Summertime!

Snakes are back in my front yard and that means that summer is nigh. Carolina summers are a treat: sultry, sunny, muggy in the evening, perfect sitting on the porch weather and getting in touch with neighbors, friends and family. So enjoy the summer, close to home preferably.

Summer also means that school is finishing up, and my first year at Enloe High School was a thoroughly enjoyable one. The second high school I have served since beginning in this hallowed profession 15 years ago, William G. Enloe offered me a challenging and rewarding atmosphere of high end academics. Very nice change of scenery, it was, but my former high school Southern High School, still calls, for instance yesterday, when I went to a graduation party of a student, Brendan S., whom I taught at Spartanland last year. It was fun to drive back to East Durham and visit with some memorable kids, and I appreciated their warm welcome in the hot Carolina afternoon. One student I did teach at Southern, a certain Jeremy R., finally graduated - well, tomorrow is graduation - with zero absences in his entire 13 year stint in the Durham Public Schools, an awesome achievement. You can see his picture at the Durham Herald Sun newspaper from today, and a nice article written about him and several other DPS students whose attendance was also 100% durable. Better yet, I'll just share the picture on this blog of this fine group of students; Jeremy is the fellow in red standing at the left.

Yesterday was a day of student appreciations. A trio of terrific talents from my Advanced Placement German class invited me to a little dinner at restaurant in Raleigh. I gratefully accepted and had a wonderful evening with these übercool students. They offered me up as a further token of their appreciation a CD, Rockin' the Rhein with Grateful Dead, an appropriate disc, given our time together in German class and my admission that classic rock and roll is my first preference when I reach for the music dial. Great to be honored by students, nice to know that I make impacts on these kids.

What else? Too much. Politics could very well take up some space, but the sheer depressive quality of the events that I care most about, events that I have recently expounded upon here, only angers me and throws me into some despair. So I'll avoid rambling on about the Middle East, but there is one article that might be interesting, by a columnist I read at antiwar.com, Charley Reese: Middle East Pop Quiz. Pretty interesting. Anyone notice how the price of gas spiked after some dipshit in the Israeli government squawked about the inevitability of attaching Iran? Even after American intelligence assessments about Iran's WMD programs concluded that Iran currently has no weapons program underway that would any time soon threaten American interests. Beware the warmongers in Washington and Israel. Call your Congressman or Congresswoman now and tell them to back off threatening Iran.

Peace