More to follow.

No, I'm not a poet. Just go vote. The only thing worse than reading in the post-election paper that your candidate lost their election is reading that less than half of registered voters actually voted.

Although I have to admit that choosing a gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey was a difficult task this year.

I was looking in the phone book for a limousine company and saw a firm called "Argosy Limousine". Now my only real exposure to the word argosy was from Argosy Magazine which I had always considered a "men's magazine". So I assumed that argosy had some type of "adult" meaning. After seeing this Argosy Limousine in the phone book, I realized that I didn't actually know what the word meant. So I looked it up on Dictionary.com. I was vaugely disappointed:

1. Nautical.
1. A large merchant ship.
2. A fleet of ships.
2. A rich source or supply: an argosy of adventure lore.

That's not really dirty at all.

As you can see, I still have my toe. As disgusting as that is.

These pictures don't really show much, but if you can get away from that actual grossness of my toe, you can see where the entire right side of my toe got scraped. In the second picture you can see a little flap of skin that is still seperated from the actual toe. Right after the "incident", the entire section from that flap down to the black mark near the nail was not connected to my body at all.

All in all, I'm a pretty disgusting human being. Come back in a few days and I'll show you all the places on my body where hair shouldn't grow but actually *is* growing. All due to the magic of getting older.

I'll just let that sentence sit there for a minute.

I was walking into the garage wearing socks (and *other* clothes, not just socks) to get something out of the refrigerator when I slipped on a piece of chalk. Not a tiny, thin stick of chalk like teachers used in school. I'm talking about a big, thick, round, hunk of sidewalk-drawin' chalk. Chalk that, interestingly enough, was almost the exact color gray (grey?) as the garage floor. My right foot stepped directly on the chalk and I started rolling forward. My left foot, in a rush to help keep balance, came forward really, *really* hard stubbing the big toe in the process.

Stubbing is such an innocent word. It's kind of cute - "stub". What really happened during the "Stubbing" is that I basically kicked my big toe directly in the concrete garage floor. I felt like I had broken it. Which is stupid because since I've never broken my big toe, I can't really say that I know what it feels like. I cursed and cursed. Damnit. And I hobbled upstairs to our bedroom where Claudine and all three kids were playing and watching T.V. I told Claudine about what happened and we joked about it. I asked her if she wanted to kiss it and I lifted my foot up to her face. That was when we both noticed the large amount of blood pumping out of my sock. Whoa-oooh. Better take a look at that.

I hobbled back into the bathroom where I took off my sock. And I was greeted by a portion of my big toe waving back at me. Which is to say that a portion of the tip of the toe had separated itself from the rest of the big toe. Claudine immediately jumped into action. And so did I. While Claudine was looking for all sorts of medical equipment, I went down to my office to take a picture of my toe. And of course, it was then that I discovered that the batteries in my digital camera were dead. So I don't have a picture of the wound to show you.

Claudine patched be up with these things called "Steri-strips" which are the next step down from actual stitches. She *could* have stitched me up right there in the kitchen if she needed to. I think that's pretty cool - I'll never have to go to the emergency room for stitches any more. I'll just have my wife stitch me up in the kitchen. But I don't have stitches this time. In a couple of days, she'll take these Steri-Strips off and look to see if that little chunk of flesh at the end of my toe wants to remain part of the toe or if I'm going to have a deformed little piggy for the rest of my life.

Yankees insert Wang into rotation.

So here I am trying to pick this blog up again. If this effort is anything like the last few, you should see a number of entries in the next week or so, then nothing until I get motivated once *again*. Not sure why sitting down and writing entries is so difficult. Perhaps it is the three kids in the house.

Speaking of the house, we are about to have some major work done on our house. I may have mentioned before that my mother is coming to live with us. After my father died, the house she was living in was just too big. Actually, *before* my father died the house was too big for them. It was the house we moved into in 1975. So they had a four bedroom house for the two of them. And now it's just her so it's time for her to get out.

Our current house is a split level so we got the wacky idea to go up one more level. So we're building a good size apartment one half flight up. And since that split is right against Annabel's room, we are adding a little loft to give her a little more space. We are also building a small office for me off the master bedroom. That way I can get out of the converted dining room. the dining room with no doors. The dining room that the kids like to run through. When I'm on the phone.

So the construction starts in the next couple of days. And in this case, "construction" starts with distruction. They have to take the current roof and rafters off before they can start to build. So that should be interesting. We've had to empty out Annie's room completely. We've moved her bed into Jake's room because that's the biggest room. And he certainly is handling the inconvenence better than I think Bobby would. The whole thing is supposed to take 12 to 15 weeks. I'm sure that those of you who have dealt with contractors before are laughing at that right now.

Claudine took some "before" pictures. Yet I am too lazy to get her camera to post them right now. If you come back tomorrow, you get to see the "before" pictures. I'll be posting pictures all the way though this ordeal for your amusement. And that way you can play right along at home with our remodeling project.

I am not a big believer in coddling. Cuddling? That's different. I'm at least as good a cuddler as Ned Flanders ("He looks like a cuddler, that Ned"). But coddling? No way. Just ask my kids. Seriously, it doesn't help. I just weakens people. And I would think that the teachers of today would be interested in..., oh I don't know, strengthening their students, rather than weakening them?

Let's look at some snippets from this story:

Parents objected. Red writing, they said, was "stressful." The principal said teachers were just giving constructive advice and the color of ink used to convey that message should not matter. But some parents could not let it go.

"Some parents could not let it go." Arrgh. Are you kidding me? These stupid parents aren't doing their kids any favors here. Can you imagine what goes on in the mind of a parent that would go to their kid's school and complain about the color of the ink that was used to correct their kid's work? I'm sure at least one of them had to stop at a traffic light on the way to the school. Hope seeing the red light at the top wasn't too stressful for them.

"You could hold up a paper that says 'Great work!' and it won't even matter if it's written in red," said Joseph Foriska, principal of Thaddeus Stevens Elementary in Pittsburgh.

He has instructed his teachers to grade with colors featuring more "pleasant-feeling tones" so that their instructional messages do not come across as derogatory or demeaning.

"The color is everything," said Foriska, an educator for 31 years.

No, the color is not everything. You sir, are just an idiot. This guy is a teacher, excuse me, an educator in an elementary school. Grades K through 6 I would assume. So kids are coming into his school with presumably no preconceived notions about the so-called evils of red markings on their school papers. Yet he is saying that if the words "Great Work" are written on a child's paper in red ink and not a color that features more "pleasant-feeling tones", then those words would "come across as derogatory or demeaning." Yeah, like if you had a class of incredibly intelligent students enter your school in kindergarten and through all their years of study all you had to do was write "A+" and "100%" and "Great Work" in red ink on their papers, would that be demeaning to them?

At Public School 188 in Manhattan, 25-year-old teacher Justin Kazmark grades with purple, which has emerged as a new color of choice for many educators, pen manufacturers confirm.

"My generation was brought up on right or wrong with no in between, and red was always in your face," Kazmark said. "It's abrasive to me. Purple is just a little bit more gentle. Part of my job is to be attuned to what kids respond to, and red is not one of those colors."

Boo to you previous generation, with your "rights" and your "wrongs". Let's have a world of "in between". A purple world of "in between".

Except, presumably, you'd like to teach your students to do things "right". How about making it part of your job, Justin, to have your students respond to *you* and not make this about the color of your pen? The point is to get the student to learn, not to feel better about not learing, or almost learning.

The disillusionment with red is part of broader shift in grading, said Vanessa Powell, a fifth-grade teacher at Snowshoe Elementary School in Wasilla, Alaska.

"It's taken a turn from 'Here's what you need to improve on' to 'Here's what you've done right,"' Powell said. "It's not that we're not pointing out mistakes, it's just that the method in which it's delivered is more positive."

Not to get all Ayn Rand/Incredibles here, but this seems like a bad approach. If you turn Powell's sentence around, it seems like she's being more positive about mistakes. But, um, making mistakes is a negative. Isn't it? Can you be positive and use red ink about what was done right and still be negative and use red ink when you point out mistakes? I would think that the last thing you want to do when pointing up mistakes to impressionable grade schoolers is to do it in and upbeat and positive way. Especially if it is the same positive and upbeat way that you're pointing out what they've done right.

That is a sound approach, said Leatrice Eiseman, a color specialist with a background in psychology who has written several books on the ties between colors and communication.

"The human eye is notoriously fickle and is always searching for something new to look at it," she said. "If you use a color that has long been used in a traditional way, you can lose people's attention, especially if they have a history of a lot of red marks on their papers."

Purple may be rising in popularity, Eiseman said, because teachers know it is a mix of blue and red. As she put it: "You still have that element of the danger aspect -- the red -- but it's kind of subtle, subliminal. It's in the color, rather than being in your face

God help me, they've brought in a color specialist. I think the fact that a job like this exists at all is part of the problem. Hey lady, guess why red is traditionally used for grading papers? Because red is a color that is easy to see. No more, no less. Not because it has an element of danger! Jeez, you have got to be kidding me. Some of my best papers from high school had a big red "A" on them. At no time in handling that paper did I feel that I was in danger. Oooooh, danger! And purple has "subtle" danger. Not truly dangerous like that in-your-face red, but more subliminal. Subliminal danger. So that the kids in school are all uncomfortable and feel like in the back of their minds they've made mistakes, but they just don't know why. Cause it's subliminal. No mixed message there, no sir.

To sum up: Some people are idiots. And those idiots are helping churn out a new and larger generation of idiots.

This is the thing that is going to get Pedro Martinez pissed by July. Even though he wasn't in a position to win this game, I can see many blown win opportunities start to really piss Pedro off. If the Mets' bullpen can't keep a lead, look for Pedro to get crazy.

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Above is a view of our neighbor's backyard from our deck. In the foreground is the top of the fence, then their pool, then their... lake. To the right you can see a little grass at the bottom of their deck. After that, it's all water.

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Turning 180 degrees is the view of our backyard. Look at all that grass. That's not to say that our backyard is bone dry, but at least we can see our backyard.

I played golf for the first time this year. And I was horrible. Just horrible. But it was nice to get back out there. Shooting a bad score didn't bother me as much as it usually does. I think that's just because I didn't have any great expectations for the first time out.

I was lucky to catch a break in the horrible, rainy weather that has drenched the Northeast. It stopped raining early enough in the week that the course had dried out somewhat. There was about a six or seven hour period on Friday that was sunny and 60 degrees. Then four hours after I played, the temperature dropped and the rains started again. We're forecast to have two days of heavy rain with the possiblity of four inches total. Which is fine because I have to travel next week and can't play golf this coming Friday.

Hey, the Pope is on his way out. Unless this is an elaborate April Fool's joke on the part of the Vatican. I can see what this is a big deal for the Catholic Church, but I don't understand why everyone is praying for him. I mean, if everything that the Pope says is true, then the John Paul II is going on to a much, much better place. I would think that Catholics would be really happy for the Pope. If anyone is going to heaven based on the teachings of the Catholic Church, it would be the Pope. Although I'm sure there are many people who argue that the Pope is the least deserving person to get to heaven.

I'm also kinda curious why Congress isn't passing some type of overreaching law to have a feeding tube inserted into the Pope.

I remember when John Paul II (and JP the first) were elected. I was 15 at the time. Not being a particularly relgious person ( ok, not religous at all) and not coming from a particularly relgious family, this was my first real exposure to all things Popey. I was fascinated by the whole Pope election process when John Paul was choosen. Then just a month later, I got to watch it all over again to choose John Paul II. I still think there was something fishy about that whole thing John Paul I thing.

The thing that I thought was cool (besides the whole black smoke/white smoke thing) was that all the Cardinals get locked up in a building until they can agree on the next Pope. Although it seems that John Paul II changed some of the rules recently so that it is easier and more comfortable for those crazy Cardinals.