I'm a shut up, sit down

Its definitely time to update since a couple more of the summer goals have been knocked out.  I know I promised more about the house, but you'll see more of it when you come to visit me.  I have had to do a few handyman things around the place though, so I'm learning all of that fun stuff.  I had to switch out the electric cord on my dryer because it was three pronged and our outlet was four pronged.  I also had to do that the day before I left for the AP reading when I didn't have many clean clothes either so thankfully it was a quick job.  I switched out my shower head last night and now have a much nicer time taking a shower.  More basic things will come up and I'll be fine until there's an emergency.

Speaking of the AP reading, I got back from that on Saturday so that's another goal down.  It's also the basis for the title of this entry.  Grading for nearly 50 hours wasn't actually as bad as I expected it to be because you never really felt too out of it simply by having that 15 minute or more break every two hours.  There definitely were some frustrating things with the grading though as the prime goal is to grade exams as consistently as possible, meaning that strict adherence to the rubric is demanded.  My biggest issues came with the rubric itself.  I know grading over 200,000 exams means you have to have some sort of rubric, but too often it seemed like the answer that was being looked for just meant parroting back the correct statement that your teacher (hopefully) taught you instead of showing true understanding.  So yeah, there was definitely some frustrations, but overall, it was definitely a good experience especially once I get paid for it.  I expect I'll do it again next year.

The week before that, I also knocked out the goal of introducing Lindsey to Lisa and mine's habit of visiting a new baseball stadium each summer.  It wasn't that successful though this year as the game got rained out.  Lisa did get to sample the nachos though and I got to try Primanti Brothers for the first time.  I wasn't tremendously impressed.  The trip wasn't a waste though as we did have a fun day at the zoo before that and we got to spend a night catching up with our friend Beez earlier.  Now though, I've got to go call the Pirates box office and see if I can get a refund on those tickets.