Q: What does industry, the seagull, a blue spruce, sego lily and a .45 caliber pistol have in common?

A: They are, or soon will be, the official motto, bird, tree, flower and handgun for the State of Utah.

Yup.  Utah State Representative Carl Wimmer is proposing legislation that will make the Browning 1911 .45 caliber pistol the official state handgun of Utah.

I have just one question for the illustrious representative: Will using an official state handgun increase or decrease the penalties for armed robbery?

(Yes, I did pick the goofiest picture I could find of Wimmer, not that one was hard to find.)

Absessive Repulsive

Seriously folks, how long is it when carrying a grudge becomes absurd?  When is it time, or way past time, to just be an adult and let it go?

I no longer have the energy to waste on being pissed off at somebody for something that a) no longer effects me and/or b) was done by somebody who is no longer in the circle of my life and probably never will be again.  Life is too short.  Anger is too soul-sucking.

I ran into a teacher I used to teach with, oh, it’s been almost a decade since I left that school.  I was having dinner with another teacher, who happens to live in the same neighborhood and is an acquaintance of hers too.  We had a nice little 5 minute chat, it was quite enjoyable, until right as she was leaving that she asked a question I truly didn’t expect.

Flashback time. The first school I taught at (for 8 years) was an upper-income junior high.  Three years into my time there we got a new principal, who attempted to implement some reforms to bring the school into the 20th century, so that maybe it would be somewhat ready when the 21st century hit 5 years later.  The faculty was fractured, 1/3 loved the new principal, 1/3 hated her and the last 1/3 couldn’t care less.  I was part of the 1/3 that loved her and the changes she was trying to make.  The teacher’s union was called, meetings were held, attempts to have both the principal and vice principal transferred were made.  One particular union meeting was scheduled behind the backs of the teachers who favored the administration.  We heard of it through the grapevine and, being union members at the time, took it upon ourselves to crash the party.  The head of our district’s union headed up the meeting and opened it with “The bad news is that N and K are still going to be here next year.”  Doing a scan of attendees and quick mathematical calculations, I raised my hand, was acknowledged by the leader and made the comment “Uh, you need to realize that half the people in this room actually support this administration.”  I got a polite nod of acceptance from the leader, but during the 2 hour meeting she needed to be reminded by several who felt like me, on more than several occasions, that not everyone wanted to get rid of them.  Things got so divisive with this faculty, even at the school, that at one point a student asked me “Mr. R, which side of the faculty civil war are you on?”  I’ll admit to being emotionally involved in the issues at the time, angry, frustrated and disgusted.  But that was 4 schools and 10 years ago.

The principal was transferred a couple years later, at least 7 years ago.  This teacher has been retired for a couple of them.  From what I’ve heard from friends up there, the school quickly returned to it’s usual laissez-faire practices and all is well.

So, tonight, after a few minutes of enjoyable reminiscing about fun things that happened at that school, this teacher gets a solemn look on her face and asks me, knowing well my answer, “Tell me, really, what did you think of N?”  When I came back with “I liked her, she’s the principal where I’m at now” she just harumphed, rolled her eyes and walked away.

Yeah, I’m a little annoyed and frustrated right now.  But, much like the dozen or so other times this has happened over the last decade, by tomorrow it will just be another amusing little anecdote to add to my life.

P.S. don’t try to make sense of the pictures, they don’t go with the story, other than they were taken during my time at that school.  I just hate posting without pictures.

Inverenza

I spent the weekend in bed feeling sick.  Started Saturday morning feeling all achy, tired, headache and a bit of a tummy gurgle.  I went out twice all weekend, less than an hour each time and only because I had an obligation I needed to have taken care of before today.  Got up this morning still feeling kind of blah, but as most teachers know, it’s more work to get a substitute than to just show up feeling like crap, unless you are seriously ill.  Miraculously, by noon I was feeling perfectly fine.

Ironically, one of Salt Lake’s infamous temperature inversions* set in Friday night, got terribly murky both Saturday and Sunday and was virtually cleaned out by a rain storm that came in before noon today.

Could there be a connection?  Nah.

I kind of got the idea that maybe I wasn’t really sick, it was just the bad air, sometime during last winter.  I’m convinced there is a connection, but not convinced that if I ignored my symptoms and just went on normally, that I wouldn’t end up really getting sick.  Sometime, when I can afford the time, I’m going to have to just go on my merry way and see if everything goes away with the inversion, rather than actually catching the flu or whatnot.

Maybe.  Or maybe I’ll just enjoy the excuse to lay in bed all day.

 

 

  * Salt Lake City is in a bowl, a valley surrounded by mountains that reach up to 4,000 or 5,000 feet above the valley floor.  Especially in the winter, a high pressure will settle in over the valley and trap in the air.  This also traps colder air down in the valley, so it will actually be warmer up at the ski resorts than down in the valley.

Another set of night.

Night pictures can be the most fun to take.  Playing with the shutter, aperture and getting the light that is there to properly portray the scene can be frustrating.  It was a lot more frustrating, and challenging, back before digital cameras, you didn’t know what you got until much later when the film was developed.  Now I can take a picture, look at it on the small screen and make adjustments from there.  Still, I am often surprised when I get them home and look at them on a bigger screen.

This set is from my time teaching at Granite High School, I was there for the last three years it was open.  Granite was the second high school built in the Salt Lake Valley, and in 1906 it was completely surrounded by farmland.  By the time I got there it was as inner-city as this valley gets, yet it was still “The Home of The Farmers.” 

This first picture is of the lobby of the (1940’s) state of the art theater.  Originally it was a building unto itself, and now still has a full sized lobby, actual ticket booths and paintings of each of the school’s principals.  It also still has the original art-deco light fixtures, neon lighting and mosaic tiling “GHS” in the center of the floor.  Much like the ghost towns of my sepia pictures, you can just imagine the students and parents of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s all dressed up in their Sunday best for a night out watching their kids perform Shakespeare or some other classic plays.  Ahhh, those days are over.  Parents now show up to performances in jeans, sweatpants or whatever they can throw on, when they find the time to even show up.

The next group of pictures were taken at the Halloween dance that last year.  One of my favorite students, who was a quiet, depressed loner that first year I was there, had transformed into quite an outgoing school character by her senior year.  Her Halloween costume was a big pink hat on her head and tiny little wings strapped to her back.  (The rest of the outfit was not unusual dress for her).

No, that’s not real blood, just decorations for the Halloween Dance.

Not sure why I like this picture so much.  It’s way too dark and you can barely see the white dress.  But like it I do.

Long shutter speeds on a dance floor.  Eerily fitting for a Halloween Dance.

Here one dancer had a glow stick in each hand.

Three students and I play with photography and their glow sticks.

Through the windows above the front door of the school.  You may have noticed that the picture has been doctored a little bit.  In a school that is over a hundred years old, with many of the remaining buildings close to 100, there are going to be rumors of ghosts roaming the halls.  Many schools here make extra money by renting out their facilities, usually the gym or the auditorium, sometimes their sports fields, to organizations that don’t have the full sized facilities they occasionally need.  One of the years I was there we had a para-normal group apply to rent the oldest building overnight, they wanted to document what we later coined “The Granite Ghosts”.  District policy requires at least one administrator and one custodian be in the building during the entire duration of the rental, and because not many administrators or custodians want to have a sleep-over with strangers, overnighters are either not allowed or simply discouraged.  Either way, this group was denied the rental, but the ghost rumors found a whole new life.  And I, of course, had to have a little fun with pictures and ghosts. In this last picture I have the Granite Ghosts leaving the building for a night of fun on Halloween, the only night of the year they can leave.

Top TSA Slogans

Whether or not you think the U.S. Transport Security Administration has overstepped it’s bounds, ya gotta find these funny.  Well, I did, so I’m sharing them with you.

• Ya can't see London, Ya can't see France, unless we see your underpants.
• Grope discounts available.
• If we did our job any better we'd have to buy you dinner first.
• Only we know if Lady Gaga is really a lady.
• Don't worry, my hands are still warm from the last guy. 
• Wanna fly? Drop your fly. 
• It's not a grope. It's a freedom pat. 
• When in doubt, we make you whip it out.
• TSA: Touchin', Squeezin', Arrestin' 
• You WERE a virgin.
• We handle more packages than UPS

Thematic Photographic.

Night.  Had too many stories to go with the pictures, so I moved it over to my story blog.  Click on the arrow to see mine, click on the Thematic Photographic to see a whole bunch more.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

I worked both those days at the Chevron.  We weren’t any busier than usual, but that didn’t stop these huge shopping days from effecting us.

When everybody and their mother-in-law’s second cousin are using their credit cards at the same time, it sure slows things down.  Do you know how long 45 seconds seems when you have a customer standing there watching you watch the cash register and all it’s saying is “PLEASE WAIT”?  A long time.