Sing up contemporary art!

For friends in San Antonio--

Mark your calendars for the fabulous art exhibition "All the Things that Go to Make Heaven and Earth," in the Central Library Gallery. The opening reception is Thursday, July 3, from 6:30 to 8:30, and the show runs through July. This is the second solo show of Sandra Carreon Griffin.

Sandra's art is edgy, smart, and bold. Her paintings take their themes from photojournalism but Sandra transforms these images into dream-like representations. Powerful. See for yourself.

Some Gifts

Very sad soccer balls, but very easy to pack.

More midwestern fun: Aqua

Drambuie at Aqua

The bar tops and sides are filled with clear, bubbling water surrounded by glass. Very Jetsons.

Double the fun

Brewers v. Blue Jays:
--5-4 Brewers over the Jays
--2 Brewers home runs
--2 Brits, new friends, having baseball explained to them by a guy from NYC
--1 sausage race: Brat, Chorizo, Polish, Italian, and hot dog (Brat won by several lengths). Really.

Pre-travel traveling, better known as "Assess or Die"

Met many new friends at the midwestern assessment conference this last week. Assessment is alive and well in many places and many care deeply about doing it with rigor and integrity. I will say, though, that assessing is a struggle. Getting people to care about assessing is a struggle.

But if educators and education workers keep denying the need for meaningful, rigorous assessment or keep trying to take an approach with less integrity, we're going to lose our voice in the accountability debates.

Calling all list-makers

Living a month on the other side of the world takes some planning. Here's where it would help to be obsessive-compulsive. However, I'm just a list-maker. I've got several lists going; here are the major categories:

--travel stuff (documents, tickets, schedules, immunization papers)
--clothes (skirts, leggings, t-shirts, comfy shoes, underthings, my favorite gray t-shirt and shorts to sleep in, scarves to tie back my hair)
--technology (water purification stuff, data collection stuff, French plug conversion stuff)
--research materials (articles, dictionaries, blank book)
--health stuff (meds, vitamins, mosquito repellent)
--gifts (general, organizational, and personal)