I love living in the future. It's true that we don't hav personal jetpacks and the political landscape is some nightmare cross between 1984 and Handmaid's Tale, but I can talk to someone 7,000 miles away in real-time, via Google Hangouts.  Tell me that's not the most awesome thing!  

Yeah, so yesterday, I was able to spontaneously coordinate a chat with jiawen who is currently living in Taiwan.  It was her night time, my mid-morning.  It's really kind of amazing to think that I was able to sit on my sunporch and chat with her as though she were sitting right beside me instead of, almost literally, on the other side of the world.

I love technology.  

People who say that iThings and social media and tech are what's wrong with kids these days are full of crap.  There are downsides, of course, but I think the kinds of communities we can create vastly outweigh many of the other issues.

In completely different news, when I was making a quick grocery run with Mason after school, I got a call from my library schedule coordinator who asked if I could work at White Bear Lake today from 10 am to 2 pm. I really, really wanted to say 'no,' but, as you know, gentle reader, we're kind of strapped for cash at the moment, so I said 'yes.'  In a few minutes, I'm going to have to get up and do the dishes and get ready to go to work.  I worked last night, too, at the New Brighton branch.  I didn't mind that one so much because it was a super-short, three hour shift.  I was basically there to cover dinner breaks for people. New Brighton, when they're not being anal-retentive, can be a quiet, easy shift.  

Mason's been coming home at the usual time this past week. He's in the final push for his History Day project.  He's doing a documentary on the Kent State massacre.  It's been kind of a timely project, in a way, since he's been listening to news clips of college-age students shouting, "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" and I literally just heard a radio segment of the school safety walk-outs, where the high school-age kids were shouting, "Hey, hey, NRA! How many kids did you kill today?"

The more things change, eh?

Okay, well, as much as I'd like to continue to sit with the cat on my lap, I need to get up and get things in some semblance of order so that we don't all come home to a messy house.


P.S. Skipped Wednesday reading because I have finished nothing again this week, though I read a hundred pages or so of at least one non-fiction book.