happy friday

It’s a stunningly quiet day here at the office – we’re off Monday and Tuesday for Easter, so I think everyone has already left town. Hooray!!! I need a quiet day, since this has been Let’s Venture Out of the Woodwork And Torture Beth Week. I’ve had an endless array of bizarre questions and situations and people all week long. Like the one who called because she needs us to send her school a letter saying she’s completed her certification-only program. Well, usually that’s no problem at all. Unless of course you had your program worked up in 1988. And the last thing we heard out of you was when you sent some transcripts in from another college five years ago. Now she says that was the last thing she needed to do (that and sit around five years twiddling her thumbs, apparently) and her school (that she’s been teaching in for 25 years, she says) has to know right this second that she’s licensed to teach PE!

I seriously can’t figure out if she’s done everything or not, since there are about twenty courses listed that someone just drew one diagonal line through – does that mean she never had to have them? And I can’t figure out what the other college transcript has to do with anything she was required to take. Because her program is, oh, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD. And no course titles were listed, just numbers, and even though I do have an antique 1988 catalogue, I can’t find several classes that weren’t checked off on her program, so I don’t know if any of them were the equivalent of what she took at Other College. And I’m sure there’s some sort of statute of limitations on how old these classes can be.

Her file is full of letters to her and from her. It appears that she contacts this office in a frenzy every 8-10 years or so, then she vanishes again. In one letter she said she knew she should have taken care of getting a transcript to us (one from a totally DIFFERENT Other University) but things came up and she wasn’t able to contact us for the past three years. I’m really wondering WHAT came up. Jail time? A trip to the space station? A coma???

Oh, well. Whatever. I’ve passed the whole file on to the Associate Dean to see what SHE thinks. But that’s just a sample of what it’s been like here. I think people who have provisional and temporary licenses are getting letters from their schools saying they have to take some classes or lose their jobs, so naturally that generates panic and hysteria. Even though they know this when they GET the license to begin with. Nothing like waiting till the last minute and then falling to shrieking pieces.

But anyway. On the plus side, my father FINALLY got to come home from the hospital yesterday. They sent him home with oxygen, which is worrying, but nobody seems that concerned about it. He’s supposed to use it if he needs it, but when I talked to him last night he sounded all of breath and exhausted. Of course, moving out of the hospital and going back home after being there for four weeks probably was exhausting in itself. We’re going down tomorrow so I’ll get to see for myself what’s going on.

On another plus side, I LOVE THE IPOD. I really really REALLY love the iPod. The IPod is perhaps the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my LIFE. I already don’t know how I’ve managed to exist all these years without the iPod. Or at least the past five or ten years when it’s been such a pain to transfer music to tapes and carry stuff around. It arrived night before last, and I’ve been busily putting songs from CDs onto it. And it’s so easy – I really feared that whole transferring music thing would be difficult and irritating because I’ve had NO luck with burning CDs, on either computer. There’s always something wrong and some songs play and some don’t and it’s a terrific pain, but this is SO EASY. It came with an iTunes disc, so once that’s installed you just pop the CD in the computer, the song list pops up on the screen, you select what you want to transfer to your library, you hit “import” – and that’s it. THAT’S IT. To upload them onto the iPod, you plug it into the computer. And THAT’S it. When you make changes to your music library, you plug the iPod in and it makes the changes on the iPod. No more deciding you really don’t like what you taped after all, and having to do the whole tape thing over! Even worse, our pathetic stereo flips to the other side of the tape if you hit “play” too hard, so I was always ending up recording over something I’d just recorded without realizing it. I gave up recording tapes several years ago, and the CD burning just didn’t work out at all, so this is very exciting.

And it sounds great. And it’s very very very cute.

See?

Yes, I might as well just make a commercial for Apple. But I’m bedazzled by the iPod.

I still haven’t tried downloading songs – well, yes I did last night, Amazon apparently has free downloads so I tried one for an experiment and got kicked offline before it was done. Thanks, Insanely Slow Dialup. So I’m going to try downloading at work, putting it on a CD, THEN putting it in my iTunes library. I’ve got so many CDs to go through that I haven’t really needed to do that yet. If it’s as easy as the CDs are, though, I’m going to be even happier.

And on the “I’m seriously losing my mind” front, I was just looking at the Apple page, and thought, “oh, that’s an upside-down exclamation mark in front of ‘Pod’ and ‘Tunes’, and I’ve been putting an ‘i’ – I better fix that!” Ummm….that’s probably a really bad sign. I also tried to use my ATM card instead of my gate pass to get into the parkinglot yesterday.

But, the sun’s out, it’s not freezing, and I have my iPod to keep me company during my mind’s downward spiral, so who cares!!