What Teachers Make

Don't have little ears in the room when you watch this - or use earphones. But watch this. It's worth it.

Perspective: Priceless

The Monster Mash - Starring Grammy & Co

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Super Salesman

Harrison has always been a very lucky kid. Combined with a little bit of honest effort, he has managed to parlay that good fortune into considerable "wealth", by standards of children his age.

Last year he worked so hard on the school fundraiser, he actually won an electric scooter for being the top salesman in his grade.

This year, he worked his tail off selling magazine subscriptions, and managed to sell 22. This number fell shy of the 25 subscription goal he had set for himself, and was 28 short of the 50 he needed to sell in order to qualify for the Nintendo DSi he was hoping to score for himself.

He wasn't disappointed, however. For each subscription he sold, he received a ticket which he could place in a school wide drawing for a 16GB Ipod Nano. Of the 640 kids at Franklin, guess who won the Ipod.

That's my boy!

Testing 1, 2, 3...

Wow, I didn't post a single thing through the month of September - but it wasn't for a lack of trying!

We currently have our high speed internet via Mediacom, and from July through September their service was so unreliable we only had internet connection for a total of about 2 hours per day. I say "a total of'" because it came in spurts that usually didn't exceed 20 minutes at a time.

We tried everything to get to the bottom of the problem - but we never did, because of course, to get to truth of the matter, we would have had to encounter an actually competent representative from Mediacom, and apparently they put all those people into the marketing department.

I even spent a morning waiting for the service man to come "between the hours of 9 and noon". When he finally did show up at 12:15, he plugged a meter thingy into a few of our outlets, walked around outside and couldn't find our hookups, then came in and told me there was nothing more he could do, but if we wanted to pay $30 they would replace all our cables with theirs, which we would then have to pay a monthly fee to use. Unless we purchased all their hardware, they wouldn't make any further efforts to troubleshoot the problem.

There's way more to the saga; a long backstory of frustrating call after frustrating call to Mediacom. They always had an automated message saying there was a "service interruption" in our area (that we received only after dialing down to the "internet service" part of their multi-tiered call system). After over a month of those messages, I took the extra 15 minutes to wait for a human and was scolded for being stupid enough to believe that the "service interruption" was always an internet issue, just because we were only having a disruption of internet service and had reached the internet service part of their phone menu before reaching the automated message.

And on and on. If you've ever dealt with Mediacom, you probably have had similar experiences.

At any rate, I'm dipping my toe in the blogging waters once more. If I can actually get this message to post, I'll scrounge up all the information I've been suppressing for a month and try to edit it better than THIS post before I put it out here.

I'm not spending too much time on this one, because the last several times I tried to blog, I spent a lot of time wordsmithing and editting, only to lose it all when I tried to post it, because it hadn't even autosaved.

Wish me luck!!!
Here goes nothing...