I have a variety of grammatical pet peeves, and one of them is "au jus." This is a French phrase which means literally "with juice," or, more precisely, served in the juice obtained from roasting. Whenever I hear that some kind of food is being served "with au jus" or worse, "with au jus sauce", it makes me cringe. Meat (or steak sandwiches or whatever) can be served "au jus" but they cannot be served "with au jus." As if I didn't hate those talking baby sandwich commercials to begin with.Forgive me if I am especially peevish today. It was a Dreaded Monthly Meeting Day. Before it started, I was sitting with another teacher-status person (not a supervisor) who is sort of running his department anyway, and with whom I sat in a Spanish class some 36 or 37 years ago. (He was a year behind me in high school.) Anyway, he said something about how he'd rather have a tooth pulled without novocaine than sit through one of these meetings, and I said, Oh, they're not as bad as they used to be. Oy vey.
It was another one of those meetings where they just keep talking about how the teachers are doing everything wrong. Not checking tardies. (We'll have to talk to them about that.) Not using the proper hall passes. (We'll talk to them about that, too.) Not giving midterm exams the way they were supposed to. (Flog 'em!) And on and on. Most of the people at this meeting are administrators or department supervisors, and when they get into the teacher-bashing, it makes it very uncomfortable to be one of the few teacher-level people in the room. There were five of us, but one of them thinks he's a supervisor (he isn't) and was sucking up big-time, so he was getting in on the fun. According to him, teachers as a species are somehow responsible for colleges asking for kids' transcripts weeks earlier than they used to. I don't know.
So that sucked. One of the big bashers is actually a good friend of long standing, who, like many others in the room, are former teachers in the school. Makes you really wonder when they totally lost perspective.
I felt amazingly good about myself this afternoon because I accomplished certain concrete tasks on my list of tasks, something more demanding than "buy bananas", although I did that, too, but I do that every few days. Not that I did anything earth-shattering -- "join the gym" has still not been checked off. First, I copied an episode of Lost onto a tape for my nephew and dropped it off at his house. Then I turned in my old cable box and got a new one, because my nephew told me yesterday that he has a DVR (digital video recorder) box and I've been waiting for like, two years, to get one and I just never knew they were available here until he told me.
So I went and got that, even though one of the things in the world that truly makes me peevish is having to disconnect and/or reconnect wires and things. (I used to love doing that crap. No idea why, or why I hate doing it now.) So I've got this magic cable box, which hopefully I will learn to use before R moves out next month. She programmed all my favorite channels into it and otherwise set it up when she got home from work, which was really only about two minutes after I got the thing connected, so I totally was going to do it myself. And I do have something already set up to be recorded tonight; we'll see how that went tomorrow morning. I figure the thing is practically paying for itself, since Turner Classic Movies has about twenty films on in February, celebrating the Oscars, that I'm going to record and will consequently never need to buy. (Until the format changes, at which point all my DVDs are coasters and I'm screwed anyway.) Hey, some people are into jewelry.
So I got me some movies to program. Did you know that The African Queen has never been released on DVD? But it's finally going to be on TV on Thursday night. As it should be.
Okay, now I'm just babbling. Let me go figure out this remote control.
