Still can't sleep....

As great as it was to visit Belarus, it's great to be back. I've been playing some of the same scenes back on American soil. I was up until about 5:30 this morning, attempting to get back on PST. I'm going to fire down my last Ambien tonight (with a little white wine :-).

No dramatic changes in my absence other than my 8 month old has decided that it's time for him to become bipedal and spends every waking moment in pursuit of that configuration. I think that he has decided to skip whole crawling thing, believing that too much emphasis is placed on its role in normal development.

The same jackass is still racing up and down our street on a piece of crap motorcycle without headers. I'm determined to capture him on videotape in the hopes that overwhelming evidence will force even my local PD into action. The same Jack "Ass" O'Connell is still running our state's education straight into the ground. Keep passing kids through the system, prepared or not, until they run into the razorwire of standardized testing at the end of the road. Genius. One of the saddest and most pathetic things I've seen in my life is a classroom full of second graders learning how to properly fill in a Scantron. This the most effective use of classroom time they can think of? These are the skills my children will need to become critical thinkers? Sadly, it's most likely the trend that will cause me, a product of public education, to remove my kids from the system.

Hey, at least I found my cell phone buried in my checked bag when it finally arrived at SFO yesterday. Best of all, 3 our of 4 bottles of Belarussian vodka survived, the lone casualty acting as a sterilizing solvent for the rest of my bag. So at least the memory of Minsk is only as far as a sniff of my Samsonite.