The falling wall

There have been a few adventures in my life in the past few days. Let's start with yesterday

     We had our district conference as I mentioned in my previous post. Well, in my last session of the morning (around 11:40am) the lights suddenly went out! We waited a couple of minutes to see if they would come back on but they didn't. I decided to find my husband and have lunch since no electricity = no hot food very quickly. We grabbed some food from the cafeteria and headed back to his room to eat since it's on a corner and has multiple windows. When we arrived at his room we saw exactly what happened.
     A little backstory first: There are electrical wires & poles that go through the edge of our parking lot. The wires hang oddly low; I would say about 10 ft. from the ground. There have been a couple of times when the soda truck for the vending machines has tried to turn around and has pulled one of the wires down. It results in one wing of the school losing electricity. Well, it seems that one of the vendors had a truck that tried to turn around but it yanked on nearly all of the electric wires. Now we have really low hanging wires but at least the school has electricity back.

Did I mention that it had been raining?

Today we mostly met with our departments and teams. We also talked about our LMS (Learner Management System). An LMS is software for creating and sending electronic assignments and such. Think of Facebook but for a school. When my husband and I came home for lunch we looked outside at our backyard. You see, we live on a hill and have started construction on a large retaining wall made of big blocks of limestone. Each block weighs about 1.5 tons. Construction had to be paused a couple of weeks ago for a couple of reasons I'd rather not go into. When it was paused, the workers had dug out near the base of the wall to work on the drainage system. Unfortunately they did not re-bury the base of the wall. Because it has been raining for at least 5 days, the wall is now starting to tilt. This is a big problem. If those blocks fall then the filler stones behind it are going to fall out. I have no clue how we would put the stones and the blocks back. We have contacted the construction crew and hopefully they will be able to solve this problem because the rain isn't due to stop for another week.

This is where construction halted. The bottom row of blocks was originally half buried.

The good news is that I am getting along well with my new team at school. The teachers who taught Algebra I last year saved everything! That means I have lots of resources, a pacing calendar, etc. I am very thankful for all of the work they did!

-Clare G. S.

P.S. - I walked in the rain today because I was determined to get at least a little exercise. YAY!