New beginnings

Today is the first day of 21st Century program afterschool activities at Stephanie’s school, with Stephanie tutoring half a dozen kids for an hour after school and then leading the first of her (weekly?) Culture Club activities. Registration, you might recall, was last week. You might also recall that – like some of new drop-in/pull-out school-day activities – this involves Stephanie working with English as a new language students and other students. Today is an introductory day in Culture Club, with no single country in focus. This all assumes Stephanie's school stays open, since dozens of students and several teachers were out - or left mid-day - Friday, because of flu-like symptoms - some of them probably with H1H1. The school district seems to have something like an 80 percent threshhold for this sort of thing. If less than 80 percent of students are there - because of illness - the school closes.

Today is the middle of three work days in which I am apparently the lead person left in our office – with my three senior colleagues and another professional colleague out – and with the deadline for a big project I – and now we all – have been working on looming tomorrow. Some of the administrative assistants have been even more cooperative than others, and we’ll see who shows up for a staff meeting I called for 9:15 a.m. Today will be a test not only of my leadership skills (imagine for example that in 15 years I really was a manager) (this reminds me a tiny bit of teaching) but also of my technical skills. With my former turtlesitter, senior colleague – and our database manager – Ida out and able to finish a little less than she hoped she would before she left – and with less good wireless Internet access on vacation than we had hoped – I’m getting stucked running more SPSS than usual. This is good in some ways – I was able to do some runs for a presentation Ida and I are supposed to do in a couple of weeks in Denver on my own – but it also means if things go wrong this afternoon with deadlines looming, there’s no one to bail me out.

In other new beginnings: Mom continues to self-administer her new medication - starting mid-week last week - and Nancy has shared with us by Facebook pictures of her newly renovating downstairs.

- Perry