Monday Brain Dump

Had a birthday 2 weeks ago. I'm now a bit more than 7 1/2 in dog years.

Here's my update on living in our new home:

People have kind of settled in and figured out how to live with what we've got. If this means carrying desks from room to room or accepting that it's not physically possible to walk around the classroom, so be it. For a not very organized person such as myself, the worst part is getting to the other building and then realizing that you've forgotten something. On the positive side, we had a nice chance to use the outdoor space at the school today for Israeli dancing and balloon animals, allowing us to hear music during lunch and popping balloons for the rest of the day.

As for the teaching side of things, we seem to have gotten past the whole white board controversy and now feel that we can write with impunity.

This past week I decided I would take the other staircase (known affectionately as Stairs 2) to see if I saw different people there, and I did. It's maybe a little scruffier over on that side of the building, though I don't think it has anything specifically to do with the stairs. In fact, the staircases are completely blank. No decoration, no message boards, though in Stairs 1, there's a wall of glass bricks that is blindingly bright in the morning.

Do you get the sense that I'm running out of things to talk about? It's a building. Buildings don't change quickly (as long as the architects didn't make any rounding errors). I've managed to cover my new desk with unsorted paper, and we still have good coffee in our office, but sometimes it feels like we're just passing though the building, while at the old place it kind of felt like we were living there (though, of course, we were not the only life forms living there). Maybe I'll have more of a sense for it once we have more than 2 school days in a row at some point.