It needs a good masthead, and some of the sidebar widgets need some work, but other than the minor, minor detail of adding some new content, this blog is pretty much good to go.

Attempting to give myself a crash course in landscaping with native species.

Here follows a bunch of random comments I wanted to make concerning this fine establishment, all compiled and relegated into one (hopefully concise) post.

• Updates to the sidebar! I have added links to blogs of family and friends that I read. Dear reader, if you are a family or friend and you have a blog that I don’t know about, please let me know about it! Thank you. I won’t list it if you don’t want me to, but I still want to read it. Other recent additions to the sidebar: a tag cloud for this blog, a link to my flickr photos, a “recently listened” widget and “album quilt” from my recent obsession last.fm, and a widget of books I have recently read courtesy of LibraryThing. Boy, are these exciting times here at the Freez, or what?

• A note about the feed for this blog: From time to time, I revise posts after they have posted. I revise posts seconds, minutes, days, weeks, even months after they were first posted, in some cases. Sometimes I completely remove posts, and other times I post something that hasn’t shown up before at a date or time in the past. What I’ve discovered is that this has led to a great disparity between the feed for the blog and the blog proper. The bottom line is, you’re just not getting the completely renovated Froz-T-Freez experience if you are reading this through a feed. You are missing stuff. So stop on by once in a while. I have all these exciting new sidebar widgets, after all.

• Catch-Up: I’m not very good at posting about current events (and by these I mean personal life events) in a timely manner. I have some pictures/things I still need to post concerning things that have long since passed. So, if you think it is weird that I am suddenly putting up posts about going to Boise in May, or pictures of people visiting Salt Lake in June, or springtime empty tree pictures when it is now July, this is the reason.

I think that is everything. If I’ve forgotten something, I guess I’ll just come back in and revise it. Have a good evening.

bedspread
nicer coat (not a parka – one I could wear to church or work)
winter hat or cap
two pairs a pair of jeans
Canon SD800 digital camera (It’s in the mail)
Apple iMac 20″ with 2.4Ghz Processor and 2GB RAM
toothbrush
some kind of blazer/”sports jacket”
Flickr Pro Account
shoelaces

I have the day off today and maybe I’d better use it to get some of these things I need, before everything is entirely overtaken by Saturnalia. And as you can see, some of these things I can do without, such as the toothbrush and the bedspread. Staying warm at night and having clean teeth are such unnecessary extravagances.

[I'm crossing things off as I obtain them.]

There is a very official-like feel to all of this. It is the last day of school and the first day of June. The teenagers are out in great numbers, toiling away at an incessant, diligent leisure. There is almost an urgency to their skateboarding, a purposefulness to their eating of breakfast burritos as they leave Molcasalsa and walk down the street, an expedience to their wandering around the park, a deep significance and poignancy to every kick of the hacky-sack. The weather could not be more appropriate: a hot, blue sky devoid of clouds; the slightest breeze. It feels as if all of it were intended to be filmed as a scene for a movie and these kids had been put up to it ahead of time, and I just happened to have wandered onto the set. There is a underlying fury to their recreation, as if they know that this time summer will only last a couple of days.

I, on the other hand, waste.

I did work on Tuesday and Wednesday, but that’s about it. No work, no play, just lump.

Tuesday I had a class of 1st graders who really weren’t that bad considering it’s the last week of school. I just had to keep dumping work on them, so that the potential riots percolating beneath the surface would not have the chance to bubble up to the top.

Wednesday was fun. I took a 2nd grade class at Eastwood at the last second because the teacher was too sick and couldn’t come. We walked as a whole 2nd grade a mile or so up Wasatch Blvd. to the bowling alley at Olympus Hills for a bowling field trip. I was so nervous at first that I would lose track of a kid or that some maniac driver would rip through as we were crossing a street, but soon I relaxed. The bowling itself was hilarious. The bumpers were up, of course, but even the light-weight balls are too heavy for most seven-year-olds. A number of kids developed what I would call a flopping method, where they would run forward with the bowling ball in both hands, hurling the ball onto the lane while simultaneously flopping themselves to the ground to prevent from crossing the line. Given the parameters of having the bumpers up, and having balls that are too heavy, it was a genius technique, and several boys were consistently getting spares and even strikes with this method by the close of the afternoon. I also loved how they started making up names for their bowling balls, such as “Meaty,” “Blaster,” and “Poo” (it was a brown ball). It was a slightly stressful but singularly fun day of substituting. I got to know the kids a lot better than I normally would have. It’s a lot nicer when you can just let them do what they do and be loud and themselves, rather than attempting to hold them down and keep everything under tight control. But now, finally, they are left to their own devices.

In honor of that “100 things about me” meme that’s always popping up around the blogoteca, and also in honor of that great insular and incestuous epic by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and most of all in honor of me and my desire to feed my narcissistic tendencies, I commemorate the first of several regular features of Josh’s Froz-T-Freez. In this feature I will write random things about myself that I feel like expressing at that moment. It’s basically like having Show and Tell on my blog, and I’m the only one that gets a turn. Actually, that’s not true, feel free to take your turn by commenting. I would love to hear from you.