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I actually decided to reread Legal Drug instead. It's amazing in a way how similar the main characters are to Watanuki and Doumeki, especially in how they interact. Rikuo is also kind of like Touya. Actually, the premise of the whole story is rather similar to xxxHOLiC. There are two guys instead of one, but they have mysterious pasts and special powers, and for one reason or another they work at a drug store owned by a man (who seems to have precognitive powers and in some ways acts suspiciously like Yuuko) who often sends them out on "special jobs" that require their powers. Kakei and Saiga were fun characters. (Not that Rikuo and Kazahaya weren't, but it really is funny how Kazahaya's angry rants around Rikuo were reminiscent of Watanuki's spazzing out around Doumeki.) Too bad there's only three volumes out and the series is cancelled. It had a set-up for some very interesting things.

Then I decided, after getting home from IST (more on that later), that I wanted to reread some of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books. Specifically the Mage Winds trilogy, although I might read more after that. I'm almost done with the second book. I'd forgotten how much I liked her world.

After going to the food pantry on Monday and doing a few other things at work, I drove down to my parents' house, since they live pretty close to where I had In-Service Training the next day. We ate dinner and watched the movie Ondine, which was good, but sadly it didn't have English subtitles, so we missed out on half the dialog due to the lovely Irish accents.

IST was...interesting. There were VISTAs from all over the state there. It could have been a little better organized...in the first session I was in, they had technology problems, so I couldn't hear or see very well. We did get a book and workbook, though - Bridges out of Poverty. Which is what we talked about. Lenses and how the lower, middle, and upper classes view things and value different things, and why that makes it hard to move from one class to another. Perhaps a little too simplistic of a model, but it was interesting. The second session was a poverty simulation where everyone was a person living in poverty, usually in a family unit, and had to survive for a month in a set-up similar to an impoverished community with limited resources. The person I was "playing" was Franco Fuentes, a seventeen-year-old high school drop-out who was into dealing drugs and who had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. I was obviously a really great guy who had made some wonderful choices in his life. I mostly ran errands for my "mom" (my father had just abandoned the family, leaving us with ten dollars and no job or income of any sort), tried unsuccessfully to sell drugs, and hung out with my girlfriend. And then the person who gave me the drugs in the first place framed me, so I ended the session in jail. Yay! I would say it's really impossible to understand poverty unless it's experienced firsthand, but that was rather eye-opening.

And then I drove back. Wednesday I was at Lake Academy again, but I ended up doing data entry rather than tutoring. Which was fine by me, as it seemed like there was a prevailing attitude that day against tutoring amongst the students. One kid got sent home over it. Sigh. I also had to make slides to send to Allison for the upcoming OBB meeting. Thursday I spent writing project reports. I was really, really far behind. I think I wrote over a dozen. And today I'm using as a comp day off. Hurrah.

Also, this week was the week of the mannequin saga. My coworker Jenn brought in this fake mannequin (the top half of a woman) and stuck it in Cindy's office on Monday as a joke. When we came in on Wednesday, the mannequin was no longer there and Cindy claimed to not know anything about it. It turns out that it was stuck in another teacher's office to play a joke on that person. Then on Friday, someone decided to stick it on a toilet seat in the faculty women's bathroom. All day long, people were luring others into the bathroom by saying that there was writing on the wall or a mess to clean up and then listening to them scream or laugh when they discovered the mannequin. They even pulled the principal and the custodian in there (both male). It was a little hard to work since the bathroom is right next to my office, but it was entertaining.