WELL, the first few weeks of school are past, and things have mellowed considerably. I'm still loving the school, and the kids couldn't be a better gaggle of tweenies, and although some of their parents could use some social polishing, all is still pretty good.
Not a ton to report...so I'll just meander...

This year's JCAFAE concert is coming together. We're taking it to the stage in less than a month (11/12, to be exact). The tickets remain too expensive for most of my friends at $75 per, but at least this year that includes dinner.

I had to back off the genealogy stuff for a while, knowing how time-consuming it is, and me with so little extra time these days. The summer was very fruitful, in my opinion--I discovered much about my mother's side of the family, stuff I knew nothing about--like the fact that my great grandfather and his sons were essentially cowboys in the San Diego area back in the 1880s.
Weirdly, researching this era of my family tree makes me look at old western movies differently. How true to life are these depictions of how life really was back then? Aside from that, I wonder: could my ancestors have been those drunken rascals who ended up being rustlers? Or ignominiously shot dead in a barroom brawl in the dustiest stretches of East Texas? So many of the connections have been lost--it wouldn't surprise me if several of them met similar fates. Still, a quasi-romantic notion of life in the Old West does include scenes like these-- Maybe my heritage is filled with 'em. Cool. Kinda offsets all the kindnesses and godly acts surely performed by the other side of my family--the Quakers. Acts like helping to run the Underground Railroad (a fact!). Talk about mixed karma!

With my first paycheck from my new job, I went and purchased something I think will help me in my highly disorganized life (helluva thing to have when you wanna be a teacher too!)...a Palm PDA. So far, it's helped me considerably. Make of that what you will.

Couple of weeks ago I received an email from a Turkish student asking me about sources for one of the papers I'd written and currently include on my webpage. Can't believe people are still responding to them...and in very different ways. They actually seem to be taken seriously! It's almost like I'm a published scholar! Go figure. Still--always a great li'l boost to the ego.

The news?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHA

Aw, man, I don't EVEN know where to start.
If I hear one more damn comment about the Foleygate (or "La Cage aux Foley," as I've hear & seen it referred to), I'm gonna hurl. And yet:
Sure, it's great to see Repubs eating their own, but didn't we get drug through this miasma with Clinton back in '98? Okay, yes, THAT was CONSENSUAL sex between ADULTS and this *whew* Foley thing stinks like pederasty of the nastiest NAMBLA variety---and I LOVE how the Right is spinning this: suddenly if you're gay and a child molester, you must also be an alcoholic and a victim of pedophile priests to boot. Sweet.

This just in: Rep. Loon/Senator Rick Santorum tries to appeal to, I dunno, thirteen year-olds, with this truly imaginative analogy:

"As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," Santorum said. "It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States."

Dude--it's a FANTASY. And ya gotta admit that the "Eye of Mordor" metaphor fits OUR side better'n THEIRS. Can anyone say "NSA?" Sheesh. Honestly.

Meanwhile, HyperChristian and avowed Jeeznik James Dobson ("Focus on the Family") has decried the Foley thing and states that, according to the Huffington Post, "other gay Republicans will be 'outed' in coming days. He... doesn't know who they are, but, 'They say it is going to be worse than anything that has happened so far.'"

Damn, this shit almost writes itself.

Now I gotta go watch Jon Stewart. Night all....