TwentySevenLetters / B

Monthly report

I’ve been somewhat remiss in my blogging. I’m okay with it, and I haven’t heard any complaints from readers, so I guess it is what it is. I’m thinking of hanging up the whole work-related blogging thing anyway—when you have some measure of job satisfaction, it’s hard to come up with things to say. It’s so much easier to complain than it is to make the mundane, everyday events interesting.

I’ve started working on the grant, now that we have it and have to implement the crazy things I said I’d do. I’ve been meeting with school representatives on various issues, most notably the head of the science department, to get him on board with the sci/tech component. One of his teachers has already volunteered to do a session on aquaculture using the high school’s lab. I have no idea what aquaculture is, but we’re going to set that up as one of the early sessions—early, because she’s the only one who’s volunteered so far. I’m hoping she enjoys it and spreads the word.

We’ve had a couple of meetings of the new advisory board. Not surprisingly, the middle schoolers are a much bigger group than the high schoolers, who aren’t even a group, because you can’t have a group when there’s nobody there. One interested ninth-grader asked that the meetings be moved to evening, since lots of kids work in the afternoon—but lots of them work at night, too, so there’s not really a time that’s great for everyone. I had split the groups into middle school and high school, but I think it might be better to just recombine them, since the high school group is so non-existent. The middle schoolers have had some really great ideas, though, and with their input I found which of my own ideas aren’t so great. Oh, they have some misses, too—the boy who suggested an ice-sculpting workshop, for instance, admitted that he didn’t think it through when I asked what kind of tools we’d need for it—but on the whole, they’re a great group of kids with great ideas, and I’m looking forward to really getting to know them.

Last night I brainstormed with one of our pages to come up with ideas for crafts that aren’t the same things we’ve been doing. Mostly it’s been “here are materials (beads, wire, pipe cleaner, paper clips); make something!” and we’re looking to break out of that mold. I think we might end up planning a trip to AC Moore, and just see what looks fun while we’re there. And different. Fun and different, because as bored as the attendees are with what we’re doing, Kate and I are just as bored. (Kate is the best page ever and I’m very sad that she’s off to college next fall. In the meantime, she and I are of like minds when it comes to crafts, which is a negative insofar as we can’t even muster the energy to do crafts one of us hates—because we hate the same ones, so neither of us can “carry” the other in running a non-craft like decoupage.)

I’ve been plugging away at the summer reading list. At last check, there was some discussion of giving a choice of books for each grade level, which I think is a great idea. So my annotated list keeps getting longer. I also have an obsessively-detailed spreadsheet, broken down by grade level and then color-coded by genre (speculative fiction, historical, mystery, realistic, non-fiction). I am a big nerd, but it was very helpful to take a quick glance at the spreadsheet and realize that, right now, 8th grade has nothing but sci-fi, and the bulk of the 7th grade list is historical. So I know I need to mix that up a bit, and add more 7th-8th grade titles in general. 10th grade? Not so much, because my 10th grade list is huuuuuuge.

Not much happening on the non-work front. Halloween is tomorrow, and with it comes the start of the holiday season for me—which means I need to get cracking on all the Projects I’m planning to do for Christmas. I’ve already requested 2 days off in December to give myself a 4-day weekend, which will be the big Candy Weekend, but I also have a couple of quilts to finish and other miscellaneous projects I’ve wanted to get to and haven’t had time for. It might end up being a less-handmade Christmas than I’m hoping, but that makes me a little sad. Dammit, I want some time to play with art supplies!

I’ve been losing a lot of my free time to the Y—stupid exercise eats into my reading time, my crafting time, my cooking dinner or watching TV or otherwise being-home time. The scale believes I’ve only dropped 3 pounds in the month I’ve been going, but all my clothes are looser, so if nothing else I’ve redistributed the weight I have. And I’ve been feeling a little better now that I’ve been moving more, so that’s a win, too. (I’m feeling like a slug now that I haven’t been in a week, but that’s because I’ve had a stupid cold that left me short of breath at the best of times; vigorous exercise didn’t seem the best plan.)

So, work, Y, eat, sleep. That’s about the extent of my life. Reading has finally picked up from the summer, though not a the breakneck pace I’d accomplished back in the fall. Full log, with reviews, is at GoodReads.com. (I’ve read 165 books so far this year!)