It’s been a week.

There are a couple of things I’m glad I learned during the pandemic, back when everything was closed because we couldn’t breathe on each other.

One of them is how to make coffee that I like to drink.

Here’s how I do it: Moka pot coffee (High Drive roast, from Indaba Coffee, here in Spokane), with soy milk (agitated in a Bodum milk frother), and about 2tsp of chocolate syrup (Hershey dark chocolate syrup, to add a subtle chocolate flavor and cut the bitterness of the coffee with a little bit of sweet).

The coffee continues to be the highlight of every week. But this week was memorable for a couple of reasons:

I got my first black fly (Buffalo Gnat) bite of the season… on my face. (OK, that’s not a highlight, but it was significant.) Black flies inject you with a numbing agent and then saw a small, impressively round, hole in your skin. The wound bleeds, and then swells up like a mosquito bite and remains itchy for several days. Usually they get you on the hairline… this one is just to the front of my ear. I was bitten on Monday afternoon, and on Saturday morning, it’s still itchy and a little bit swollen. I’m pretty sensitive to bug bites anyway, but I hate black flies… at least their season is short. (Treatment: hydrocortisone cream and antihistamines (Allegra or Zyrtec — we probably shouldn’t use Benadryl anymore).)

I finished my first semester of graduate school. For our final project, my group had to rethink and redesign the navigation structure of a website, and we finished it on Thursday. I suggested the OLC’s district site, because it doesn’t (at present) adequately represent what the OLC does, how, or for whom.

(For what it’s worth, school districts generally don’t do a lot of great web development; funding is inadequate, and school employees don’t have time to maintain a complex site, because they’re, you know, teaching kids. It’s unfortunate, because there are significant information needs for students, parents, and the community, that are just not being met. And yes, I know, not all school districts.)

We got to do a card sort with the OLC staff, which was amazing. Card sorting is a really great way to get a glimpse into other people’s ideas about how the world should be organized. There are apps and orgs that allow you to do them online. We used index cards, which for a group hybrid sort, is an easy, tactile experience (nice after the teachers had worked with kindergarteners all day).

Since I’m the one who suggested it (and the OLC is where I live), I got to do some of the heavier lifting with the foundational pieces. I’m lucky the group had a tech person who could read my early drafts. It was a gift to have someone who could check to make sure she could visualize what I was describing. And then to be able to hand it off to writers and editors who could take our observations and ideas (~ 12 pages, at that point, with some photos and sitemaps) and create a cohesive report about the project. (It was quite a bit of work for 10 points.)

[5/14/23: We got full credit! Yay, us!}

I’m (still) not a huge fan of group work, but not for the reasons you might think. I enjoy collaborating with people, one-on-one or in small groups — different perspectives often makes for stronger work. And I was lucky to have landed in the group I was in; everyone was interesting and insightful, hugely talented, and wanted to be involved and get things done in a timely manner. That said, we all have lives outside of school that need to be attended to, and matching schedules and availability for project work turned out to be a bigger challenge than doing the actual work of the project. That’s a little too “real world” for work that has hard deadlines and offers no compensation.

I spent yesterday morning decompressing with a tropical smoothie. (Shakes and smoothies are like donuts to me. I really enjoy them… about twice a year. Anything more ends up being… too much.)

And now it’s on to the next semester. This summer I will be coding… a lot. I’m taking SJSU’s MLIS foundation front-end coding class, and working my way through a front-end coding certificate through the University of Washington.

(And hopefully, continuing to work with the Outdoor Learning Center on building out their district website.)