the NCTE Halloween Party gallery and added captions so people who explore have more of a shot at knowing what they’re looking at. Adobe is my friend. Otherwise, I am very dull and boring.

The unauthorized exposé is here:
NCTE Halloween Party. Yes, I know that you all never believed me when I said this happens. Now you have photographic proof.

The dumpster was gone when I got home from the office; so I get to park back by the garage again. But who knows what they’ll come up with tomorrow, so I’m leaving the car outside so that they know I’ll need out. No evidence that the plumber was here. Maybe s/he was very tidy.

Today was a day of much more prom wear. In addition to all the dresses, the office now has bins of makeup and jewelry and other accessories. There was a pre-party meeting this afternoon to coordinate and make sure everyone had what they needed. I’ve pretty much figured out that nothing is going to get accomplished tomorrow. It’s party stuff most of the day.

I found a cute shirt for my niece, the panda lover (Thank you Wonkette). Yes, I was off-task at work today too.

I’ve been working on a Grapes of Wrath lesson plan. I’ve gathered a lot of Web sites into a travelogue, with some specific questions, as a prereading activity. After the exploration, they predict some of the themes that the novel will explore before diving in.

Frappr was just posted on the TAWL list. They’re using it to map the locations of list members, but it got me to thinking of lesson options. Students mapping their extended families. Mapping literary authors. Mapping important locations for a historical period (e.g., the Dust Bowl).

So I got to thinking about a Flash interactive that allowed us to pass whatever background we need via xml. Students choose locations for the markers and write associated descriptive text. In ways it’s just an annotation tool. Perhaps the background could be a graphic of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the markers are features in the text that the student is explaining.

I think the functionality would be relatively simple to develop, because we have tools that do similar things. Dragging the bubbles and creating related text is no different in function than dragging the text tags for the Venn or Plot Diagram. The background could be passed with xml, as we pass in text for the Guided Tour. Or at the worst, we’d have subfolders for each new version (a la the Graphic Map).

I’m hoping to investigate the options on this. Could be a cool tool that wouldn’t take long to develop.

The owner of the roofing company just came to my door. Apparently my soffit is shot, and the facia (?) that it should connect to wasn’t properly done in the first place. $600. He showed me places where someone had tried to use drywall screws to hold the soffit in place.

Before this discussion, I had no idea what a soffit was (“the exposed underside of any overhead component of a building”), let alone that I owned one. I still don’t know how to spell facia. Thank you, Google. It appears to be fascia (not “a thick band of fiberous tissue” but “a horizontal band or board, often used to conceal the ends of rafters; the front of an object”).

He promises that is the last thing. I told him I wasn’t letting him in the house because he was gonna find something else. The plumber is supposed to come at the end of the day to work on the dropped pipe/vent. I’m okay with someone working on the roof while I’m not here, but it’s creepy to have someone in the house while I’m gone. I’m trying to breathe and avoid anxiety. The plumber is probably going to find 15 more broken things. Why did I move far away from family handyhelpers and buy my own house?