Letter from the Editor.

"Please stop your work, put your pencils down, and place your answer sheets inside your test books. We will now be taking a ten-minute break."

That's just a small sample of the play I was in this weekend. It's kind of a 5-hour experimental play called "SAT." That's right, I proctored the SAT last weekend. Nothing I love better than dipping my toes back in the standardized testing world. College Board, who runs the SAT, even brought their processes into the 21st century this year by allowing me to check in students ~*digitally*~. It was exhilarating.

I said "students" but what I really meant was "student." For the first time in my six or seven years of proctoring the SAT, I was in the charge of the room for students with special accommodations and I just had one student in there so I didn't even have to worry about peer-to-peer cheating!

I took the opportunity to finish my book on the history of timekeeping. It was two weeks overdue at the library...if you believe in the concept of weeks, I guess.

Speaking of time, daylight saving time ended. Buh bye! I was very aware of the time change but didn't change any of my clocks that needed a manual adjustment, so I did show up an hour early to something on Sunday evening. Boy was I confused!

Anybody sit down an vote this past week? Do the ballot ballet? I totally did and, as usual, left it until Monday night. I do my best work with a tight deadline. I voted and I think I did okay. I suppose time will tell if I did okay voting. But I wish politicians could get a +/- score kind of like how athletes do to rate their impact during the game. Somebody start working on that.

River Watch: The Clackamas River is flooding. The Tualatin River is not.

Okay, now that the river watch portion of the newsletter is out of the way, we can talk about the good stuff. Like how I cracked a code at work this week! We have two file cabinets in my department that both lock with a three-number combination. One of the cabinets was locked on accident about two years ago and because the combinations pre-dated our department's existence, no one could open the cabinet.

A few weeks ago I decided if I tried 100 combinations a day, I could figure out the combination in 10 days or less. I ended up doing about 100 combinations a day because I would forget about the cabinet for a week at a time. This week, I started in on the 400s and, lo and behold, the combination was 402! I have since updated the combination so you all can't come over to my office and unlock our secret cabinet that was full of empty hanging file folders and flattened Chipotle bags.

Enough of file cabinet business. Let's get to the real updates. Other than updating my phone's operating system, I have one last piece of news.

I am moving!

That's right. I am moving myself right on down to Los Angeles. Ever heard of it? You can expect me to be leaving soon. I can guarantee no one will even miss me because I will be back in Portland regularly for my job that is still located in Portland!

I told my coworkers about the move and one of them said the nicest thing: "You're the least Los Angeles person I know."

But I'm warning you now, I could possibly get even more annoying, potentially intolerable, than I already am after steeping myself in the LA scene.

Ciao!


Rachel.