"In the midst of life we are in the midst of death; a truer word was never said."--Sabina, The Skin of Our Teeth

The Daily News

1  Made it.

2   My deadline.

3   No one cares.

4   Heck, I don't even care.

6    I finished grading mountains of papers, finding tons of "lost" work, watching my home turn into a battlefield of paper, staples, post-it notes, and odd drinks like Jack and Catsup. I've been dieting so I left out the hamburger.

7    But I made my deadline, and actually almost beat it by six assignments. I combined six journal entries into one grade and got all the way up to one-and-a half classes left before it all unraveled.

8    This was close to midnight. I went outside and gave up the ghost. I looked up at the glowing moon, hallucinated, sawing a shining meteor descend over me, casting a black shadow everywhere that engulfed my soul. I saw a subtle red glow on my back fence, and possum eyes slithering this way and that, and I heard odd animal emanating from an unseen bush.

9    I walked back in, figuring that I was now officially Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Somewhere after all that I still managed to walk, exhausted from an already exhausting week.

10   But I made it.

11   Moving on, Part the First: So...Heavy D walks into a bar...

12   Forty-four, and a grave loss to many.

13   Sad, sad, sad.

14   Way to young.

15    And somehow I made it.

16   Go figure.

17   Moving on, Part the Second:  This morning I put on my baseball tie. I have this baseball tie that is so abstract that nobody know it is. They think it's a Matisse.

18   I think the Giants just made a great trade, so I wore it as my Matissesque badge of courage. Nobody will know that I still carry baseball into November.

19   While inundating myself with the self-flagellation that is grading large assignments, I stopped for a moment and opened one of my hodge-podge books.

20   I love opening hodge-podge books to random pages, because in this one, I turned right to Abbot and Costello's classic "Who's on First?"

21   As I read it, I moved completely away from all the stress of normal living and chatted aloud, even though nobody was around.

22   I thought to myelf, "I HAVE to post this in tomorrow's DN! It's providence! Everybody needs to take a step back and laugh at something that is so stupid it's intelligent!"

24    So here it is all it's glory. I thank Baseball Almanac for allowing any schmuck to be able to copy and paste it!

25   Sweet moment in the day, wouldn't you say?  ;  )  <--------way cool sideways winky guy

26   Well, that's about all I gots. Anyone know where I could get a nickel beer and a corn dog?

27   You guys have a wonderful Wednesday.

28    Don't let the madness do you in.

29    You'll make it.

30    I made it.

31    So can you. Hope you enjoy Bud and Lou.

32    Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

The Daily News

1   So Smokin' Joe walks into a bar...

2    What a tremendous boxer, and what tremendous battles.

3    More of our past pulling behinder and behinder on this freeway we call life.

4    Keep fightin' Joe. You were WAY underrated.

5    We'll miss you.

6    Moving on, Part the First: Okay, okay so I guess I'm supposed to address the Dr. Murray thing. The day MJ died, I listened to the 911 call and all the rest. I honestly don't remember too many specifics; I just said, "Whoever that doctor is should be the very first suspect. 

7   Evidently others feel the same way. I just figured it logically when it happened. As I said, at the time I had all the details listed and everything, because the entire thing sounded pretty fishy to me.

8   Anyway, it really isn't something that interests me that much. That family is so whacky that I get tired of hearing about them. But writing it all off as Michael wanting the drugs just looks like the work of a leech. The guy made mountains of money off Michael, and would remain employed as long as he gave Michael whatever he felt he needed for the tour.

9    As I said, I was never that into that case to begin with, just thought it was pretty obvious from the moment it happened.

10   So let's move on.

11   Moving on, Part the Second:  In my race to get all my grading done, I had papers stretched all over my living room last night at ten p.m. when School Loop crashed for "maintenance".  I had just pushed the "save" button so that my data would not disappear, but the second I pushed it, the notification appeared that it was shutting down.

12    Got really mad at first, then realized pretty quickly that the smartest thing I could do was to get to sleep. I awakened at 3 a.m. and was pleased to see that all my stuff saved, and decided to go ahead and do more work as long as I was awake.

13    Somehow I turned it all around, and it is looking good for beating the deadline almost a day ahead!

14   Of course, with Murphy's Law bein' what it is, I'm not going to leave anything to chance.

15   I could technically turn everything in right now, but a few students would get screwed if I did, so I'll try to make sure every single student is given a fair shake.

16   Pretty sleepy.

17    Wish me luck.

18    I'm goin' in man.

19    Have a good one.

20    Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

  The Daily News

1  So...Andy Rooney walks into a bar...

2  Funny man, intelligent and witty.

3   They had a special on him last night. It was pretty fun to watch. 

4    Here's a link, if it works:

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/rooney/main3419.shtml

5      I got some stuff off CNN's wire last night, so here are a few Rooneyisms:

Great lines from "60 Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney

November 05, 2011

• 

CBS News released this photo of Andy Rooney on the announcement of his death Saturday.

Andy Rooney, who died Saturday at the age of 92, had the last word each week on the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes." Here are some of his great lines from those essays, along with a few others, that reveal his talent as a writer and the dry wit that made him famous.

"I try to look nice. I comb my hair, I tie my tie, I put on a jacket, but I draw the line when it comes to trimming my eyebrows. You work with what you got." -- from an essay on his eyebrows, Nov. 24, 1996

"We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers. More college graduates ought to become plumbers or electricians, then go home at night and read Shakespeare." -- from an essay on finding a good job, March 21, 2010

"We didn't shock them, and we didn't awe them in Baghdad. The phrase makes us look like foolish braggarts. The president ought to fire whoever wrote that for him." -- on the start of the war in Iraq in 2003

"I recently bought this new laptop to use when I travel. Look at that. Fits right into my briefcase. It weighs less than three pounds. I lose that much getting mad, waiting to get on the plane through security at the airport." -- from an essay on computers, Feb. 11, 2009

CBS commentator Andy Rooney dies at 92

"We can all be prouder to be human beings, because that's what they were. They make up for a lot of liars, cheats, and terrorists among us." -- on the astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger after it exploded on takeoff in 1986

"Not many people in this world are as lucky as I've been. ... All this time I've been paid to say what is on my mind on television. You don't get any luckier in life than that." -- from Rooney's final "60 Minutes" essay, Oct. 2, 2011

"One of the things we can be sure of over the July 4th weekend is that news reports will keep telling us how many of us are going to die in automobile accidents." -- from Rooney's first "60 Minutes" essay, July 2, 1978

"The third rule of life is this: Everything you buy today is smaller, more expensive, and not as good as it was yesterday." -- from an essay on coffee cans, Oct. 23, 1988

"A lot of these products are actually pretty good. But why are they always trying to con us with the contrived pictures on the box that don't look anything like you get when you eat it?" -- from an essay on the pictures on food packages, Dec. 4, 1988

6    Moving on, Part the First: Nicoley had a lot of people run to her support over the weekend and as of last night, she did much better. Wait. What's with the font issues. We're getting smaller. Remember the People Mover in Disneyland, where we would shrink? Oh noooooooooooooooo!!!! Oh well, I'm over it. Hope you are too.

7    Moving on, Part the Second: What a lot of people don't know about the teaching profession is that during the school year, lesson plans need constantly to be put in place, every single day. And every single day a teacher must be meticulously planned. This is not always easy, since teachers also have to attend meetings, grade papers (my nemesis!), meet with parents, answer emails, attend IEP's, write recommendations and pretty much let the job run them...just like any job. But we don't need fellow workers coming up and criticizing our hard work and dedication. That's bush.

8   Classroom management is always sited as the hardest part of the job. It is sometimes, but once routines are established, all the bookwork tends to dominate. It is especially tough if you try to teach English, because a simple brief look at Facebook will let you know that "alot" of people out there never really learned good writing skills. Let me help some of you out.  

9    I would include myself in that mix, by the way. Even though I know grammar backwards and forwards, I still read some DN's where my editing got away from me. I edit the DN pretty carefully each night, but sometimes an item will appear with two "the's" in it, or I might accidentally spell milk "mikl".

10   What is especially atrocious is the amount of misspellings we teachers get, even at the purported best school in the entire district. I see common words misspelled so often that every once in a while I question whether I spelled them correctly or not. And I won my sixth-grade spelling bee, best in the entire skool.

11   While correcting the tons and tons of papers I make it a point always to have a dictionary nearby. But I get SO jumbled from the mistakes that I might type "dictionery" and then question if it is right or not.

12   Well, our grades are due this Wednesday, and I spent my entire weekend continuing to read and grade essays. I'm in my third week of doing that. It is imperative that I get those done before Wednesday.

13   Yesterday I spent almost two hours on half a class, and this was just entering the grades in School Loop. When I went to save them, I pushed a wrong button and everything disappeared!

14   Fortunately I know not to wallow in those situations. Well, I wallowed for a few minutes, then realized I was simply costing myself time, and that yeah, I just spent two hours doing something and it disappeared, but facts is facts.

15   I got on with it. I not only finished it in one-fourth the time, but even got another half class done before I got three essays I thought I had already graded from a student who didn't follow directions properly. Her papers were in another folder, so right while I was on a roll, I had to take another twenty minutes to read and comment on her stuff.

16   Glamorous stuff.

17    At that point I just figured I was exhausted. I had graded all the stuff on Friday and Saturday, and it is still an enormous job trying to get all the papers in all the classes into those little squares by Wednesday. It's endless. I even get a neck ache sometimes.

18   Anyway, enough about that. The deadline is huge, and I didn't need almost two hours taken from me yesterday, but it happened.

19   Moving on, Part the Thoid: I awakened at 3 a.m. and was able to type out some of this, but the schedule is grueling. I have finished entering only half of the essays, and still have tons of scraps to do. Scraps are like papers without names, smaller assignments, make-up tests, etc.

20   So I'm gonna cut this DN short once more.

21   Sometimes duty calls. Oh, and for the record: It's "A lot. Two words."

22   Hope you have a great Monday. Hope you enjoyed the Rooneyisms.

23   Fly low.

24   Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

The Daily News

1   Like the leprechaun butcher who backs into his meat grinder, I'm getting a little behind in my work.

2   With all the Heidi stories and everything else, my deadlines are insidious these days, so I thought I might take a quick little break from trying to invent things for the DN and give you all a little laugh courtesy of a couple of books called Disorderly Conduct and Disorderly Conduct in the Court by Rodney R. Jones, Charles M. Sevilla, Gerald F. Uelmen, with illustrations by Lee Lorenz. These are actual court proceedings that these guys gathered and put into a book. I copped these from a book called The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader assembled by a mischievous group called The Bathroom Readers' Institute out of Ashland, Oregon.

3   They are actual excerpts from real court documents. So here goes; I'll let these guys take over. Happy reading!

4  

Defendant: Judge, I want you to appoint me another lawyer.

Judge: And why is that?

Defendant: Because the public defender isn't interested in my case.

Judge (to public defender): Do you have any comments on your defendant's motion?

Defendant: I'm sorry, Your Honor, I wasn't listening.

5  

Judge: Is there any reason you could not serve as a juror in this case?

Potential juror: I don't want to be away from my job for that long.

Judge:  Can they do without you at work?

Potential juror: Yes, but I don't want them to know it.

6  

Judge: You have a right to a trial by jury, but you may waive that right. What do you wish to do?

Defendant: (Hesitates.)

Lawyer to defendant: Waive.

Defendant: (Waves at the judge.)

7 

Lawyer: Were you leaning against the shut door, or the open door?

Witness:  A shut door. How can you lean against an open door? There's a hole in the door. You'd fall right through.

8 

Lawyer: Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

Defendant: Yes.

Lawyer: How many?

Defendant: One, so far.

9

Judge: The charge here is theft of frozen chickens. Are you the defendant, sir?

Defendant: No, sir, I'm the guy who stole the chickens.

10

Defense Attorney:  Are you sure you did not enter the 7-11 on 14th and Northeast Broadway and hold up the cashier on June 17 of this year?

Defendant: I'm pretty sure.

11

Judge: Mr. E, you're charged here with driving a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?

Defendant: I'm guilty as Hell.

Judge: Let the record reflect the defendant is guilty as Hell.

12

Lawyer: Could you briefly describe the type of construction equipment used in your business?

Witness: Four tractors.

Lawyer: What kind of tractors are they?

Witness: Fords.

Lawyer: Did you say, "four"?

Witness:  Ford. Ford. Like the Ford. It is a Ford tractor.

Lawyer: You didn't say "four" you just said "Ford?"

Witness: Yes, Ford. That is what you asked me, what kind of tractors.

Lawyer:  Are there four Ford tractors? Is that what there is?

Witness:  No, no. You asked me what kind of a tractor it is, and I said Ford tractors.

Lawyer: How many tractors are there?

Witness: Four.

13  The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader is a great book, Christmas present I gave to Josh last year, at least I think it was last year.

14   It's just a hodge-podge of useless information, but information that is usually pretty amusing, and designed to be read during short bursts in the day.

15  At the bottom of each page is some useless fact. Here are a few:

16  Only four percent of Americans can say they didn't eat at McDonald's last year.

17  Twenty-one percent of American high-school students say they'd like to be President some day.

18  Red-headed men are more likely to go bald than anybody else.

19  Mussolini's favorite cartoon character was Donald Duck.

20  World's record: A man carried a milk bottle on his head continuously for 24 miles.

21  Moving on, Part the First: Same book. Cheap transition. Here are some quotes from the immortal Casey Stengel. Since pitchers and catchers don't report 'til February, I thought I'd shorten that with a little bit of Stengel's thoughts and quips on baseball.

22   "Now all you fellers line up in alphabetical order by height."

23   "They say you can't do it, but sometimes it doesn't work."

24   Giants' fans might appreciate this one:  "Look at that guy. Can't run, can't hit, can't catch. That's why they gave him to us."

25   And this one: "We're in such a slump that even the guys who are drinkin' aren't hittin'."

26   "The secret of managing a good club is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the five guys who are undecided."

27  "Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional ballplayer. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in."

28   To a hitter with the bases loaded: "Let him hit 'ya. I'll get you a new neck!"

29   Finally, the Bathroom Reader presents a small collection of horrid grammatical errors found in church bulletins.

30   Here are a few:

"This afternoon there will be a meeting in the South and North ends of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends."

"Tuesday at 4 p.m., there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk, come early."

"Wednesday the Ladies Liturgy Society will meet. Mrs. Johnson will sing 'Put Me in my Little Bed' accompanied by the Pastor."

"This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Johnson to lay an egg on the altar."

"On Sunday, a special collection will be taken to defray the expense of the new carpet. All those wishing to do something on the new carpet, come forward and get a piece of paper."

"The ladies of the church have cast-off clothing of every kind and they may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon."

"A bean supper will be held Saturday evening in the church basement. Music will follow."

"The rosebud on the altar this morning is to announce the birth of David Alan Belser, the sin of Rev. and Mrs. Julius Belser."

31   I hope you enjoyed this. I'll be back tomorrow.

32   Have a great day.

33   See ya again.

34   Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

  The Daily News

1   I have a bit of a correction to do today.

2   Yesterday I reported that a girl in my fifth period class, a straight A+ student skeptical about the Heidi stories, had written a shorter version of her own ghost story. She merely wanted to get some extra credit, but when she finished writing, her computer somehow got stuck on the six button, and a series of sixes suddenly appeared on her screen.

3   I said that when she walked away and came back, three giant sixes appeared on her screen.

4   That was inaccurate. I approached her yesterday for corroboration and she told me that it as just three small sixes, the same size as the others.

5    I thanked her, and assured here that it was probably just some sort of sticky key thing with her keyboard, and not to worry.

6    Great kid, and honest. She didn't seem too phased by any of it, but I still thought her story about her story remained high on my list of interesting stuff.

7    It also demonstrated the difficulty of trying to chronicle real stories told by students.

8    As the key "scribe" of the Heidi Chronz, I have tried to remain true to the story as much as possible, so that my credibility will remain strong.

9    And as careful as I try to do that, I still find little things that are inaccurate. I do check and re-check with primary sources, but many times their memories are worse than mine.

10   It's an interesting experiment, when you think about it.

11   I remember, for instance, one time years ago a drama class had a teevee suddenly go on. A video played, and the students claimed that the video recorder was unplugged. I asked them several times about that, and the students had insisted this was true.

12   Well, at the time I kept that as a part of the stories because I had reliable witnesses, but I never saw that happen.

13   I couldn't really wrap my head around that one, because there really was no explanation.

14   I eventually dismissed the story because it was inconsistent with the other stories, and because it was virtually impossible for that to have been a "ghostly" encounter.

15   Fast forward to this year.

16   Last week I had an similar oddity occur in an amazing series of oddities with electrical things. I have a small Altec iPod dock that I use to audio-out movies in order to give them a little extra punch. It's easy to do: you simply take a small cable from the audio out to the audio-in on the dock, and it amplifies any film. You need a small adapter to take the left and right wires into one in-connection, and it's done.

17  Well, I was in the middle of doing something with The Sixth Sense, and pushed the power button on the iPod dock. Suddenly The Sixth Sense music came on even though the power button on the DVD player apparently wasn't on.

18   When the power is on, a little red light comes on, and it was off, but the music from the DVD player blasted through the room, and the red light wasn't on.

19   I immediately pushed the power button on the DVD player, but the thought instantly occurred to me that the sound came out of the iPod deck but that it had no powered source. When I pushed the power button, the music on the iPod deck stopped abruptly.

20  I asked several students if I had pushed the DVD or the iPod deck first, and all of them said I had pushed the iPod deck first. There should have been no sound, since the DVD player evidently wasn't on.

21   For a second I completely freaked out, because all week we had strange things going on with nearly every plug-in device in my classroom and in my regular life. But most of that was just them not working properly: for instance, the printer jammed, and had only jammed maybe two or three times in seven years. The computer failed a few times, and wouldn't open Microsoft Word at one point. The light switch in the tech booth didn't go on when I flipped the switch. The stapler broke several times. The worklights in the Theater went on with nobody at the switches (I earlier ruled this out as anything odd because a district electrical truck was parked right outside the Theater, but the concidence was a bit unnerving.)  My car battery failed at the end of that day, but started up after I goosed the battery.

22   There were several other things that happened, but I can't recall them right now.

23   But a device going on with no power? I had to trace that one down. I did.

24    The red power light on the DVD player was clearly not on, and the music from the DVD player WAS playing. What I didn't see was that when the DVD player is playing, the red light goes out, and a green light on the right side of the player lights up indicating that it is in "Play" mode. Duh. So the DVD player was already playing when I pushed the iPod button.

25   I diagnosed that rather quickly, and figured that probably a similar occurrence had happened all those years ago. Both incidences clearly causal, and explainable.

26   What wasn't explainable was the series of coincidences that occurred over the same couple of days: the day after I had reported a bunch of electrical malfunctions in and around my room, the school bells failed to work in the morning, AND the attendance program shut down about an hour later. That was the same day that my car battery clicked.

27   Never mind the amount of computer failures that happened to a series of students, all in the same two or three day windows. I had at least six students needing to print their ghost stories. I usually get one or two in a class, sometimes three or four.

28   The night that the girl had the sixes appearing on her computer was the same night that a nineteen wound up at the bottom of the page of my DN, the one that had a picture of Steve Jobs with orbs.

29    I also accidentally pushed a button on Xanga that took me to my first pics ever, and two pictures of students in the Theatre appeared. One had three girls on a couch at center stage, nothing unusual. The other had a girl with the same backlighting as the Jobs picture. I decided against posting those pictures because I wanted to respect the privacy of the parties involved.

30   When I went to exit Xanga (and hastily I might add!), the number 19 was somehow in the bottom left-hand corner.

31   Heidi's "numbers" have traditionally been one and nine. Long story, but you'll need to trust me on that one.

32   All simple coincidences in a series of coincidences upon coincidences upon coincidences.

33   All scientifically explainable.

34    To me, each coincidence of itself is simply that: a causal coincidence that could easily be explained.

35    What becomes acausal to me is the massive number of explicable occurrences involving electrical things happening in too short a span of time. And that occur every single year during the Heidi stories.

36    This year was a banner year for things happening publicly. I remember telling one class last week about the time I was preparing a Poe lesson right before Halloween. I was Activities' Director at the time, and was caught down at the school past ten at night working on my computer. I was putting together the Heidi stories and working on a Poe unit.

37   I heard a fluttering sound, looked up from my computer, and a black bird had landed on a small teevee in the Activities' office. It didn't utter a sound, but kept turning its head and looking at me with beady eyes. It eventually flew back out and disappeared into the night sky.

38   Last week, I had my students watch the end of The Sixth Sense and then write journal entries as the end credits and music played eerily through the selfsame Altec speakers.

39   Towards the end of class, several students looked up to a window across the room from them and started giggling and pointing. When I looked up at the window, I saw the shadow of a large crow resembling a raven suddenly take off. Evidently it was putting on a bit of a show for those students, and when I looked, it took off instantly.

40   We all laughed, but it was just another oddity in a week of massive oddities. A couple of days ago I found a picture that looked exactly like that shadow. If you can imagine this picture animated, almost putting on a little shuck-and-jive, then you'll get the idea of what we saw. Here's the picture:

41   At some point, when all of this stops, I fully intend to go back through my DN's for this week and measure all of the strange occurrences, because there were too many really even to count.

42   But I did know that I owed it to that girl to correct her account. The three sixes were not filling her screen.

43    They were just there after she deleted a bunch of others.

44    So it was nothing, really.

45    Nothing at all.

46    Gottago.

47    More to come.

48    Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington

The Daily News

1   Another Halloween.

2   They just happen, every year.

3    And then they're gone.

4    Interestingly, we had more Heidi things going on than we have in years.

5    Not too much, but enough to be worthy of DN news.

6    For instance, yesterday I got to our Theater early.

7    I went up to the tech booth to set the lights for the Heidi Chronz.

8    I flipped on the light switch, and nothing happened.

9    Normally, when you switch on a light switch, lights go on.

10   Not yesterday morning.

11   I switched on the light switch and nothing happened. The lights did not go on.

12   Fortunately, another switch turned on the incandescent lights in the booth, and I was able to light the stage down a bit, no thanks to the normal light switch.

13   Pretty normal stuff for the Heidi stories.

14   My first class of the day came in, and instantly everything in the  Theater turned strange.

15   I began my stories, but something felt extremely weird. I can't always explain it, but it was an overall feeling with that morning group.

16   Some kids got a bit spooked, but I began the stories, telling them all that I was just a scribe, like any scribe who ever had to relay history to a younger generation.

17   I began my stories.

18   When I got to the climax of the stories, the stuff about a one-act play I once wrote called the Titanic that was included in a collection of short scenes and plays called Ship of Fools, a strange, light breeze brought a slight chill to the Theater.

19   Everyone in my morning class felt it, and a few even wanted to leave.

20   As always, I told them that if they wished to leave, they could.

21   It became a lttle strange, but I kept going with the stories.

22   The discomfort was felt by all, but I continued, welcoming anyone uncomfortable to go out to the lobby.

23  They all stayed, and I finished it all up, and then received applause because of a genuine Halloween scare.

24   Only it wasn't really a scare; it was just me relating things that happened so many years ago,  as truthfully as I could deliver it. The play, which included direct quotations of  Titanic survivors, almost always turned the YB Theatre chillingly cold. Each time we rehearsed that play back then, the temperature would turn cold, and the seats in one area of the Theatre would begin clicking in a sort of popcorn fashion. It would happen at different times of the day: at afternoon rehearsals, as well as at evening performances. Interesting to note that a lot of the survivors we had quoted had since died. Consequently, my students were saying the exact words of some people who had later died after having quoted them.

25   The applause from my classes yesterday was interesting, and much appreciated.

26   I've told these tales for years, almost untouched, and they remain incredible.

27   But oh, my. Sometimes it all becomes quite real, and quite present. I must confess I was a bit spooked yesterday.

28   The stuff became almost too much for my morning class.

29    The remainder of the day saw no noticeable temperature changes, nor anything really unusual. I told the same stories I have told for years, and only got out of sequence twice the whole day. That usually happens when students try fooling around, or talking to the point of distraction.

30    It takes a great deal of concentration to tell even a familiar story five times in one day, so I got a bit out of sequence with the story during my fifth period class, which is just before lunch.

31   At one point, the students got scared, because someone was standing and watching the stories. I had the Theater extremely dark, so we did see a shadow on the wall house right.

32   "H, it's Jenny!" came a voice from the house. I had invited alumni to come in yesterday, and Jenny Valdez was always a person who not only loved the stories, but who went through a few quite real encounters with me through the years. It was great of her to come in and corroborate a few stories.

33   The best thing she reported was the clicking of the spot booth a few years back. I rememember it distinctly, because the clicks were not singular, but rather staccato. She told my class how she put her hand on the spot both and felt the clicks happening. I did too, and as I recall the Theatre turned remarkably cold that day.

34    It was truly a remarkable series of stories this year, as hauntingly strange as ever.

35   I'm realizing that the more things that happen each year, the longer the stories get. So many small things happened this year that it will be tougher to tell these tales next year, and in subsequent years.

36   I'm beginning to think that it is time for me to re-write the stories. I have notes from the Geocities stories, which I tried adding to each year, but which often wouldn't allow me access, nor even the ability to do layers any longer.

37   A few years ago I tried copying and pasting that story from Geocities to Xanga.

38   When I went to paste it, it became huge, smothering my entire Xanga page. I couldn't even get to the control keys to remove it and to write the DN.

39    I was able to Google the situation and go through a virtual exorcism, but I have never been able successfully to take the story I had been writing and paste it anywhere else. The story was layered with pictures, and the fonts on the written story would change, get bigger, shrink, and other odd things.

40   That happened on one Halloween around 2006. I'll try to hunt that story down, because all the Xanga postings have been archived since 2004. I checked on that this past Saturday, but there's a lot, and it is over two-week periods each year.

41   It is becoming obvious that I will one day have to write the entire story, updating odd things that happened at times when I wasn't paying careful enough attention, and THAT goes all the way back to 1998.

42   For some reason, I became less willing to believe that the stories were ongoing.

43   At least until this year.

44   So many strange things occurred this year.

45    I fully intend to archive them.

46    One girl in my class, for instance, a straight  A+ student, reported her skepticism about the stories. She told the class that she was pretty skeptical, but brought in a story only for extra credit.

47   She also said that she went on Microsoft Word in order to shorten her story so that she could practice it, and that when she finished, a bunch of sixes appeared on her computer screen. She backspaced them off, walked off, came back to her computer only to find three giant sixes on the screen.

48   Another student said that her mom was a ghost-hunter, and that they had two pictures with a ghost in each. She had them on her phone all day, but during my class she couldn't access them.

49   There are more, and there will be more.

50    Running late.

51    Gottago.

52    More to come.

53    Peace.

~H~

www.xanga.com/bharrington