changes

Finishing up a two-week winter break where I truly didn’t think much about work and just spent time with my family.

Despite the break, something I was focusing on at work and will again is the development and curation of our school district’s Sora/OverDrive collection of ebooks and audiobooks. You need to be a student or staff member to access these, but you can see some examples of what we are doing here.

Reading whatever I want, and tracking it faithfully on Goodreads again. Maybe I will start sharing things about my reading on this site and other social media as well.

Watching movies again. About to do a deep dive into New Korean Cinema. (I track my movie-watching on Letterboxd.)

Pondering making a concerted re-entry into social media and updating this site for the first time in months, starting with this ‘now’ update. I feel like, if nothing else, I should be sharing more things that I like, do, read, see, eat, etc., so that I can give a little more promotion to businesses, artists, creators, authors, etc. I’ve gotten as shy online as I have always been in person, and I’m ready to push back.

I’m reading and reviewing children’s fiction to help determine the 2021 nominees for the Beehive Book Awards. I could always use more readers, so if you are interested and especially if you know kids who would be interested, let me know and I’ll hook you up with the list and some great books to read.

Newly obsessed with and recommitted to getting my district’s library catalog in better shape after attending a Cataloging workshop courtesy of the Utah State Library and the main cataloging librarian for the Salt Lake County Library system a couple of weeks ago. I’m even, like, regularly referencing and importing authority records and other next-level MARC record stuff like that now. Hope it is helpful.

Writing this in the “Canyon” lobby of the Natural History Museum of Utah while my son is at his friend’s birthday party somewhere in the museum. (It might be my favorite building in Utah so I couldn’t resist mentioning it.)

I started a variation on Bullet Journaling in October and so far it is going quite well, better than any other journaling, notebooking, or task management system I’ve attempted up to this point in my life. (I drafted these notes in said journal at said natural history museum lobby before posting them on this site.)

It wasn’t really my idea but we got a puppy in August. Her name is Luna. She has awesome foxlike ears with multiple points of articulation that could probably make useful contributions to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence if only she could better communicate with us what she is hearing. Sometimes she’ll go on walks/hikes with me or watch horror movies with me, but mostly she just chews on whatever stuff is around, including my children.

Continuing to work on making this website functional and useful to myself. I toyed around with doing P.O.S.S.E. with this site as my basis, but I found out I actually don’t like the reality of how it works, so I am moving towards not having this site be my source for everything but rather using it as a central curation and archival location for everything I do anywhere on the internet that I feel like is worth noting or saving.

I’m still tinkering with this website, but I’m going to start sharing things from it on social media networks, and basically publicly acknowledge its existence.

Taking some actual time off work to take my kids on adventures big and small, and to give my wife a break since the kids are home all day every day right now.

• Big adventure example: camping by the Colorado River outside Moab and Arches National Park.
• Small adventure example: riding bikes yesterday at a nature park by our neighborhood. Well, they rode bikes and I mostly sat at a bench and wrote in a notebook.

I’m in serious summer project mode at work, when I’m at work. Right now I’m about to set up a new theme and revamp a lot of things at granitemedia.org so that the site can be more secure and functional, and hopefully a bit easier to read and navigate. Beyond that, I am generally attempting to learn, fix, and improve a lot of things I often can’t make the time for during the school year.

I’m chairing the Children’s Fiction Committee for the Beehive Book Awards again next year. Right now we are in summer reading mode, just finding potential nominations for the 2021 long list which we will meet to determine in the fall.

Just finished up a month four months of listening exclusively to music made by women. Best listening project I’ve ever done, though I didn’t know quite how to end it.

Currently on a deep dive into the films and art of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Taking a little break from my Film School Drop Outs 2018 Challenge.

I’ll be attending the Utah Coalition for Educational Technology and the Utah Educational Library Media Association conferences next week.

I’m chairing the Children’s Fiction Committee for the Beehive Book Awards. We’ll be announcing the nominees for the 2020 awards in sessions at said UELMA conference next week. I probably really should be crafting 45 second booktalks right now.

I’m building out this website, with the aim of it becoming a central home for all my personal content and activity on the world wide web. I’m building it mostly from scratch to force myself into learning more about web design and coding.

I’m trying out this Coaching Digital Learning MOOC from the Friday Institute.

I’m gearing up to transfer content, create tutorials, and curate new digital resources as our district phases out an old digital video platform at the end of this year.

I’m just finishing up an exhaustive listen through the discography of Sonic Youth. Up next (actually already started) are Outkast and Parliament-Funkadelic.

Though we are now deep into 2019, I continue to plug away at the 2018 Film School Drop Outs Challenge on Letterboxd.