Saturday, March 26, 2011

Three things

1) Someone on staff is really stupid. And petty. And has entirely too much time on his/her hands. So the whole thing about reporting me to the boss for 'conducting classes' during House meetings is apparently still out there. I don't get it - I consider that time a free period to organise, categorise and make things for the students who are never in class because of the sport heats (which they do DURING classes). Now they're harping on about how the Science staff members never go to the House meetings. I am sorry, but I have 16 School-Based Assessment labs to mark and compile for 30 pupils FOR A DEADLINE. OMG WTF. Math and English have no assessments and other subjects have like, 1 project. It doesn't help that the students bring their stuff in late, despite our threats for zero (which the admin will be all, 'Did you exhaust all the opportunities to get them to bring their stuff in?' if we actually give them zero). I can't help it if they encourage shitty work ethics and whenever I try to harness anything good from it, I have students giving me the evil eye and telling their parents and the other teachers that I'm a meanie. OMG.

2) I got my S.B.A. business done, organised and compiled it. I gave it to my supervisor, who is in charge of that graduating class. She then tells me that her students should have been in that list (there are two groups). I knew that, but she has not met her deadline, so when she is writing hers up, it's just a matter of putting mine in, since I put everything else in already. She starts to tell me that I have to do it over and include her students. I told her no. She's too damned lazy and should do her damned job.
This same lady also shoved a whole bunch of papers haphazardly in a cupboard that I spend hours organising at the end of last year and then proceeded to tell me that she knows I'm good at organising and to fix it up real nice. I did not hide my 'you're not serious' expression. I couldn't.

3) I finished The Passage by Justin Cronin today. Finally! That was probably the biggest book I've ever read for leisure. It was bigger than my Math texts from A Levels, at least according to the size specs on Amazon: 784 pages pages in Hardcover. I read it on my Kindle, so I just saw that although 50 screens were read and the book was only like, 5% through. I think that was the only downside to the book. That and I don't know the map of the USA like, at all, so I was a bit lost while the people were travelling. But that's not the book's fault. That was Geography's.
On the upside, it was a pretty good read. It was filed under horrors, which I almsot never read because I don't like dreams of the nightmare variety. Thankfully the descriptions in this book were detailed enough to know what is going on, but vague enough to not paint maggot infested images in my head.
It tells of the journey of Amy, a girl who seems to be almost frozen in time. The books starts with her birth and early childhood from her mother's point-of-view. Amy was abandoned by her mother at a convent, where she was doted on by Sister Lacey, then she was cared for my Agent Wolgast, who carried her to Colorado. The book then goes on about a project by the army to make superior beings via a viral infection. The virus was obtained by vampires, which is what the first 12 infected persons, who unsuspectingly signed on as test subjects, became. Amy, subject 13, was a bit different, since she had strange powers even before she was changed. I think her age and rate of healing was a huge aspect in making Amy a superior human, rather than a freakish vampire.
That's another thing - the vamps in this book were not of the Dracula or Lestat variety - they were something completely different - their skin looked like it was pulled over rope, hairless, with orange eyes. They did not speak like humans either, but rather in a clicking noise, akin to some insects, I would assume. They didn't suck on their prey like the vamps of the other stories either. They ripped it apart. And they were everywhere. The 12 vamps escape the facility at Colorado and basically either kill or infect pretty much everyone else in the USA.
Amy lives for at least a hundred years in the book, and she meets various people who help her, care for her, and are protected by her. The book goes into their point-of-views as well, their lives and their journeys.
It is a good read, but a very long one, so I would only recommend it to people who really like to read. I believe it is the first of a trilogy - it is easy to see where a sequel would follow, but the book doesn't end in an annoying cliffhanger either.

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