Help a cadet get to West Point

My cadet commander at San Gorgonio High School, a truly amazing 11th-grader named Brittany Contreras, has been selected to attend the West Point Summer Leaders Seminar -- a prestigious weeklong program for rising seniors held at the U.S. Military Academy. She is scheduled to report to West Point on 14 June 2008.

The round-trip airfare from Ontario, Calif., the airport nearest her home, and Newark, N.J., the airport from which West Point is providing shuttle service for the students attending the seminar, will run about $500. Please consider a small donation to help her family defray that cost. There is a "Donate" button at the upper right corner of this blog for your convenience.

Thank you for your support!

A dark day for L.A. Unified

How do people like this become assistant principals?

Mom's Overture by Anita Renfroe

This is hilarious! I think every parent can relate to this video ...

Snoopy's home!

We got the call two days ago. Someone had found our beloved Snoopy, who'd jumped out the back of a truck and gone missing back in October.

So we drove down to Coachella last night and had a joyful reunion with our puppy. He had apparently made himself at home in the backyard of a nice family, who took care of him until he let him get close enough to read his tags.

Snoopy is home now -- at the moment, curled up in front of my feet, sleeping, with what looks like a smile on his face. He's obviously glad to be home ... and we are so glad to have him home!

Teacher. Daddy.

If you only keep track of me through this blog, you've probably written me off as dead or vanished off the face of the earth.

Not so. However, "Editor. Daddy." is no longer a truly accurate description of who I am.

The "Daddy" part is still true, of course. And the saying that holds so true for the Marine Corps ("Once a Marine, always a Marine") can just as easily be applied to editors. So in that sense, I'm still an editor, too; I'm just not currently being paid to use that skill set.

Nor am I living in Montana at the moment, much as I would love to be there. I am back in California, back in the classroom, back in uniform as a captain in the California Cadet Corps. As the Commandant of Cadets at San Gorgonio High School in San Bernardino, I have 210 high-school cadets who keep me running ragged.

It's actually a good gig. I'm having fun, even though I'm tired all the time. As you've noticed, I don't get around to blogging much.

However, I've decided to start a bulletin board/blog hybrid Web site for my cadets. Feel free to check it out. Unless you're one of my cadets, you probably won't care what the homework assignment for next Tuesday is, or when the State Drill Competition is being held. But who knows? You might find something interesting there.

Am I abandoning Editor. Daddy.? Not quite. I'll try to get back here every so often, if for no other reason than to let you know I'm still alive and kicking, or to post a particularly cute picture of my kids. But don't expect regular updates unless the Earth adjusts its speed of rotation such that our days become longer than 24 hours.

And no, we never did find Snoopy. You folks in Montana keep an eye out for him, y'hear? I wouldn't put it past that dog to decide he was fed up with California and set off for home. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.

Essayons!

Snoopy, come home

Our border collie, Snoopy, jumped out of the back of a pickup truck two days ago en route to Grandma's house in La Quinta, Calif. He hasn't been seen since.

If you happen to know where he is, please contact us.

Lots more has happened in EditorDaddy's life in the last few months, which you'll get to read about a little later on.

Come home, Snoopy!

Life's twists and turns

Astute readers will notice a change in this blog's subtitle (or "drop hed" or "deck," as newspaper types are wont to call it).

Indeed, it is true: My employment with the Great Falls Tribune came to a rather sudden, abrupt and unexpected end June 20 when the managing editor called me at home, on my day off no less, and asked me to come in to meet with him at 11:30 a.m. -- at which time I walked in the door only to be escorted rather promptly back out the door, on what I would consider rather questionable grounds.

I'm not going to get into all the details, partly because I don't feel the need to bash the Tribune in this forum (the desire, most definitely, but not the need), and partly because I'm not sure I have all the details. But I do have to ask this: What's the point of calling somebody in on his day off to fire him? They couldn't have waited 27 hours until 3 p.m. Thursday, and saved me the trouble of making a special trip (at $3.05 a gallon for gas)?

Anyway, life has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster since then, not to mention a financial challenge (to say the least). Looking for a job -- any job -- in a state with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country is an interesting proposition; forget looking for a newspaper job in this state. So for now, I've signed up with the few temp agencies (er, I mean "staffing services") in town, which so far have combined to find me a whole five hours of work at the local pasta factory packing and stacking boxes of noodles in a plant whose ambient temperature is 98 degrees.

So I've been putting serious thought into starting a freelance editing business. If you all know anyone who needs anything edited, by all means get in touch with me.

Meanwhile, I completed my first class at University of Phoenix last week, and my A grade was posted this afternoon, much to my pleasant surprise. My second class started this week and looks to be at least four times the work load of the last one, so perhaps it's not so bad that I have all this extra time on my hands.

Wish me luck. All gifts of food and money will be gladly accepted.

City of Angels? Not in this hospital

So the Martin Luther King Jr.-Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles, just a few blocks from the Compton middle school I taught at for a year, was in so much hot water with federal, state and county regulators over their shoddy handling of patients (to put it nicely) that it evidently was forced to change its name to King-Harbor Hospital and cut back from a 200-bed trauma center to what a Long Beach Press-Telegram editorial calls a "minor medical center" of 40 beds.

If that wasn't a clear sign that King-Drew, er, I mean Harbor, needs to be shut down for good, then this story most certainly is.

The story is told with the typical excellence of Los Angeles Times investigative reporting, so rather than attempt to retell it here, I'll just tell you to read the story, and then come back here to finish reading my reaction to it. Be sure to also read this follow-up story, which ran today after The Times got hold of the 9-1-1 calls. (There are also audio links to the calls, which require Adobe Flash Player, a free download.)

We're talking here about a publicly funded county hospital, who by its very nature is required to treat anyone who comes walking through the emergency-room door. There is no excuse for the conduct of either the nurses and medical "professionals" who were working during this incident, or the county police, or even the "innocent" onlookers who allowed this tragedy to unfold before their eyes while they sat indifferently in the emergency-room lobby.

David Janssen, the county's chief administrative officer, declared, "I think it's a tragic, tragic incident, but it's not a systemic one." The problem is, King-[fill-in-the-blank]'s track record over the last few years belie that statement. (Read The Times' multi-part investigative project on the subject here.) The troubles at this beleagured inner-city hospital are systemic, and they stem from the county supervisors elected by the voters of Los Angeles County to, among other things, supervise the county's public hospitals.

In a county that boasts many first-class medical facilities — including county-owned ones — King-Harbor is an eyesore, the laughingstock of the Watts community. The county needs to shut it down and start from scratch. If it can't or won't, the voters need to recall the whole lot of the Board of Supervisors and bring in true leaders who will get the job done.



read more digg story

One (week) down, two (years) to go

Baby steps to a degree.

According to my University of Phoenix counselor's projection, I'll have a bachelor of science in communications on Sept. 7, 2009.

Seems like a long way off. On the other hand, if all the weeks go as quickly as this last one has (I'm already a fifth of the way through my first class), it won't be so long at all.

This online-learning thing is interesting. It's nice to be able to go to school from the comfort of my living room. But although my classmates and I have lively discussions in our "classroom" (which is actually a newsgroup), I miss the physical, face-to-face interaction that comes in a bricks-and-mortar classroom. But I guess I'll get plenty of face-to-face interaction with my kids, who are now out of school, to make up for it.

Well, back to class.

My wealthy e-mail

Spam subject header of the day:

"CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR EMAIL HAS WON ($200,000USD) AUSTRALIA LOTTERY"

Gee, wonder if I can get my newly rich e-mail to buy me a house.

Incidentally, the spammers are getting good if they can circumvent Google Mail's normally excellent spam filter. Lately I've been getting one or two a day in my Inbox. But I won't complain about one or two, when my "Spam" folder currently shows 2,234 messages.