This might be the shortest list ever because I’m working on a million things, but here’s the rundown:

– Celebrated my birthday this past weekend (1/24/1982, and if you add up all the digits there, yes, you get a number divisible by 3, my favorite number. Yes I’m that random).

– Worked on the first draft of this site. (I’m not sassy, but some of my best friends are.)

– Trying to get a manual ready for the most non-secret secret on-line African Diaspora organization / think tank there is.

– Doing my research on English Language Learners and best practices, so I can be an ELL-expert like my girlfriend :-)

– Helping to write up grants so our school can get money to actually make things happen (against all odds)

– Writing a poem for a teacher whose retirement comes this Friday (tomorrow), and I’m roasting him so badly. Here’s a few lines I’m using:

“I worked so hard on this poem:
15 minutes hard!
1 to come up with the insults
and 14 to write them all down.”

– Oh yeah, and this teaching thing. To interpolate what’s been happening at the school lately, I went to a mess and a class broke out. I broke up my second fight between a surly 16-year-old and a not-so-surly 13-year-old … in the same grade. But very few people actually believe the stories I’ll tell them about my school, or any other school.

– Speaking of retirement, when I get the opportunity to retire (and by the looks of things now, my retirement age will be 80 or something crazy like that), I’m going somewhere nice. Really nice.

Jose, who’s off to write a poem I’ll be sharing with all of you this weekend …