Thursday, April 11, 2013

April 11, 2013


The old guy at book club last night was telling us how his parents had the only ballet bookstore in New York way back in the day. I am assuming it was a bookstore specializing in books about ballet. His mother was apparently very small and everyone assumed she used to be a ballet dancer, which she hadn't, but she didn't mention that fact and played it up for the customers. Also, because it was the only bookstore of its kind, when kids would come to New York to do ballet stuff they would eventually end up at this bookstore. And when their parents hadn't heard from them in awhile, they would end up writing this bookstore asking about their kids, and the old guys parents would basically be the go between, telling the kids they needed to check in with their parents.

Yesterday the first assessment of the day took forever for some kids to log in, today it was the second assessment. At least half the class had to try and log in more than once, some kids more than five times and on multiple computers. It seemed like maybe every other school in the state was trying to take the assessment at exactly the same time. Eventually everyone was able to take the assessment, even if some of them had to start half an hour late.

I have to collect the scratch paper after the assessments and “destroy” it for security reasons and during the second assessment the teacher came up and handed me a piece of scratch paper and said “Here are all the answers.” I mentioned that I would go sell them on the black market and she replied “Probably not from that one.” Later she handed me another piece and said “Now this one you can sell, it has a lot of right answers on it. You need to cut me in for half.”

We had another assembly today, this one was the second grade classes singing and doing little skits. I think the whole thing was called School Days, I didn't get a program, but it was pretty good. The first song sounded very old-timey to me and it just seemed like it would be a musical interlude in a movie from the 1930s. I couldn't get Laurel And Hardy out of my head. Then there were the occasional hip-hop songs which involved attempts at choreographed dancing. It was so epic. Not a single kid was in time to the music or to anyone else. They were all definitely dancing to the beat of their own drummer. And several kids were really getting into it. I loved it. After the first dance number I turned to my para friend and told her that second graders dancing was my new favorite thing. After the assembly my para friend and I put away chairs but we actually got a lot of help with it today. We decided that maybe we have just been setting such a good example that other people are wanting to join in the fun.

My sister recently bought a Cross Canadian Ragweed USB-bracelet that was supposed to come loaded with a bunch of music. Instead it came broken. Whenever she plugged it in, it would ask her to reformat it, which would delete anything that was on there, if there actually was anything on it. So she asked me to check it out. I downloaded a file recovery program and was able to get a bunch of stuff off of it, including 30 songs. The strange thing was that after I got everything off and reformatted the bracelet, I couldn't get all the stuff back onto the bracelet. There wasn't enough room. It was like that triangle that when you cut it up into pieces and rearrange them you end up with a triangle that has the same dimensions on the outside but there is a hole in the middle. Except kind of the opposite of that because I took a bunch of stuff out but couldn't get it all back in. So maybe like when you take something apart and end up with an extra screw? Yeah, that analogy makes more sense. Anyway, the point is I was able to get the music off of it. I'm not sure what all the other stuff was but hopefully it wasn't important. But if it is I still have it backed-up on my computer.

Tonight I had the visit with the new volunteer kid. It was a pretty good forty-five minute visit. I was a little worried it wouldn't happen because when I called the foster dad he was over here but said a visit would be fine. So I crossed my fingers and headed out on my thirty minute trip in the hopes that the kid would get the message and have the time or interest to hang out. But he did so it was all good.

When we got in the car I asked him how he was doing and he said “excellente”. I then asked him how school was going and he said he had just gotten a 'C' on his English test. I said maybe it was because he was speaking in Spanish. Classic me. Another zinger. For the rest of the visit we continued talking about school stuff. His English test had been over To Kill A Mockingbird which is a book I didn't read until late in college or maybe even after, but it is one of my favorite books. I really related to Atticus Finch. I actually need to read that book again. I could definitely see it as a once-a-year kind of book.

On the topic of the kid. I got on the Jostens website today so I could recreate his class ring. My supervisor got the money for it but the order form he gave me seemed like the ring was a lot more expensive than I remembered. So I got on and entered everything just how he had it until I got to the type of metal. I was thinking White Lustrium because that is what I got and it is the cheapest. It looks good and I think it is more than enough for a ring most people don't wear for too long. So I left that option on White Lustrium, which was the default, but when I tried to move onto the next question, a window popped up asking if I wanted to upgrade the metal type to Silver Elite for only $144. Only. By default that option was picked so if you clicked to go on, the metal type would be switched to Silver Elite. So kind of a tricky way to get people to spend more money, even unintentionally. With the Silver Elite the ring came out to just over $400 before tax. With White Lustrium it came out to under $265 before tax. I emailed my supervisor about all this and my recommendation was White Lustrium but we'll see what she thinks.

And on that note, I'm going to almost go to bed. I need to edit my recording of my day and then go to bed. I am tired. So I think I will edit my recording tomorrow.

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