We Are Being Tested

For three days starting today, every 11th grader in the state of New Jersey is being tested to see if s/he can graduate. It's called the High School Proficiency Assessment, HSPA, which we pronounce "hespa." Like all of these tests, it's pointless. If any little thing goes wrong in the testing, we will lose our jobs, our licenses, our pensions, we have been promised. The state is serious about this shit, as if it actually might mean something.

Because my school is never quite up to speed, I didn't have an assignment this morning, but I took hall duty outside the library anyway, because no one gets out of HSPA alive, and it was better to just find a duty and do it than have to deal with any aftermath. Our bell schedule is all changed for these three days; today, we have morning classes in the afternoon. It's crazy here.

In other news, did I mention that I picked up an inexpensive PC netbook last week? And now I know why I love my Mac? All I wanted was a little computer that could pick up a few non-Mac-compliant websites, and that would stream video, which my Mac is too old to do. All good, it does all that. I do need to remember that I can't download just anything I come across like I can on a Mac, where no one fears viruses, so I activated the McAfee free trial and then decided to upgrade it to a year.

Oh.My. God. This must be why I have a Mac, because I am already in McAfee hell. I have already talked to two people in India, I may possibly have paid for the upgrade twice, and guess what? No upgrade received. Am I surprised? No, not at all. Pissed off, yes, but not surprised. So after school today, I need to do battle with those people. All for a cheap little netbook. Which is very cute, btw. And I can watch things on hulu and they're closed captioned, too.

I'm making dinner in the crockpot right this very minute, some kind of chicken, so it should be easy to get the meal on the table tonight, just make some potatoes on the side. I'm turning into a regular Suzy Homemaker.

I am semi-back to following Twitter, but not really, only because I saw that Serge, the butler robot on Caprica, is twittering, and it's very amusing. He tweets under the name Serge Greystone. If you haven't seen the show, he's just a sort of automated servant, kind of shaped like one of those hip 70's phones with the long sort-of neck, that floats through the house and talks to the people who live there, but he has a personality, which is certainly showing up in the Twitter feeds. I haven't looked at Twitter otherwise in a very, very long time. I'll see what's going on there for a while before it loses me again, I guess.

I am so ready for lunch, but lunch is later today because of the weird schedule. What a stupid place this is.