Back to school week

Yamaarashi-chan's school is still getting on-line. The school she's going to is in a new building and is a merger of two local schools, one of which I actually worked in fourteen years ago and was terribly run down even then. The school isn't even really finished; some hallways are still roped off and marked "Wet paint," moulding is still missing in some places, the administration has not established its internal culture and routines. Any institution that is uprooted and mutated tends to have a shake-out period while it tries to service its constitutients, but schools seem to be uniquely sessile institutions and have a rougher time of it. School has been in session for three days and I still don't have a school-delivered schedule or a curriculum. I have the district's schedule so things like vacations are assured but I'm still trying to find the PTA schedule. I'm hoping to get in touch with the teacher so I can ask her to email parents the homework assignments.

Still, Yamaarashi-chan loves her school. She's coming home full of lists of friends she's made and her mental record of what she's done is mostly of the people she's hung with during recess. We're letting her stay awake an extra half-hour than Kouryou-chan, which is another change that will take some getting used to in both of them. We're trying to do her eye exercises early in the evening, before her eye muscles are so very tired and so that during the bedtime routine there isn't this gap where Kouryou-chan has nothing to do but find trouble.

That leaves that extra half-hour in Yamaarashi-chan's day, and we seem to have evolved to taking that time to reading together, just she and I. She's reading Buffaloes Before Breakfast, part of the Magic Treehouse series by Mary Pope Osborne. The girls are enthralled with these books. I read from Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin, and just before bedtime Yamaarashi-chan asked me why I sometimes make noise when I read. I thought about the few minutes and said, "Because sometimes I can't help but admire this writing."

"Like what?" she said.

So I read the prologue to her, one of the best parts so far. (The description of Pearly Soames's photograph is near and dear to my heart, but probably not suitable for her.)

A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan. As a book in which to read this plan, New York is unsurpassed. For the whole world has poured its heart into the city by the Palisades, and made it far better than it ever had any right to be.

The city is now obscured, as it often is, by the whitened mass in which it rests-- rushing by us at unfathomable speed, crackling like wind in the mist, cold to the touch, glistening and unfolding, tumbling over itself like the steam of an engine or cotton spilling from a bale. Though the blinding white web of ceaseless sounds flows past mercilessly, the curtain is breaking...it reveals amid the clouds a lake of air as smooth and clear as a mirror, the deep round eye of a white hurricane.

The use of metaphor, his multiple simile, his choice of adjectives are so beautiful that I can't help but cheer a little when I read them. Yamaarashi-chan said, "I don't get it."

I just smiled. "You will some day," I said, and touseled her hair. "If you keep reading the way you do now, you will."

Omaha and I put her to bed. She kept going back and forth, getting more hugs from each of us, until I said, "I think someone is avoiding going to bed, huh?" Yamaarashi-chan giggled and nodded. "Okay, you, off to bed."

Motivational Thought For The Day

Successful people are people who always give one hundred percent, who understand that a company's success depends on an individual's determination to excel. You may say to yourself, "I am an insignificant person in this big company. I could be laid off tomorrow along with five hundred of my fellow workers, and no one would care." The truth is, what you do is important to people who are important. While you may, indeed be one of many, your labor can benefit someone who is, in fact, genuinely important.

My apologies, Theo

Where is Brown? THERE IS BROWN! Mr. Brown is out of town.

Not that this will change anything. But at least someone with a working knowledge of the distinction between "management" and "command" will be at the helm.

An important observation about Getting Things Done

One of the promises of GTD is this: if you write down everything in your head and get it into a system where you can and will refer to it such that whatever it is actually gets done, you'll stop feeling anxious about it and free up your braincells to pay attention to the current item on your list.

There is, however, one type of anxiety that you cannot exorcise this way. And that is the one labeled "Don't, even though you really want to."

Only time makes those go away.

Chimp Strike!

President Bush has suspended the Davis-Bacon act of 1931 for workers in declared disaster areas. This means that contractors will not be required to pay prevailing local wages to federal employees.

In a letter to Congress, Bush said he has the power to suspend the law because of the national emergency caused by the hurricane: "I have found that the conditions caused by Hurricane Katrina constitute a 'national emergency'."

Lovely. By fiat, George Bush has given himself the power Nixon once craved. Now, I'm scared.

I've joined the PTSA?

Omaha and I went down to Yamaarashi-chan's school today to attend the PTSA ribbon cutting (now that the school has opened), at which some local political types showed up to actually do the cutting. The school is rather nice, although it has the most inoffensive oatmeal color to the walls, some intersection between institutional color theory and good Washingtonian Earth tones.

Yamaarashi-chan's teacher is the older sort who admits to being computer illiterate and did not know how to email out the weekly homework assignments. I thought (but did not say), "Then what makes you qualified to teach my child?" She seemed the competent sort but definitely out of place in a world filled with iPods and powerbooks. She mentioned that they had cut back to 20 minutes a day of homework and still got complaints because that much time ate into the kids' sporting time. She said that she had heard from the parents that at the third grade soccer, football, and so on were more important than an education. The classroom was clean and well laid-out. It had better be; it's only been in use for three days.

The librarian allowed us to log into one of her workstations and look through the catalog, but the catalog program (written in Visual Basic by Microsoft) crashed badly and would not run. We spoke with the librarian about whether or not there were copies of Of Pandas and People were on the shelves. As far as she knew, there were not and the school was definitely not infected with "intelligent design" folks. Not yet, at any rate. We were also able to test the filtering program: the kids can get to my LJ.

It may be time to take my LJ private. I wonder if there's a way to make my LJ ready for ICRA.