Where I've been

I felt as if I spent all last week away from the world during my administrative internship. This week, I scrambled back, only to have the rug yanked out from under me again next week, going back to another school to finish up those certification requirements.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dangerbird/

Being unplugged made the time at the K-6 school much more immediate. I was definitely registering more stimula than I do sitting working at the computer (and now often at two computers, since I have the kiosk going for the catalog and printing and email and troubleshooting). It was actually a relief not to be swallowing whole raw information about ebooks or social justice or machine intelligence or whatever else I'm obsessing over at the moment all day long.

But, in some ways, I need that distracting stream of content to keep me focused. My acuity decreased, I lost hours of time offline once I went home. I found it almost impossible to write anything much all week. I can usually crank out copy, so the mental effort it took me to readjust was a marked change. All that reminds me of the AASL 2011 One Conference, One Book selection, The Shallows. Minneapolis looks like a great conference...

I do have lots of comings-and-goings before then. I will be at the School Library Journal Summit in Virginia, September 21-23, then at the Kentucky School Media Association, September 29 - October 1.

With this internship wrapping up next week and the Praxis on September 17, everyone wants to know what is going to be next. After this certification, all I am concerned with is finishing my dissertation. I keep saying I won't commit to much else, and probably have been better about parsing back and getting rid of clutter, like deleting Google+ and cleaning out my file folders from 2003. There are aspects of my job from which I continue to derive great pleasure, but I can't say I'm not scanning the horizon for the next thing.