Funny Face

I'm emceeing a big fundraiser on Zoom tonight, and I am NERVOUS.

So I put on a new dress, did my hair, makeup, etc.

I will not wear the dress tonight because it will translate too "naked" over Zoom, but it's giving me a nice boost just sitting around the house.

I've been working on this event since February--on and off, but it's been on mind. I'll be grateful to put it to rest after tonight.

I need new swimsuits. I've been wearing the same awful, unflattering and poorly made Cupshe two pieces for three years. And I have a few one pieces from Target, and they aren't great either. I spend too much time in a swimsuit for this! I hate ordering swimsuits online, but I've finally given up and admitted that's the only way to go, so I ordered some separates from Quince.

I've never worn Quince before? But while I was looking at swim tops and bottoms, I also threw a couple dresses and these short-alls in my cart, and thankfully I LOVE the short-alls. They really scratch the itch I have to be wearing overalls at all times, except make it summer. Make it unbearably hot.

And the linen sundress I ordered fits and is nice too.

Only one swim top has come in, but it's also nice??? Here's hoping the bottoms will also fit and the other dress will be nice too.

For breakfast I had two frozen egg white crustless mini quiches with multigrain toast and strawberry jam. (Dead easy but felt close to a restaurant meal.)

And for lunch I had a taco salad with leftover black beans and a little seasoned ground beef on tortilla chips with melted cheese, tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, chopped up quick pickled red onions, hatch green chili salsa, avocado salsa, and sour cream. Really delicious! Extraordinarily low effort!

Dominic: Okay?

Me (suspicious): Anything on your hand we should know about?

I know I am an insane person with a brain fully saturated (as it should be) with love for my child, but every time Riv deigns to paint, I think it's SO GOOD.

He's really not that interested in drawing or coloring??? To an extent that makes me sad sometimes. But every now and then he'll sit down, usually with dot paints, and I feel like he's inventing a new art movement?

To me, this painting has movement and composition. And Riv also mixed paints and made new colors. The smearing! The layered dots! The use of color! The way the painting moves across the page!

It's very silly, but it's happened often enough--Riv making interesting paintings--that I really feel like he's got some sort of uncanny savant thing going on. Or I'm just a mom who likes when her kid paints. Either way!

Spent all day trying to clean up this mentorship mess before it starts on the 15th. Had a mentor drop out at the 11th hour. Panicked. Immediately found a replacement mentor. I have to write some instructional materials tomorrow, and that will take time, but things are slowly getting better.

My birthday yesterday was so fun! @thebarbaricyawp and Gavin came to visit, and we went to a skating rink! My big kid had a great time. Riv struggled because he couldn't immediately skate perfectly (he's not even four!). B is, of course, a former roller girl, and Gavin is also really good on skates.

I am not good on skates and in fact busted my ass so hard I am now bruised (a little girl wobbled by right in front of me), but I still had such a nice time. There were all these skate crews there practicing their skate dances! It was so fun. God bless the young men of Pensacola who are deep into the shuffle skating subculture.

At home, we did a record pairing with Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and a fishbowl cocktail. We bought blue curaçao especially for this drink, and it ended up being so tasty, so watch out! In year 44, I am drinking blue drinks!

Canvas's free-for-teacher option, which is still shuttered, has opened today for 24 hours so people can retrieve their course content. The mentorship really only uses Canvas as a repository for students to upload work and for mentors to receive it and provide feedback. It makes it easier for me to track everything from one place so that I can make sure everything is running smoothly and that mentees are uploading work and mentors are providing feedback. It also has a peer review function that was extremely useful. And it can be accessed all over the world for our international students.

In the research I did, the only other LMS option, other than Google Classroom, seems to be Moodle, but we will still have to pay for a hosted version, and I'm unfamiliar with its interface. I have an appointment next week to talk to a Canvas representative about whether they offer paid versions for an organization as small as ours. And then Canvas is also saying they will bring back some kind of non-paid version. Not crazy about continuing to use Canvas at all after this debacle, though, which is understandable!

The decision I made for this summer was to use to Google Classroom, but it's an imperfect stopgap mostly because it's not accessible in mainland China, and we have some mentees who will be affected by this.

So today I'm getting my materials off Canvas and beginning to set up shells on Google Classroom. All of this has been a giant headache, as you would imagine. And I'm super nervous that I'm not thinking through all the organizational aspects of moving to Google Classroom. Maybe I should have immediately moved to Moodle, which is where I think we'll eventually end up, but it just made me so nervous to commit to a paid LMS at such short notice and to have to learn a new interface and deal with a company and program that I had no idea even existed until a week ago. The mentorship begins in two weeks!

It's scary that I'm making all these decisions essentially by myself! Why am I in charge of all this! Who let me do this???