Lumber Options Quotes

For a while I considered dropping out of Barnard to help. It felt unbearably selfish, just downright wrong, to be indulging myself with an education in the liberal arts at a fancy private college while Mom and Dad were on the streets. But Lori convinced me that dropping out was a lamebrained idea. It wouldn’t do any good, she said, and besides, dropping out would break Dad’s heart. He was immensely proud that he had a daughter in college, and an Ivy League college at that. Every time he met someone new, he managed to work it into the first few minutes of conversation. Mom and Dad, Brian pointed out, had options. They could move back to West Virginia or Phoenix. Mom could work. And she was not destitute. She had her collection of antique Indian jewelry, which she kept in a self-storage locker. There was the two-carat diamond ring that Brian and I had found under the rotten lumber back in Welch; she wore it even when sleeping on the street. She still owned property in Phoenix. And she had the land in Texas, the source of her oil-lease royalties.

I visited McBeth’s eleventh and twelfth grade classes, which were both working on prototypes for projects they had approached through design thinking. One was a revitalization scheme for Toronto’s waterfront, and the other was creating an indoor agriculture system. The students were producing all sorts of creative solutions, from elaborate models of their waterfront developments to fish farms where the fish’s own waste would fertilize the plants that cleaned the water. It was loud, messy work. At one point, three girls were hand-sawing a piece of lumber balanced between two desks, and sawdust quickly coated their preppy uniforms and hair. With a few exceptions, all the students said they preferred to work without computers on this type of project. They felt they had more creative freedom, were less distracted, could be more accurate to their vision, and gained a better understanding of the scale and materials involved. It also seemed more fun. The groups building models and contraptions around the room were laughing and joking as they glued and taped and cut and broke things. The only ones working on computers were two girls who gave up on a model and decided to make an app instead. They sat side by side, quietly checking out the pricing options on various app-building websites, flipping over to Facebook whenever McBeth was out