Hitting the Ground Flailing, Back To School

With only seven or so weeks left, and two of them largely gutted via standardized testing, the remainder of the school year seems to hang like cat hair on a suitcase. A suitcase that is still somewhere in the bowels of Continental Airlines, having not made it all back all the way from Marseilles.

And we ourselves barely made it back from Marseilles, and I could bore you with a 22-hour travel odyssey involving Amsterdam, the evil that is the George Bush (H.W.? W.? both?) International Airport in Houston, etc., but will spare you.

Besides, my eyes are so bleary I can hardly see the computer keyboard, even the English/American one with the "A" where the "A" is supposed to be instead of a French keyboard "Q". Those French....more about them later, perhaps.

Meanwhile, it's right back to the pesky, hanging cat hair of school year 2008-2009. Let's get this thing over with.

And one other thing. Let's also get together in some sort of mind meld that answers the $780 billion "economic stimulus" question...where did/does all the federal money for K-12 education go? Why are we still talking about belt-tightening in education? Why did teachers get a de facto pay cut this year? What the Hell happened?

If someone could just spew the answers to the above out, I'd appreciate it. The jet-lagged among us can hardly type, much less explain the sausage-making that is the NM legislative process.

And speaking of sausage...about those sausages in Southern France. Combined with the soft goat cheese inside the rustic country-style breads of France...that's good for about five pounds of gained weight per week of vacation. At least. At the very least.