While I was in town for the week, I visited the high school, and A&J’s, the store I used to work at. Both places had said that they wanted me to visit when I got a chance, so I decided I’d visit.

The high school has changed a whole bunch. They remodeled the library over the summer, and now it’s a mostly finished ‘media center’. The contractors were supposed to have finished by the time school started, but today they were still finishing the trim on the display case outside the library. It looks very different. They re-did the hall along the library, too. They put in skylights, and extended it out towards the parking lot further. I was used to turning at the end of that hall to go to Mr. Johnson’s room, and now, although it’s still the last turn, it’s about 25 feet from the end of the hall. I was talking to the counselor, who’s office is also in that hall, and he said that he has missed the turn to his office several times due to the remodel. It’s like there should be another turn further down.
As part of the remodeled library, they knocked down the wall into the Journalism room, and made it part of the library, as a computer lab. The Journalism class is now held in RayJ’s old room, which was a computer lab. I stopped by the Journalism class to visit, which was an interesting experience. They are still getting the software up and running, and haven’t even installed the software for the yearbook yet. Lindsey, one of the yearbook editors, tells me that due to that, she’s been looking at a lot of the pictures taken, and doing a lot of homework from other classes. I also saw that they’re almost set to distribute their first issue of the newspaper, The Realm. (To be fair, part of the reason they’re so behind is that Mrs. Harmening, the Adviser for that class, came down with appendicitis, and has only been back for about two weeks.)

When I was in Journalism, I took a lot of pictures, and the editors seemed to like them, as they said so when they saw them, and quite a few of my pictures appeared in the yearbook. I just wish that they’d gotten their act together and done photo credits. As it was, no one got credit for taking any of the pictures. So I already feel left out. And then they ran an ad in the back of the yearbook, saying “Congratulations to the Journalism Seniors”, and I somehow got left out of that, too. I know it wasn’t intentional, but those two things kind of make me feel bad about this year’s yearbook. That and there’s a lot of mistakes, and such. Maybe it’s just something with being involved in the production–you know what the product could have been, and are disappointed in whatever it turns out to be.

This post has gotten longer than I’d planned, and I still haven’t talked about my visit to A&J, but I’ll do that later. I may post again later tonight, there’s an issue that’s bugging me. We’ll see if this turns into a post, or just a draft.

–Nathan