Dalton

I've officially changed my office hours. They were 10-1. They are now 11-2. Why would I do such a thing? No, it's not because I want to sleep in longer. It's because I got a phone call today from the principal (or warden or head inflicter of punishment or something) of a "Restart" school that's near the apartments. This school/juvenile correction facility exists to educate troubled teens that get themselves expelled and/or arrested and can no longer attend regular school. This head inflicter of justice wondered if I could use some help around the apartments during the day from one of the students/inmates. I knew Karen had done this last year with a kid named Jacob, and I figured "what the heck?" So I said that I could certainly accommodate him.
So at about 11:30, he showed up with Dalton, my new janitor. Apparently Dalton does classes in the morning and then is my property from 11:30 to 2:30. Because of Dalton's hours of availability, I figured it would be easier if I just pushed my office hours back.
So Dalton is fourteen. He looks like he is twelve. He mutters. And he was arrested for possession and the attempted sale of hydrocodone. Dalton loves fishing and shooting his father with a BB gun when he's mad. Dalton does not like old people. He hides when he hears people in the hallway.
I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with him. I guess he'll mostly just end up doing the same thing every single day: vacuum the carpets and clean the windows.
Anna's computer flipped out last night. It kept restarting itself, letting you sign in and then before it would finish booting up, it would give a blue screen of death and restart. It did this for over an hour. We tried to do a system restore. That failed. It kept restarting itself. And then magically, one time it finally loaded all the way. So Anna backed up all her pictures and important information to our external harddrive. And I drove to Greenwood today to get another backup harddrive, just in case. You think that's overkill? The first backup harddrive we had freaked out and no longer works. So that's why we have the two working ones right now.
It's amazing that you can now get a TB of storage for under a hundred dollars. Six months ago, I spent almost exactly the same amount on a 500 GB harddrive.
The Rockies won. They are still leading the wildcard chase. I'd love to see them in the playoffs again. A Rockies/Dodgers NLCS would be so awesome.
Because I was already in Greenwood, I stopped at Half-Priced Books. I found myself another Salman Rushdie book, which is good. There's just so much there that it's kind of overwhelming. I need to start making lists of authors that I need to read before I go.
I love ESPN, but I hate ESPN. They always short change the Rockies on coverage. They only ever talk about six teams: the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Phillies, Dodgers, and Cubs. Unless the Rockies are playing one of those teams, good luck getting to hear about them.
In some ways, I hope the Broncos go 0-16 just to guarantee that they go ahead and fire McDaniels. Why would I want this? I want this because I know that however much I hope it will happen, Bowlen isn't going to fire McDaniels before the end of the season. Bowlen should fire himself for hiring McDaniels. Ridiculous. Bowlen should have fired himself twice over after the draft. For seriously. This is going to be a depressing NFL season.
Now I'm all depressed thinking about football.
You know what else is depressing? Last night Anna and I were watching "Secret Lives of Women" on WE TV. Sounds incredibly dumb right? It can actually be really interesting. Last night they were documenting child brides. They profiled four different girls/women that got married as young teenagers (13, 14, 15). One girl was Asian and had been forced into an arranged marriage by her parents. One girl was from Nebraska and had been impregnated by her 22 year old boyfriend. Two of them were from Kentucky, where one had gotten pregnant at a really young age, and the other had simply "fallen in love" at 13. The thing about it was that the three white girls were obviously very uneducated. The two women from Kentucky abused the English language like a rented mule that had mated with a red-headed step-child. It was extremely obvious that these girls were all super low class. So I asked Anna if she though WE had intentionally focused on the super uneducated to make a point or if these were the only kinds of girls they could find. I thought about it some, and I just can't imagine girls with any sort of education or money marrying at such a young age, pregnant or not. But I still wonder. There's got to be some educated rich girl out there that got married at 14, right?
Well, I've talked about nothing for long enough tonight. Sweet dreams.
(Speaking of dreams: I was dreaming about boat-sized snapping turtles earlier. I wonder what that means?)