Setbacks

Setbacks

Well, I burned my first batch of popcorn in years today.

I am absolutely dumbfounded. It started popping like 30 seconds later than normal, and by the 2:02 mark when I normally hit the stop button, it was right at the peak of popping. So I got real fidgety, but I let it keep going a bit more. No good. I opened the door at 2:24 and -poof- the wincing odors wafted out like an effluvium of cremated gerbils. You cannot hide the aftermath of burned popcorn. I sulked back to the office, trying to piece together what went wrong. The oven said it was set on 'Hi' like usual. I had set the bag blue-side down--in the *middle* of the rotisserie. Although, I realized I *had* played with the package on the way to the oven, mooshing the cake of powdered, artificial butter inside the bag like when you compulsively pop plastic packaging bubbles. I usually don't do that, so maybe that's what set off the weird chain of events that lead to the burning. I won't do it again.

The first set of people to come down the hallway commented on it immediately. Grrrr. I tried to explain, but it was like "oh yeah, surrrre surrrrre". Cooking popcorn is a high risk venture. One must have a sturdy constitution.

Last night, I went with Giselle to a Culture Fair at her school. All the different classes had set up displays and dances and things from various cultures. So we cruised around and got little stickers put in her 'passport' for each land we visited. Giselle particularly enjoyed the life-sized igloo made of paper wrapped around a tent.

As we walked from class to class, I noticed that her school was most definitely a Macintosh school, but almost all of the computers were from like 1992. I was shocked. About 1 in 3 classrooms had a 2 or 3 year old iMac. But almost everything else was all-in-one LC and Performa models. I even saw a couple Apple IIe stations still plugged in and set up for use. I mean, it's not like the kids are sitting on dirt floors, with 6 kids per book or something. But it still gave me a sick feeling seeing what looks like to be a zero budget for computers in the past few years. And that won't get fixed anytime soon. The Flagstaff schools have a projected budget defict of six and a half million dollars next year. The teachers are probably going to get hit with a pay freeze or reduction and 86 vacancies could go unfilled. There's no way that new computers--Macs or otherwise--are going to fly in the midst of that. I asked Giselle's teacher about it, and she said they went from 2 computers to 1 in her class this year because there aren't any district resources available to fix technical problems. I hadn't volunteered in her class this year, and I've been feeling pretty ashamed about that. But if they don't mind outsiders futzing around with their Macs, maybe I can make some sort of measley contribution there.