un/FAIR Release Day

It's Release Day!  Release Day!  Happy, happy Release Day!  un/FAIR is officially available from booksellers everywhere.

It's difficult enough to live in the neighborhood "freakazoid" house. It's even more difficult when you're autistic and neither your family nor best friend really understands you. So when Ryan November wakes up on his eleventh birthday with the ability to see the future, he braces himself for trouble. But even his newfound power doesn't help him anticipate that the fair folk-undines, salamanders, gnomes, and sylphs-want him dead, dead, dead. Ryan races to defend himself and his family against unrelenting danger from the fairy realm so he can uncover the truth about his family history-and himself. Except as Ryan's power grows, the more enticing the fairy realm becomes, forcing him to choose between order and chaos and power and family. And for an autistic boy, such choices are never cut and dry.



Grab it now! It's a great read for the start of the school year!

Getting Ready

Like most teachers, I've spent a chunk of pre-Labor Day time getting my classroom ready for the new school year.  It takes an entire day just to arrange desks, hang posters, make copies, and hook up electronics.  The latter includes putting together two computer systems (one for my desk and one for my SmartBoard--first world problems, I know).  Last year, the school's lease on the laptops expired, so we all got new computers.  This is nice in that the new computers are faster and more responsive, but it's bad in that a new computer is always time-consuming.  It takes hours to get all the software rejiggered so it's actually usable.  (Software engineers need to be beaten regularly until they write software that people can actually use instead of how they think people should use it.  For example, the new version of Microsoft Outlook, which I'm required to use for my email, came preloaded with a micrscopic San Serif style font that I simply can't read, and it took me more than an hour to figure out how to change it because the function for that was hidden deep within a sub-sub-sub menu, and then you had to change it three times for three different functions--reading, previewing, and composing--which makes no sense.  Why would I want three different viewing styles for these three integrated functions?  Hand me the beating stick, please.)

I also made extensive modifications to upcoming curriculum, fielded a pileup of email, laminated a bunch of stuff, sat through some pointless meetings, and more, more, more.

But now we're all set and ready to go!