May 21, 2013

Working at an elementary school is like a PIXAR movie. It's made for kids but there are a lot of adult jokes.

I forgot to mention yesterday that one of the kindergarteners brought me a cookbook. It is a church thing but it is a really well constructed book and food is food. I'll need to try some of it this summer.

Also, the power went out briefly yesterday morning. Long enough to blow a breaker so half of the computers in the lab wouldn't turn on, and long enough to mess up the air conditioning so it was off for awhile. That made things a little warm.

And my sister returned a Bayside CD that I apparently let her borrow a year or two ago. I had completely forgotten about it and apparently she did too until she accidentally stumbled across it. Despite forgetting about its existence, I do remember most of the songs. And now I'm back up to having seven Bayside CDs.

And think that is everything I forgot from yesterday.

Today I got the last scores I needed for my note card labels so I was able to add those, do some final format editing, and then print off the labels. It took me a lot less time to affix all the labels to note cards than I thought it would. And not to toot my own horn but they came out looking pretty good. Hopefully the teachers will find them useful.

When I finished with that I continued working on my MAP spreadsheets and nearly finished that. And I started to archive some emails. Mainly just the ones where I had humorous exchanges with the principal or other teachers. Tomorrow I will probably save a few that are more useful to my work next year, like MAP-related stuff.

This morning the sixth graders put on a play about ancient civilizations that was written by two of the sixth graders. They had a couple microphones on stage but only a couple kids seemed to remember that so I couldn't hear a lot of the play, but it seemed to be educational, and funny at times.

This afternoon we had a tree planting ceremony for the retiring fifth grade teacher. It was a redbud tree and the fifth grade teacher had a long explanation for why he picked that tree which was pretty interesting. I couldn't hear all of it but it was something about how the redbud symbolized the beginning of spring and the indians on the prairie would use it as a sign for when the prairie needed to be burned, which would create new growth, which would attract the bison. At least I think that is what he was saying. Regardless, it was interesting. Most of the school was there and several of the teachers spoke about their favorite memories of the retiring teacher which was really touching. And it was a perfect day outside so that just added to it.

When that was over I took the camera from the librarian so I could get the pictures off of it and email them to her so she could pick out the ones she liked and send them to the retiring teacher. And then it was the end of the day. A very productive day at work.

After work I finally called Old Navy to start the exchange process on the hoodie I bought that was too long. And it was a very enjoyable phone call. It reminded me of the phone call I had when I needed to exchange my Land's End coat. All customer service experiences should be like this. Tomorrow I should be able to send back the too-long hoodie and hopefully the new one will be a good fit.

I also pulled the trigger and ordered a Nexus 7. It should be here Thursday. It'll be a little last day of school present to myself. I just hope I like it. My main goal for it is so I can write these journal entries while I'm at the theater. That is also why I got the keyboard/case to go with it. There is a chance I may come up with other uses for it, hopefully, but we'll see what's up when it gets here.

When I was done with all that stuff, I ate a couple carrots, eventually had dinner, and then did nothing of great consequence for the rest of the night. I did jump into a couple games of Battlefield 3 on PC and had my ass thoroughly handed to me. I got into a noob server, which turned out to be an ironic title because almost everyone else was a higher rank than I am on Xbox, and I have put 125 hours into my Xbox account. And both games were TDM, which I hate. I like objective games so I have a goal in mind and there is a chance at least some of the other team will be focused on the objective, which increases my chances of getting a kill. I did manage to get a handful of kills, several with a sniper rifle. I need to put some more time in to get more familiar with the controls. And probably rebind some of the keys. I kept meleeing when I wanted to throw a grenade. And the game would lag every few seconds, which lead to a death or two. But the graphics and animations looked good. So there's that.

Soon I am going to head over to the theater to get a trash bag of popcorn to take to school tomorrow. The last one of the year. I really just want to go to bed but the last movie doesn't start until 10:30PM. But soon I won't have to worry about waking up at 6:00AM every morning. So I can deal with staying up past my bedtime in order to get popcorn one more time.