The sun is shining in my window and I'm drinking hot coffee out of a big chunky pottery mug, a wedding gift. It's a perfect Sunday morning. It was a busy week, I'm in for another one this week too. We are settled into our new office in south Minneapolis now, right near Midtown Global Market. Windows line the walls from floor to ceiling and we share the building space with some other stellar organizations. The rest of our cubicles will be delivered this Friday. Right now we have just parts - certain walls that fit together perfectly, we are just missing a few.
When my name changed this summer I switched over to Gmail. At Hamline, where I'm in graduate school, we also converted to Gmail. When I started this new job in July, I learned we are on Gmail here too. I have made the complete conversion and I love it. We often use G-chat in the office to avoid having to get up twenty times a day and to avoid disturbing other cube-dwellers' work. I have never worked in a cubicle before and don't mind it much. I might like it. In a string of hilarious G-chat bantering with a co-worker on Friday, I erupted in a burst of laughter and could not immediately respond. I suppose my response would have included something like, what, "LOL"? The beauty of it was that I needed not respond. She heard my LOL from the other side of the cubicle wall. Surely this is a perk of being stationed in a cubicle at work among incredibly witty people. Every once in a while two of us will stand up to talk. Before we know it, five, or maybe all six of us will be standing there chatting over the cubicles walls. We need not go far to have our questions answered. My cubicle is one of the stations still missing a wall. I enjoy launching backwards in my rolling chair and gingerly knocking into the chair of the woman who sits next to me (directly behind me for now) to let her know I have a question for her. Gingerly, because she is pregnant. Still launching my chair backwards towards her, because she thinks it's funny. So do I. I've got just four days left before a wall separates us.
I heard a very scary statistic late last week. I learned that they (you know, "they") project the number of future prison beds needed based on the number of children reading (or "not reading") at grade level by the end of 3rd grade. I know that the 3rd grade time frame is very important - we shoot for bringing kids up to grade level by this time because this is when it switches from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." But the number of projected prison beds needed!? When I heard this, it sent a big scary shiver right down my spine.
Read to your kids tonight.
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