This Was Probably the Monday-est Wednesday of the Year

OK, indulge me here for a second. Twice a year, I'll write a post about how rough it is to get back in the swing of things on the first day of a school semester. For Spring 2005, this is that post.

Sleeping was minimal last night; didn't get to bed until one, partially because I jammed with Halfling till midnight, and partially because the intended effort to wake up at eight yesterday fell short (or would that be long?) by almost two more hours. Once I did get to bed, sleep was slow to arrive, as I tossed and turned until way past two. I didn't actually hit that many snooze alarms and got out of the house on time, but I knew that going from leisure time to a 10+ hour workday would eventually take its toll. (I almost accidentally typed "take its tool." Huh huh, he said "tool.")

I do have to say that it was a perfect day to start a new semester, if by "perfect" I mean "perfectly ugly, and thus not conducive to missing the leisure time." Two days ago, it was in the 70's, and not much cooler than that yesterday. When I left the house at 7:25 this morning, it was falling into the 30's, accompanied by a nasty rain. On top of that, the warmth from previous days was still trapped inside the practice rooms at the first few schools, so I experienced a temperature swing of some 50 degrees for a bit...yecch.

I was impressed with something, though: I made it through the first two hours of teaching without yawning, despite the fact that the first two people I taught yawned incessantly. People have gone round and round about whether or not yawning is "contagious," but my experience would lead me to agree that it is. Of course, once the yawning started for me, it came in droves.

One cool thing about today was that almost everyone paid me. For once, emailing the bills a few days beforehand actually worked. Yay, no eating cat food for me this year.

It was really funny how many people thought today was a Monday. I got a few funny looks from students when I walked in, because they thought their lesson wasn't for two more days; some even tried to invoke the "Monday excuse" if they made a goofy mistake. But while this may have been the Monday-est Wednesday of the year, Friday will be here in just two more days.

Unfortunate Web name, part deux: About a year ago, I made note of a company whose name, Landpro Creations, resulted in unintentional humor when the two words were combined to make a domain name. Today I found another one, which begs the question: what were the people at "Pen Island" thinking? If any domain name ever deserved a well-placed hyphen, this is it.
(via Dave Barry's Blog)

Maybe it was just a mis-labeled version of John Cage's 4'33": It is now possible to download silence--for 99 cents a pop, of course--on iTunes.
And the scary thing is, I bet it still sounds better than the latest Britney Spears single.
(via UNEASYsilence, which only seems appropriate)