4th grader – I couldn’t do the homework Mrs. D., I was really busy over the weekend, we had visitors from out of state. The house was really noisy, and I couldn’t concentrate.

Moi – Really… uh, remind me, when did I give you the homework?

4th grader – The last time we had computers

Moi – uh huh, and when was that?

4th grader – Last Monday

Moi – So, pray tell, what were you doing Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night and Friday night?

4th grader – ?????????

Moi – You’ve had a week to write 4 sentences, so giving me the excuse you were busy on the weekend isn’t going to cut it my dear. Would you like to try again with another excuse, although I must warn you, I have an 8th grader at home, and I’ve pretty much heard all the excuses in the book?

4th grader – I…ah, we had visitors…I was busy…

Moi - And you’ll be busy at recess finishing what you should have done 7 days ago

I remember when I was a kid, my excuses were so much better than the ones these kids come up with. They were well thought out, fool proof, I explained them with conviction and enough dramatics and facial expressions to always get away with it.

What is this world coming to when a kid can’t come up with a feasible excuse? It’s a crying shame. Personally, I blame all this crappy rap music :)

I want to set up a photo album for my new school, something plain and simple. I like the way typepad displays it’s photos, but I don’t use typepad. I like the way picasa webgallery works, easy peasy, clean and fresh. Unfortunately I don’t want the albums to be public and setting them to private brings forth new problems.

I can invite parents to view the albums, but if I add photos after the invite, they wouldn’t be able to see them unless I send another invite. Over 200 families at this school, I don’t want to be forever sending invites – and I’m sure they don’t want to get spammed by me either.

With dreamhost I have the ability to setup and install gallery2, and password protect the directory, I’ve done it on my site already, but there’s such a thing as to many options. I can never get it the to look the way I want it to look, I can’t even find where to change the header so it’s the school banner. It would be nice if I could embed it in the wordpress installation, it is possible, but reading the instructions 50 times still has made me none the wiser on how to do it. The information just isn’t sinking in – at this point you should all be emailing me with offers of help and “no problem Lynne, give me the info and I’ll do it for you” – since I know it’s in your nature to help me out WHEN I’M READY TO PUT MY FIST THROUGH THE SCREEN! :)

Ahhhhh, that’s better, a little screaming always helps.

Pixel post is incredibly easy to set up, but it’s more of a photos blog, one can’t divide it into albums, it’s one pic per day kinda deal. IT would be better if one could go to a category, then browse all the photos in that gallery, but it’s not possible. There’s some great flash galleres out there, but I have to consider those who are still using dial up.

I think I’ll go ahead and install gallery2, play around a little, see if I can get a basic look and have another go of embedding the darn thing – unless someone has a better idea.