Well, that was interesting

I know I abandoned y'all for about three weeks. I'm sorry. *hangs head* School happened, but two schedule changes, a time management plan, and a few cups of tea later I think I'm back in the game. Just in time for Term 5, right? Is everyone excited? This will be pretty epic, I promise! Before things start up, I have a little catching up to do for y'all, so here goes:

Plot: the magic is back! After a month RL time (probably about 2 months IC time), the 'specialty wizards' hired by the Magical Board of Ed (MBoE) have fixed the problem and all is back to normal, just in time for the third years to take their STOATs, which should be going up in the next couple of days. However, Deputy Headmistress McFarlan is sticking around for the ride. Next term will be verrry interesting....

ORMI: will seriously, for reals get posted and worked on in the next couple of days. Again, sorry for the delay. Real life can be a pain sometimes.

Applications for Next Term: Ah, this is the interesting section. Medic Connor is leaving us, which makes the medic position open, and Professor Dai has also plead an excess of RL work and begged off the DADA job. In other words, we are looking for a new medic and a new DADA professor; please apply using the staff form on the main page! We need about thirty student apps in the next three weeks, or else we won't be able to end and start term on time. We are no longer accepting transfer students above second year. How can you help with your student shortage? Here are a few ideas:

• Tell your friends! Most of the successful applicants apply because their friends write for us. So use that positive peer pressure and tell everyone about RMI.
  
• Facebook, facebook, facebook. Post a note or share RMI's link on Facebook.
• Review! If you write at a site such as Fictionpress or Fanfiction.net, or some other creative writing site, review other peoples' stories and add a link to RMI in! Please use your good judgment though; if their FFN or FP writing doesn't meet RMI standards, chances are their app won't either.
• Talk to teachers about it. If you are in high school, ask your English teacher or another teacher you know well to share the information with his or her class. Depending on district regulations they may or may not be able to do so, but they could recommend students who might be interested. Give it a shot!
• Put fliers up! We have fliers you can use; just let me know and I'll email those to you. Try your local library, coffee shop, or school bulletin board.

Remember, the more people we have, the more fun RMI is. Plus, we can't start term without at least 40 applicants...so the more work you do, the happier we'll all be. Spread the word!

Again, major apologies for abandoning y'all, especially those I'm in threads with. But I'm back, fear not! Get those applications in! Let me know if you have any questions or comments or concerns!

Lots of love,
Your Friendly Local Austin
Slightly Crazed Headmaster
Rocky Mountain International
http://www.rmimagic.com

Again with the Internet

Well, a mixture of my school!schedule, the changing of the guard in the Deputy Head department, and my ill-timed lack of internet connection has delayed both my posting and the uploading of new and old profiles still left on the old server.

Everything should be up, although I have not yet had time to go through and catch and fix errors yet. My posting...should be caught up shortly. Thanks for your patience!

Chaos, as Promised

What's this? The portraits aren't moving? The entrances to Houses are apparent for all to see? The Finer Diner is an ordinary room?

For those of you who have been around RMI in the past two days, I'm sure that you're wondering what exactly is going on. Well, I'm sure that you've figured out that it is, indeed, that elusive Plot (and many thanks to Juliet Audrey for helping me get it up). But here's the full story...it just requires a little ancient history.

Four years ago, the caretaker, Nic Clavell had to leave RMI. Struggling to find a replacement, the Board of Governors (BoG) ended up hiring Joseph Wagoner, a pop singer who was interested in doing the job for a short amount of time as a publicity stunt. He left at the end of the year, but without doing many crucial bits of maintanence that everyone assumed he had, indeed, done. One of these pieces of work was to renew the charms preventing RMI's magic from influencing the Muggle world above. Kim Kraft entered her new post assuming, as everyone else did, that the charms had been renewed as they have to be every five years.

Now eight years since the charms were supposed to be renewed, they have gone into overdrive, completely blanketing the school. No form of wand magic will work until they are fixed, save that done on the Quidditch Pitch. The Pitch is on a different schedule than the rest of the school as it was just finished being built. However, this is the only place that wand magic will work. Elf magic and naturally occurring magics (such as those found in plants, potions, and magical creatures) are still functioning, but this leaves the wizards and witches of the school at a great disadvantage.

On February 13th, the day before this magical outage occurred, Deputy Headmistress Mariette Lander-Guido went on maternity leave, expecting twins in April. Her replacement, Kathleen McFarlan, was hired by the BoG solely for the purpose of auditing the school and making sure that things are as they should be; complications in recent years have lead them to doubt Alessandro Guido's capacity to lead the school properly, and numerous parent complaints about malfunctions within the school only exacerbated this doubt.

The magical outage will remain in place until the specialist, an independent contractor that the BoG has specifically hired for this purpose, has set the school to rights. Until then, classes will occur on the Quidditch Pitch and RMI will cope as is necessary. The Quidditch programme will resume with the Draco vs. Aquila game as soon as a new coach is found.

...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is where I will leave you. Enjoy yourselves with the magical power outage! And in the next installment: the new ORMI.

At long last

The server change...it hath begun!

Only 'begun' because it's fairly late on my personal, internal clock and I have to get some nasty school stuff done. I'm sure you all know the drill. Anyway, I was planning on wrapping up some things when, lo and behold, the server is finally ready to use! After travel, tech issues, and general bad circumstances, RMI is finally off the geocities server.

Now, mind you, I'm not completely done yet, but things are working enough that we have basic functions. The profiles are only about half done, and there are a few aesthetic things that I really want to fix up (varying picture sizes, for instance), but the main thing is that RMI works. So enjoy it! And while you're enjoying it, a big thanks to the reason we have this awesome server, my dad, would be outstanding. ;)

Sorry about the down time. It was rather unexpected, and due to me making the small mistake of deleting and having to rebuild the home page.

Anyway, things should be back to normal soon. In upcoming posts (tomorrow?), look out for RMI's New Deputy Head, the ever-elusive Plot Start, and the new and improved Outside of RMI.

Good night, my marvelous authors!
Austin

To My Most Awesome Staffies,

I will be unavailable for about two weeks, as I have to be in Washington DC at the time, and wireless internet (or the time to use it) will be fairly sparse if it exists at all. So the site will be left in the hands of the most awesome staff members ever--ours! But before I go, I just wanted to appreciate their awesomeness. Without our RMI staff, Sherri and I would be slightly more crazed than we are now; they let us know when we overlook things, take care of minor things on their own, and most of all make us laugh when we need it. So thank you:

To Eliana, for stepping up and taking Care of Magical Creatures. It's a marvelous class, and you're doing a truly outstanding job teaching it. I'm glad you volunteered for that. :)

To Jodie, for lessons that make about half my characters cringe, the rest love you, and all of them take post-STOATs Charms classes. You also get the award for Most Original Use of a Cat at RMI, and gods know that Charms would be less fun without Parrot there.

To Sakura, for scaring the living daylights out of half my characters and putting the other half in total awe of your teaching. You certainly bring character to the staff, and we love you for it.

To Serilda, for stepping up at the last minute to my desperate pleas of 'we need an herbology teacher!' and for never making me regret that decision. Although you haven't been on staff since the very beginning, you came in when we needed you most and you've never failed to take on extra duties when Sherri and I needed you to.

To Zuma, who wins the 'most positions held at RMI' award. First as Head of Draco, then a Counselor, then a History of Magic teacher, we're so glad we have you. Your originality and family posts have certainly made my day more than once. The Little Zumas are amazing, and your history lessons are something that I'd want to attend!

To Elizabeth, for being uber supportive both IRL and on the site, for going along with my crazy schemes, and for taking on Lyra House. The computer lab was a stroke of brilliance that really helps make RMI what it is today!

To Juliet, for always having energy. Always. Even when it scares me. ;) Just kidding. The founder of the Secret Santa, and the staff member with the most "can I do this??" questions, I know you love RMI as much as Sherri and I do and your out-of-the-box ingenuity helps it thrive.

To Christian, for never failing to second guess me or Sherri. Or both, simultaneously, if needed. For the Advanced Transfigurations lessons and the Remedial Transfigurations lessons, and for all the other things you volunteer to do, despite your other responsibilities.

To Poppy, for RMI news and ever-enthusiastic posting.

To Bubbles, for becoming our third medic in four years, despite the apparent curse on the position. ;) I love your characters' personalities and your willingness to post avidly with students, even under difficult circumstances.

To Garen, for making the Admin Quarters more active than it's ever been in four terms at RMI and starting what we all thought may be impossible: an RPG musical. You also win the Most Copious Use of Random Metaphors award. Keep it up, my friend!

To Kim, for being willing to do 'just this one more thing'. You stepped up to take a staff position when we really needed it, and since then you have been willing to do pretty much anything, including write a myriad of other characters, even if you were only ever expecting to just write the caretaker. Thanks as well for the hugs, the teddy grahams and frosting, and the noise of little house-elf feet pitter-pattering through the halls of the school.

To Mariette, to Sherri, to my wonderful Deputy Headmistress. Couldn't do this without you, and I really wouldn't want to try. I mean, for one, I'd actually have to update profiles on a yearly basis! What madness that would be!

Thank you all for being completely awesome.

Love from your friendly local Austin! <3

Auegh! Wireless!

After experiencing some Severe Wireless Deprivation over the past week, I'm glad to say that my lovely connection is back, and I should be catching up with posts ASAP.

In other news, ten days until Midterm. ;)

Looming on the Horizon

That's right. It's here. Or at least threatening. This is now the time to cue the Jaws music.

Duhnuh. Duhnuh. Duuuuh...nuhnuhnuhnuhnuuuuh!

Plot. It's approaching. Are YOU ready? Do you have your canned food properly stacked? Your bottled water stored? Your gas mask at the ready?

Well, maybe it's not quite that drastic. But let me tell you, this plot is going to be so much fun, if you want to have it. Seriously, it's going to be fantastic. This has been in the works since T1, although it was put aside because we thought it would be better to wait until we have more people. Now it's T4 and we've got the people, and it's so ready to go!

Part Uno, if you haven't seen it: Draco, Lyra, Cetus, Aquila

Part Dos, if you haven't seen it: Rec Centre
(and continued, Finer Diner)

Can anybody guess what we're doing? No staffies from T1 are allowed to guess. ;) Let's see how quick you guys are on the pick up!

The Decline from Sanity

Not that I need anything else to do or anything like that.

Heh. Well, this is Austin, your friendly local Headmaster from Rocky Mountain International. I write Alessandro Guido, do maintainance, and other such things that have to do with RMI. Real life happens sometimes too, but that's not too important. ;)

Just for a little bit of background on the site: RMI was founded on December 29, 2006 during a sleepover with my friend and darling Deputy Headmistress, Sherri. We're both into international stuff, so we decided to make the school international as well. We threw up some code, started advertising, and boom! Term one happened. There were some setbacks, of course, and we have (at current count) recoded the entire site three times (many thanks to the Head at Sonora for helping us). But thanks to you guys, we've kept it going and now we're almost halfway through our fourth term!

We're anticipating a server move sometime in the next month or so. By 'server move' I mean that we will no longer be hosted by geocities, but by our own domain! It's pretty exciting for us because geocities has some serious issues with failing at crucial times due to server overload from too many page views.

But yeah, I'm planning on using this blog to keep in touch with you guys. Feel free to make comments, ask questions, or whatever you want! I don't get to talk to all of you (and I wish I could), but hopefully this will make sure everyone knows what's going on with RMI now and in the future, even if you're one of the ones I don't get to talk to, for whatever reason.

Ciao!