I walked in a different direction this morning, so I can report this: that civil engineering project where they raised the streets is HUGE. It is at least two miles across. Just wow. I can also report that mulberrries are plentiful here, and hardly anyone eats them, except for that woman who had a quarter shopping bag full of them and was still collecting with thousands on the sidewalk around her. PLUS there is this type of blueberry bush used ornamentally around here that is just delicious. What can I say? My mom didn’t do such a great job of teaching me not to stick things in my mouth. But, as she would say (and has on many an occasion), I was her first try.

I spent the majority of the day working: fixing slides, adjusting our lesson plans and calendar and actually doing the programming activities that we will ask the students to do. Yesterday I programmed the computer to play Pig, an easy dice game you could play with even little kids (old enough to count to 100) on a rainy day. Today I will be programming a Jukebox, and tomorrow it will be an image posterizer and a video game. That’ll get me through the first three weeks of what the students will be doing.

We had a meeting with our hosts at Accenture today. I bet you don’t know what Accenture does. I know I didn’t until today, when a twenty-something (that’s the term he started using when some of the new employees were younger than his tenure) year veteran at Accenture told me about some of their projects. Sufficed to say, they’re everywhere. Remember way back in the eighties, there were those really kind of unnerving commercials “We’re Beatrice” (example), and we all thought “Who’s Beatrice?” It’s kind of like that, but not so unnerving. They work as consultants for (at least) all the Fortune 1000 (not a typo). So, if a grocery chain wants to do some big tech project, like those hand held scanners for shoppers some stores have, they call Accenture to help them. (I don’t know that Accenture actually did that, but from some of the other projects he described, that would be exactly the type of thing that they’d do). We don’t know the name so well because “Buy’N’Large announces that they hired consultants to make these nifty new scanners” doesn’t sound as good as “Buy’N’Large announces their nifty new scanners”.

I hate to disparage my new classroom at EHHS, even though my view improved from a close up of view of the brick side of the old LMC to a grand panorama of the VFW, the Peacemaker (an Apache helicopter) and the surrounding neighborhood, but my view this summer will be incredible: Our classroom is on the 36th floor facing north looking out over all of North Chicago and the lake. I’ll post pictures when we get in the classroom full time on Thursday.

I’m taking my own advice and heading to bed early tonight.