On Thursday afternoon, we were treated to a bit of a serenade down our humble little street. The teachers, administrators and staff at Amelia’s elementary school planned a parade to drive by homes in ours and surrounding neighborhoods to wave and say hello (at a safe distance) to the kids and families they miss so much.
Our local school is great, and we are very fond of everyone we’ve interacted with there. Amelia loves her teachers, and while she gets to see her on Zoom most every day, that of course isn’t quite the same. So this was a pretty exciting prospect for her and for all of us.
First of all, big points to the school for punctuality, because the parade was scheduled to begin at 2pm and I think we heard the police escort at 1:58. I guess maybe they were running on Lombardi Time.
NOTE: For any non-Green Bay Packers fans reading this, Vince Lombardi famously expected his players and coaches to show up early. So if he said a meeting was a 9am, it was actually at 8:45 and you were late if you showed up at 9. For this, and a multitude of other other reasons that include lack of coordination, strength, speed, low pain tolerance and will, I would have been a terrible, terrible Lombardi-era Green Bay Packer.
So we ran outside in time to get to waving. I jumped off a webinar to be part of it, and I have to say I was very glad I did. This all might seem like a small thing, but you could feel the joy and emotion from everyone as this parade moved on by. Amelia had an enormous grin on her face and loved telling us all about whatever teacher or staff just drove by. Erin and I also got big smiles and lots of warm fuzzies waving to the people that we used to see just about every day.
That was a welcome break in the monotony. Even Henry really got into it and kept asking if we could have another parade tomorrow.
After that, it was back to a web meeting marathon for me. I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who can relate, but boy I’ve been spending a lot of time on Zoom and GoToMeeting these days. It’s great technology and a real lifesaver in the days we’re going through, but it can be exhausting, too. I think there are probably at least 3 webinars every week that I’d like to check out, but just don’t have the time because of all the other webinars I’m on or giving.
Thursday, I had to moderate a webinar from 11-noon, and then was part of a student architecture review that was set from 12:30 to 5:30. That’s a lot of screen time.
But the webinar went well, and the student architecture review was really cool. It was a design studio at CU Denver that my association helps support, and the students worked in teams of two to develop a concept design for a Tesla charging station way out in the middle of nowhere, Utah. The idea was that since it often takes a couple hours to charge a car, the place would have to also offer things for travelers to do, dining, amenities, etc.
There were some really cool and thoughtful designs. Many employed innovative sustainability and reusability strategies, and one utilized a really cool modular concept where basically the entire structure is built from 3 styles of LEGO-like pieces that can be put together in different configurations.
Fortunately, the student teams each ran efficiently and nicely ahead of schedule so we wrapped up early. These kinds of things are the parts of my job I enjoy the most. It’s really intriguing to see what young designers come up with before realities like budgets, schedules and the laws of physics weigh down on them too much.
But seriously, it also gives me a lot of hope because I see really thoughtful, creative solutions to difficult problems. Heaven knows, the coming generations are going to have no shortage of difficult problems to deal with, and it’s inspiring to see that spark to show humanity has a shot at tackling them.
