A back-in-the-day building in the Pearl

Do you see the name on the building?  That’s not an ironically titled restaurant.  That’s an actual Bearing Service Company, left over from the time where the Pearl District was filled with blue-collar businesses and warehouses instead of wandering yuppies and tourists.  They’ve recently painted this building, so it looks like they plan to stick around.

Look at that Art Deco glass, and the super cool rounded platform entrance, topped by a neon sign.  Niiiiiiice!

From peeking through the windows, I know that there’s a tiny customer service space, and then the rest of the building is taken up with shelves of parts.  When it’s hot, the large fan they set in the doorway has tipped me off to the fact that they don’t have air conditioning.

Found in notepad

I didn’t have a notebook and needed one for the conference I was attending. I grabbed an old notepad and ripped out some page so as to make my own smaller pages.  And here was a list of classmates.  I can tell by the presence of the name Abby, that this is from one of my Middle School Math Certificate classes.  I used to make a list of names on the first day, and then quiz myself before every class.  That way, when I needed to point out that Ida had a good point, I could just say, “Ida has a good point,” rather than, “I agree with her.” [waves vaguely in the direction of Ida]

People marveled over how I learned everyone’s name, but it wasn’t hard.  They mostly sat in the same order each week.  And learning names quickly is an important skill for a teacher to have.

Citing your medium

I met up with a friend for breakfast at Byways Cafe and enjoyed reading this cocktail list, as well as the explanation of the method of getting the cocktail list together.

As someone who once had the job of manually typing checks (with NO mistakes, because there were carbons involved) I feel for them. It probably took them a very long time.  While it’s fun to type on typewriters, manual keyboard are so much faster.  And they have both a backspace AND a delete key.

In fun typewriting observations, I’m willing to bet that this particular model doesn’t have a key with the number one on it. You can tell, because they typed the year as: i954. I once had such a typewriter.  When I pointed this lack of digit out to my mom, she said they all used to be like that, and they always just used the lowercase letter “l”.

A year of Family Book Group

I had great amounts of fun in my first year leading the Family Book Group for sixth and seventh graders. And I also had fun making a handy color-coded sheet of our highs and lows.

Overall, our highest rated book was I Am Princess X.  Our lowest was the Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle.

Based on these results, I’m on the hunt for YA that isn’t too old for next year’s group.

I also received a very nice card from one of the participants.

One Story: Guts; The Third Birdhouse

“Small-town girls’ unsafety is accepted as a certainty.”  So says Gnesis Villar, who is a sophomore at Kenyon College.  I liked this premise–because can’t it be said that we accept girls’ unsafety in our current society?  The execution wasn’t my favorite.

A retelling of the story of Abraham and Issac, this was a story that was over so quickly, I had to read it again.  It worked well for me.  Well done, John Biguenet.

Electric Pianos, a changing of the guard

In December of 2014, my co-worker lent me her keyboard.  It was a great gift, and I have played it mostly every day since it arrived in my home.  It’s been a good start to my piano life, but I’ve been looking for an upgrade.  

It so happened that a different co-worker (from that same job) was getting rid of her electric piano, and I jumped at the chance to take it home.  It’s got a solid base and weighted keys, not to mention more of them.  I’m happy to be continuing my piano journey with this new instrument.
And my friend who lent me the original keyboard took it back so she could lend it to another friend, so the keyboard circulation continues.

Thanks Branka and Tara!