Life in the third grade

Well, it's official: A third grader lives in our house.

Today, our son Joel embarked on a new adventure commonly known as third grade. And after a summer's worth of groaning and wishing he could go back to second grade, I'd say "Third Grade: Day 1" was a rousing success.

Confidence was not at an all-time high heading into the annual Meet the Teacher Night on Monday of this week. Joel wasn't at all thrilled about leaving second grade behind. He really loved his teacher, Mrs. Wilson, and told me on the final day of school in the spring that he didn't want to be a third grader. Despite my best effort at assuring him that third grade would be just fine, he would hear none of it.

And so began our summer.

Any mention of school by My Smokin' Hot Wife or me brought about the same response: "I don't wanna go to third grade. I wanna stay in second grade. I miss Mrs. Wilson."

And so it continued; until today.

As usual, he awoke early (like 4:45 a.m. early) to give me a hug and see me off to work. I squeezed him, kissed his head and told him school would be fun and that I'd pick him up afterward. He was all smiles in the annual "first day of the new school year" photo that My Smokin' Hot Wife took of him this morning and was still bouncy and upbeat when I collected him at parent pickup this afternoon after school dismissed.

"I like third grade, Daddy!" he proclaimed as he climbed into Ye Olde DadMobile. He then rattled off a list of all the positives about third grade that he had gleaned from his first day, including a glowing recommendation of his new teacher, Ms. Riggle. Best of all, he told me, "there's no home work in third grade!"

Of course, I disputed this claim, but he assured me that Ms. Riggle told the class that there would be no home work in third grade.

"No home work this week, probably," I said to him.

"No home work EVER," replied Joel the Confident.

Okay. A bridge to be crossed later. I don't want to kill the mood today.

So we're off to a good start with "Third Grade: Day 1" in the books.

A win's a win, right?

Yep. We'll take it.

Thank you, Lord, for the blessing of a happy boy.

#Hashtags on Facebook

So I host this morning radio show at WHIZ-FM in Zanesville, Ohio, and I maintain a Facebook page and Twitter account for the program, which is called Z92 Morning Rush (shameless plug, yes). The social media accounts help me to build an audience and stay in contact with regular listeners. The usual stuff.

Now I'm not the most tech savvy dude you'll ever meet. I'm not totally lost in the techniverse, but it's not exactly home sweet home, either. Anyway, today on the show - which I affectionately refer to as El Grande Show - one of my minions, Sara the Moderator, informed me that Facebook is now using hashtags (#), a la Twitter.

This was news to me, so I Googled "Facebook hashtags" and found an article by Christopher Null on PC World's interwebs site about the topic. According to a study by Simply Measured, the Facebook hashtags, which made their debut on the site in June, aren't "driving additional engagement" by users.

Mr. Null said there are multiple issues with Facebook's hashtags that could be preventing the desired "additional engagement." First, the hashtags are clickable in an initial post, but don't work all the time in ensuing comments. Second, the hashtags on Facebook aren't readily visible like they are on Twitter. Third, when you click on a Facebook hashtag, you get a pop-up page that loads at a snail's pace.

It seems like the Facebook hashtags are rather useless then, doesn't it? Why even bother with them, right? I certainly won't be using them on my future Facebook posts, will I?

Wrong. In good lemming fashion, I hashtagged (did I just make up a word?) three items in my very next post about a local band that we had on the show today. I felt cool and trendy for about a minute or so.

But I'll probably keep using the Facebook hashtags just because they turn blue and you can click on them.

Hey, squirrel!!!!

#Sigh.