I'm Only the Trombone Player

So before I embark on Andre's Cruise ---

I thought I'd take a look back at the first half of May and try to figure out just where the train wreck started —


It all started out well, I had a plan, and it seemed like a good one a the time;

There were no contests, raffles, or any side gigs to contend with. I had convinced Anon-Y-Monkey, Pub Bunny, and the Grumpy Leprechaun that I needed some time off from their shananigans to actually do a few things for me.

I was going to take a course here on Writing.Com. Along with that course, I was planning either a short story or the opening chapters of a novella. I was going to do at least fifteen reviews. I was also going to try organizing and plotting out some of my abandoned stories.

The Score?

I am hopelessly behind in my course. (curses — because what I have completed has been really helpful) Thank You blimprider!

Not a single review. — Not one. I didn't even manage to get a review in for the Super Power Raid.

And I haven't even peeked into my portfolio (it has to be really dusty and musty in there).

Yeah, yeah, there are excuses.

The whole Covid thing (you can read about that here "The Quarantine Blues" ) set me on my backside, I spent too much of that time worrying uselessly when I could have been productive.

Work as always intervened in several ways, from supervising the talent hunt in its search for fresh teaching meat for the educational grinder to the mundane task of creating the final for my Regents level Music Theory class, it seemed every task was just a little more intense then it needed to be.

We have three Dept. Chair level positions and five other positions to fill, unless we hire all three Chairs from within, a strong and growing possibility, in which case we have eight non Chair level positions to fill. For those eight/eleven positions, we received 252 applications/resume packets. The first pass, handled by our HR people eliminated forty-nine of them for reasons related to credentialing, background check failures, and other automatic disqualifications. A mere 203 resumes to read and score while herding the others on the committee to do the same in a timely fashion. Present the lucky seventy-five to HR, who now request their applicant's references, and teaching videos. HR checks the references, we watch and score the videos, we are down to twenty-five. Now in-person interviews are starting, an HR rep, a member of the search committee, and myself. I am the ONLY one that has to attend All twenty-five. Yesterday I had the pleasure of creating about thirty Thank You For Applying/Rejection Letters.

So that's where that task is, we are fifteen interviews in, with the rest to follow this week.

Then, there's the Regents Exam. Every year my Music Theory 2 section has to take a Regents instead of a final exam. For this, they get Regents Credit in Music and can claim that's their quasi High School Major Sequence. The Regents offered by the state do not cover nearly all that my kids have learned, so every year I have to create and submit my own Regents for approval. It always consists of seventy true/false, multiple-choice questions, and a thirty-point creative question.

This year the reviewer thought my thirty-pointer was "too hard" and would result in too many kids failing. Aside from the fact that she doesn't know the kids, does she really think I'd set them up to fail? We arrived at a compromise — I created another much easier thirty-pointer, but I am allowed to include both on the final. We have a bet on which option my kids are going to take, she is so gonna lose!

Anyway, I am going to try to salvage the last half of May the best I can. That is after Lilith 🎄 Christmas Cheer and Andre's Cruise gets done with me.

Thanks For Stopping By!