This educator, former educator, independent school professional, is tired.

This is our final week of school for the 2025–26 school year, and the calendar has been relentless. AP exams. Final exams. Awards ceremonies. Matriculation events. Kindergarten plays. Tomorrow brings the final two major events: Baccalaureate at ten in the morning and commencement at seven in the evening.

It has been an exhausting week.

I’m burning on fumes.

There’s a lot being asked right now, and there isn’t much leftover capacity to do it all. My associate is oversubscribed too. That’s just the ebb and flow of the school year in independent schools, especially in May, but understanding that doesn’t make it easier to carry.

I know things will slow down drastically after this weekend, but the last three weeks, leading into a nonstop week of events, wear on you.

I often think about performers who do extended tours and what their lives must feel like. Always moving. Always around people. Always “on.”

It takes a different type of person, I suppose.

I’m a little too introverted to enjoy all of it.

Even one week of this kind of constant engagement at school is exhausting to me. And yet, there’s also a part of me that genuinely appreciates the pomp and circumstance. As progressive as I can be in many areas of life, I still love certain traditions. Formal events. Ceremonies. Rituals that mark transition and accomplishment.

Today we collected the MacBooks from our graduating class.

Well, almost all of them.

Five are still out in the wild somewhere, and two are currently unaccounted for, but honestly, those are pretty good numbers.

This graduating class was the first group to receive these machines four years ago, and I am genuinely surprised by how well they held up. Some came back with barely any cosmetic wear at all. Others looked like they had lost a fistfight with a four wheeler.

But every single one of them still worked.

Most even came back with undamaged screens. I think only two or three require repairs before they can be redeployed.

Phenomenal.

I’ve enjoyed The M1 MacBook Air, it has excelled in the classroom environment. Especially when paired with a warranty that actually covers the full lifecycle of the deployment. For us, that means four years, with no service fees during that period.

These aren’t disposable devices. They still have years of useful life ahead of them. We’ll repurpose them into classroom carts and computer labs.

it’s Just such a robust platform.

The fact that every one of them is still comfortably running the latest operating system without hesitation is honestly pretty remarkable.

I’ll need to do a deeper dive into the numbers at some point. We haven’t even gotten through the iPad returns yet, though encouragingly, I haven’t had teachers report any missing devices. Maybe next week I’ll finally have time to sit down and look at the four year trajectory of those as well.

I suspect they’re holding up better than most would expect.

to further complicate this week, At home, we’ve been having foundation work done.

It’s an extraordinary amount of money, which is difficult to swallow, but it was desperately needed. The house had become noticeably worse over the last six months. The crew finished today, and I can already see improvement.

We’ll probably have them come back and continue adjusting things over time as the house settles, but this may have been the intervention the house needed.

I keep thinking about scale and value.

If someone owned a four hundred dollar handbag and needed a twenty dollar seam repair to keep it functional, nobody would question making that repair.

But when the numbers get larger with houses, suddenly it feels existential.

And now, as I finish writing this, I’m sitting in a power outage.

A minor thunderstorm rolled through Cloverdale, and several hundred people immediately lost power because apparently the electrical infrastructure in this historic neighborhood is held together with dental floss and prayer.

Lately, a strong gust of wind has seemed sufficient to take portions of the neighborhood offline.

I pine for buried infrastructure.

Anyway. Onward into tomorrow.

Let’s see how the rest of this week plays out.