Monthly Archives: May 2009

Commencement

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Last night was Stella’s official graduation from pre-school. Each of the children at the center were invited to participate in the ceremonies regardless of whether they were graduating or not. Both kids were honored for their special contributions and achievements – Stella for teaching all the new kids about the school rules, and Porter for learning circle time rules. My basic interpretation of this was, “Thank you Stella for your productive channeling of your bossiness, and thank you Porter for no longer inciting circle-time riots.” That perky eduspeak doesn’t fool me.

This being Humboldt County, the kids all wore their homemade tie-die t-shirts in lieu of graduation gowns and, with the single exception of my son, they also wore their homemade mortar boards. Upon hearing his name called to come up and receive his certificate of achievement, Porter naturally chose to bolt in the opposite direction. That is, until he saw that each of the certificate was accompanied by an ice-cream-cone-cupcake, at which point he was lured back to the podium to participate in the ceremony.

Congratulations, preschool. You now only have one Walston to contend with.

stella and porter
(click on photo to see the full set)

This is your brain on multitasking.

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I work part time. It’s a lovely thing, this part-time status. It allows me to keep my giant life-scale sort of in balance. Little work here, little home-life there, and sometimes when I’m really luck a little me-time. But this week the universe came along and dropped a giant brick on the work side of that scale and catapulted everything else off in a thousand directions. This week was the convergence of three gigantic projects all swirling in a perfect-storm-like hurricane of crazy.

It was the kind of week that pushed my usually precision-like multitasking abilities from awesome to inept. I ended up working closely with the associate dean from one of the colleges and I swear, he thinks I belong in the remediation program. It seemed like over half of our emails went something like this:

Him: Blue.
Me: Gotcha! Green it is!
Him: Um, I think we had discussed blue.
Me: Oh yeah, didn’t you know? I’m an idiot.

Which was especially ridiculous considering the logistical aspects of this project at times rivaled that of a space shuttle launch. Combine this with the 1-day institute my unit is putting together, and that the new website goes up in tandem with said Institute, I have been shown how quickly I can go from organizational maven to handicapped illiterate.

This week’s hours, by my usual standards, have been grueling and I’ll probably be hacking out content for the website throughout the course of the weekend, and with any luck, come Monday evening I just might regain some IQ points. Which will help the next time I run into the dean and can prove to him that I’m actually competent enough to be employed by the university.