The art work on my walls.

Carmi, of Written Inc., posed the question “Do you hang your own artwork on your walls?” and this is my response.

Yes, I do, although, like Carmi, I have very little talent at drawing so my personal stuff is limited to photographs.  But with 10 foot ceilings, I have a lot of area to cover, which gives me a lot of room to show things off. I do have some drawings up there too, ones that were done by past students and other teachers I’ve worked with. (These are photos of the framed works, from where they are on the wall, so they are not the best quality.)

This is the first student work I ever bought.  I got it while I was student teaching, they had an art show every year for the students and the students were allowed to auction off their work.

Below is a caricature of the year the Utah Jazz won the first 3 games of the playoffs, and since the fourth was a home game, we were expecting them to sweep the championship.  Ironically, they lost the next 4 games and the title.And this one was a going away present for the entire staff at the high school the district closed on us.  The French teacher drew it, taking into account each of our personalities.  Bonus points for anyone who can correctly identify which character is mine. (Click on the picture to enlarge.) She first did this at a junior high school we both worked at, when the principal (same one as at the high school) retired.  I would post it, but since it identifies the school, which is still open, I think it is best to leave it off.

Thematic Photographic: Aerial

Haven’t posted here for a while, so figured I’d use this blog for my Thematic Photographic entries.  Please, check out all the other entries, and enter yourself if so inclined, by clicking on the banner at the bottom.

I too these aerial photographs of the Colorado River and surrounding areas from Dead Horse Point.   

The “H” rock revisited.

The “H” rock.  A big “H” painted on a rock on the side of the mountain east of Salt Lake City, it marks the territory of Salt Lake City’s Highland High School.  Cyprus High out in Magna has a “C” on the hill above it, as many of the schools in the Mountain States do.  From almost everywhere in Salt Lake you can see the huge concrete “U” on the side of the hill above the University of Utah.  Brigham Young University (yecch!*) has a “Y”.  I went to East High in Salt Lake City, and we didn’t have our own letter on a rock on the side of the hill.  This was a big source of contention for us, especially since the “H” rock was pretty much right on the border of East and Highland’s boundaries.  

At least during my 3 years at East High, several times a year someone (obviously not from East) would climb up to the rock and paint the white H into a red E.   And every time, the next day, an administrator would come on over the speaker and admonish us for this vandalism and waste of school’s monies.  Now I understand the financial problems this would cause the district, but at the time I just thought things that I will not repeat here.

Now, you probably are wondering if, or at least what, the students of Highland did to retaliate. (Yes, that’s a weird and inappropriate sentence, but you get the meaning.)  They did several things.  One year they set our tissue paper covered homecoming float on fire.  You can just imagine how fast that burnt down to the metal cage that shaped it.  Several times they painted the E in front of the tennis courts into an H.  Once they spray painted an enormous H on the side of our brand new auditorium.

But by far, the best try they ever made they got caught at.  Two or three Highland students used their rock climbing skills to climb up the face of our school and paint the E you see there on top into an H.  This was late at night, back at a time when, in Salt Lake City, 11:00 was the wee hours of the morning, so they expected to get it done unnoticed.  I don’t know if it was because someone saw them, or just their bad luck that a police officer was cruising by the school at the time, but they were caught rappelling down the face of the school.  BUSTED!

Of course that didn’t stop the rivalry and the continued painting and re painting of the “H” rock.  To be honest, I haven’t paid enough attention to notice if it still goes on today.

*Sorry all BYU fans, my dad has worked for the U for 40 years, I got both my Bachelor’s and Master’s there.  I am required, by law, to say rude things about BYU.

Blue, blew. Oh, pooh.

Dry rot.  It doesn’t always show on a car tire, until you hit 70 MPH.  Back in ought-7, a friend and I were headed up to Ogden in my ‘70 convertible LTD.  We just barely got onto the freeway when the right rear tire literally exploded.  The tires had looked good, they just passed the state inspection, but were at least 8 years old, and for most of that 8 years I owned the car it had been sitting in the garage.  I had to call up my sister-in-law, Mrs. Gearhead, because my spare was flat and and I didn’t even have the bumper-jack in the trunk.  Duh!  Once again, one of my siblings or siblings-in-law bailed me out of a jam, I got a spare on the car, hobbled it home and immediately bought 5 new tires for the car.  Good lesson, because when I bought my ‘69 4-door LTD in California and was told the tires looked good but were quite old, I budgeted for band new tires for the drive home.

Anyway, this first picture is of the bridge I was on when the tire exploded.  As you can see, it was a cloudless day, perfect for a cruise in the convertible, and the sky was a beautiful blue, as it often is here in July. The second picture is of the tire that blew. As you can see, there was enough force to do damage to the car itself.  Unfortunately, it’s 3 years later and I still haven’t repaired the damage. 

Disneyland, far from home.

Ever gone to Disneyland?  How about for three days and two nights, with 75 fifteen-year-olds?  And only two teachers?  Yeah, there were more than a half dozen more adults, but parents are not used to ordering around that many kids they don’t know.

In 2001, the Dance Company of the school I was at was invited to perform at both of the Disneyland Parks (California Adventure was still fairly new).  It was quite an honor,and the trip was actually a lot of fun, but not without some, uh, ‘experiences’.  On the airplane, not including 1^st Class, we took up close to ¾ of the seats.   They were pretty well behaved on the plane, although a businessman made the mistake of falling asleep next to a couple of the boys.  They didn’t seem to bug him, but later I saw a few pictures of the guy with one of the kids pretending to sleep leaning up against him.

We got from the airport to the hotel without any lost kids or other incidents, but were unhappily surprised when we got there.  We had specifically asked for rooms in separate wings of the building, in order to separate the boys from the girls.  The had told us that we could be accommodated, yet when we got there all the  rooms were in the same wing.  We tried to do our best, arranging the boys on one floor and the girls on another, but this ended up placing a room of boys two stories above a room of girls, with regular guests in between.  This, as you can imagine, caused some problems.  Once they realized they were right above one another, they were yelling up and down the side of the building at each other.   The manager had to come ask me to get them to stop, the regular customers had complained, and I told him that I would take care of it, but reminded him that we had asked for separate wings just because of things like this.   Other than that the kids were reasonably good, except for the group I was directly in charge of.  My group a) broke a bed, b) knocked down an Exit sign playing football in the hall and c) discovered that it took 1½ rolls of  toilet paper to plug up their toilet.  I made them a) pay for the broken bed, b) reattach the Exit sigh and c) borrow a plunger from the front desk until the toilet was working again.  Fortunately I had a good relationship with these kids, so they didn’t even argue about their consequences, just paid the money and  fixed the stuff.

Once we were in the park, things were great.  The dances went off without a hitch, and since the parks are designed for kids, as soon as we got them through the gates we chaperones were off duty.  Only thing we were supposed to do, but not required, was to show up for the dances for a show of support, which we wanted to do anyhow. 

The last day we left for the airport giving enough time to stop by the ocean for an hour or so.  It was quite relaxing, after the hustle and bustle of the amusement parks, to just sit there on the beach and watch the kids running around.  Perfect end to the trip, because I can’t even remember the rest so there couldn’t have been much going on .

From far to home.

“Far from home” is a relative thing, depending on where you define home.  And as time passes, and “Home” changes, so does what we think of as far from it.

I was 14 when we moved from Lexington, Mass. to Salt Lake City.  Not only did I see myself as moving 2/3 of the way across the country, I thought I was moving out to the wild west.  It was 1974, I’d grown up on The Brady Bunch and John Wayne movies, so I won’t fault myself for really believing I was going to live on a ranch and ride my horse to school every day.  Nope, no such luck.  It was a city.  Very small city by my east coast eyes, but still my school had no hitchin’ posts, the sidewalks were concrete instead of wood and there were buildings more than 2 stories tall.

When I first saw this house, it seemed like the furthest thing from home.  All our furniture and worldly belongings were lost somewhere in the mid-west so the moving company put us up in a hotel.  For about two months “home” was an empty shell we were painting and re-flooring, the breakfast table was at Marie Callender’s restaurant and dinner was whatever fast food place struck our fancy that night. But, despite still considering myself (partly) a Bostonian, it did become home and even though I was no longer living there when it was sold, it was hard to see it go.  

Wordle for this blog.

Can you tell what I talk about on this blog?  Remember – the bigger the word the more often it appears in the text.