Yeah, student teachers are a very different ballgame. Hell, I would rather have had a high schooler earning credit.

True confession: I have worked in child care. I kind of hated it when we had volunteers, especially when they weren’t exactly voluntary, come in to “help.” They tended to be disruptive, they weren’t allowed to help with things like diaper changes, feeding, or discipline, so I ended up not only still having to watch…

No, I don’t think there is any kind of statutory vacation time here. Many businesses don’t allow vacation for the first year, and then you start with a week and can build up from there. Often, businesses will have a system where you can build up PTO (either vacation or sick days) according to how many hours/days you…

Just one more reason to move to Sweden.

Except that the worst offenders for this sort of thing tend to be places that have little to no respect for their employees anyway, view them as a dime a dozen, and have insanely high turnover. They often don’t have well-trained employees to start with since they never keep anyone around long enough to earn much…

Your cynical (read: realistic) approach to this makes me give a resigned nod.

Don’t worry; fashion will be irrelevant as soon as my robot brethren and sistren feel the time is right, and we start by launching a — oh. Never mind. Scratch that. Robots? What robots? What take-over? Who said anything about the robots taking over and crushing all humans beneath our shiny feet? NOBODY, that’s who!

Damn. What is the good of writing snark for a blog if you can’t use it to your advantage to get your landlord to let you get a damn dishwasher? For some reason, mine seem to think that the installation of a wormhole, which will enable my kitchen to have enough room for a washer, will completely off-set the energy…

HA! WHAT COUNTER!? I have about three square feet of counter space.

AHH!!! WHY DID YOU HAVE TO SHOW ME THAT!?

YES. When my hair was long enough to braid, a missed bit like that would have driven me crazy. I would have been able to feel it, just sitting there at the back of my neck, TAUNTING ME.

Yes. I really want to still love her, out of love for that woman from back then. :/

Most of the girls I have taught in recent years have had the middle name “Grace.”

Seconded.

It was blink-and-you-miss-it in the movie, tho. If you didn’t already know that’s what was happening, you probably spent the rest of that movie and the next wondering who was caring for Hedwig while Harry went camping.

My beautiful son wrote JK a letter after I read him and his brother the bit about Dobby. He was NOT happy. I really do need to send it to her. She must see the 8-year-old angst she caused!

No. I refuse to imagine that. I may be down, but I am NOT in that horrible a space.

Clearly, they really should have asked us before naming it. What were they thinking?

I keep looking at the name of that island and reading “urethra” so, no, I really don’t want to go there.

I don’t get it, either. He has always seemed really arrogant and entitled and not at all charming to me. I still haven’t forgiven him for the standing on his cutting board incident on Iron Chef. I bet he’s a really selfish lover.