Splendiferous Zeppelin Escapades

Fourth Quarter started on Monday.  All of my students are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  My seniors are getting more and more careless.  That class can be kind of difficult since they all have senioritis, and just want to get out of these hallowed walls of learning and teenage drama.  

I have made a goal that this quarter I will be more organized and stay on top of all the assignments that are handed in.  This way I won’t have to suffer like I did at the end of last quarter.  Those were stressful days, but now they are over and I can move on.   

Anyway, that is really all that is happening on this front right now.  I’ll tell you more when I know more.  If you are at all interested in what my students are doing checkout my Teacher Blog.  English 5-6 are my junior classes and World Literature is my senior class.

What do these three things have in common:  1099, TEKsystems, convenience?  Absolutely nothing.  Here’s the story:  My business is needing some extra revenue for the next couple of months to fill in some gaps.  So what do we do?  We go out to some recruiting agencies to get some short temp work.  We wanted to do it on just a 1099 basis (1099 is IRS-speak for independent contracting) so we don’t have to mess with getting our employees on a W-2 basis with the company (TEKsystems).  That would make it a nightmare to transfer that money to the business then.

Ok, bear with me.  TEKsystems says they have two options: W-2 or Corp-to-Corp.  What, no 1099?  Who doesn’t do 1099’s?!?  Its the easiest thing in the world to do; no taxes, no hassle.  Well, apparently they don’t.  They would require each of our employees to set up their own corporation in order to be paid on a 1099 basis.  Can you say Jeppys, Inc.?  I can’t, and I won’t. 

Bottom line:  They would be great to work for if I just wanted some money for myself (good money at that), but they won’t work with businesses.  It really makes no sense that a company that provides employees for needing companies won’t provide employment opportunities to needing companies.  Geesh…

Well, another week has gone by, and my has it been busy.  I have been working like crazy to get essays graded and get everything caught up for the end of the quarter on the 23rd.  The end of the term means I get to go to Rexburg on Friday!  Whoo hoo! 

I got to a attend a first year teacher conference on Friday and Saturday, and it was mildly interesting.  Almost all the workshops I chose attend I ended up being disappointing.  They were geared more toward Elementary teachers, and any suggestions they might have had for improving my classroom organization or parent-teacher relations were (and still are) completely impossible for someone who has 212 students.  I felt like I wasted some time there, but I learned a few interesting things. 

I’ll post again soon.

Hi everyone.  Its been a couple of days, and I’ve been meaning to post this:  IE7 Beta 2.  I was pretty excited to see this.  I know its not really all that new as far as the world is concerned, but its new to me and maybe anybody else reading this.  It features tabbed browsing, rss feeds, more viewing area, etc.  It will only be available on Vista, but the beta will work for XP right now.

Also, I posted a semi-permanent link to They Might Be Giants Podcasts.  30 minutes of so of new music by TMBG for your listening pleasure.  They’ve got a goal to reach 1 million subscribers (they currently have over half-million), so lets help out the cause, eh? 

That’s it for now, but I might come up with something good before the weekend hits.

Well, I know many of you probably won’t care as much as I do, but Lucy has started losing her baby teeth.  And man, what weird teeth she has.  We’ve been finding them on the floor.

For the last few days we noticed that she has been chewing alot, and we thought she was chewing her gums raw.  As it turns out, she was just wiggling her teeth.    Pretty exciting stuff. 

Anyway, that’s all for now…

Edit (by Adam):  In case you didn’t know, Lucy is our five-months old miniature Schnauzer.  I just wanted to make that clear because you might think it a bit odd that we’re finding teeth all over our floor if she was a child…