21 May 02 - 10:18pm

Monday-Before-Yesterday

Made my flight with 3 minutes left on the clock. Slept the whole way down, shoehorned betweed sullen flying companions. The hard landing at Burbank woke me. The pilots always seem to come in fast and shallow there. A lack of runway perhaps.

The U-Boss picked me up and drove me to the new school ("Honey, say hello to your new daddy; he's going to be taking care of us from now on"). On the way to the Step-Dad School she unloaded this rant about Dale, one of their new instructors; he used to be with the Sister School, but when the students there got transferred so did he. Apparently he's been deviating somewhat from the curriculum, what little there is for him to stray from anyway. So essentially the cause of the U-Boss's ire was that he wasn't following the guidelines that he'd had the temerity to not be provided with. I used a more diplomatic tone with her, but I basically told her the same thing: "Maybe he's just trying to keep things rolling in class until we can get the finished curriculum to him". Her response was classic U-Boss: "He already HAS the finished curriculum!! The curriculum IS finished! He's just trying to make me look bad!!!" Which, I think, serves as a pretty good indicator of her customary disconnect from reality...

The day was spent in the (fortunately) air-conditioned offices of the Step-Dad School. The place actually looks ok. Four or five classrooms with 20 to 30 workstations apiece, and at most workstations a piggybacked G4 and P4. The faculty and admin staff looked happy if busy. So maybe I don't need to worry about the SoCal students too much, if this is where they get to go.

Met with one of the Step-Dad School's owners. He seemed ok enough. He understands his product, and he understands his customers. What I was there to do was compare our 3D curriculum, both extant and pending, with theirs (almost entirely pending) and figure out some kind of fit. So that took the balance of the day.

At one point I had to take a walk in the heat, just to wake up. Down one street I glimpsed the massive soundstages and water tower of a film studio, but I couldn't be sure of which one. I wondered if this is where I'd be living in a year...

We finished our intra-curriculur kit-bashing and I took an hour to sit in on Dale's class. Turns out he's not even teaching one of our classes; this was a free 'transitional' course to bridge the gap between our Intermediate and Advanced Tiers. Dale just thought it up and did it, else the students would've had to wait another month for the next Tier. I quietly and politely pointed this out to the U-Boss, who suddenly was all about what a great teacher Dale was...

And of course she'd forgotten to book me into a motel for the night, so we had to drive around for an hour before we found a non-smoking (allergies, asthma) room. Finally found one that she announced as the "Jacuzzi Suite". To hear her talk it was all sunken floors and spanish tile; in truth it was a rather nicely appointed motel room featuring a bathtub with water jets.

I took a bath, then walked to the nearest Del Taco. When I returned I stayed up too late and watched too much cable tv, which these days is like some kind of strange and marvelous (yet curiously unsatisfying) alien technology.

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