August 30, 2013

No exercising was had this morning. I probably fell asleep before 10:30PM last night and I woke up at 5:55AM when my alarm went off, wide awake and ready for the day, but I just couldn't convince myself to sit up. So I went back to sleep until 7:00AM. I suck.

At school today I added a printer onto one of the resource teacher's laptop because for some reason she doesn't have the sufficient permissions to add a printer. It seems like somehow she got lumped in with the students because she doesn't even have the control panel. When I logged in to add the printer I messed around with the group policy and tried to give her access to the control panel and the ability to add a printer but it didn't work so I think it is something that will have to be changed further up the chain.

The librarian and I discovered that at least one of the students doesn't seem to exist. She hasn't been able to log into the computers in the lab and when we checked today we couldn't find her in the system. But she is in Infinite Campus because she is on the roster I have, with her student number, and that was printed from Infinite Campus. She has a brother but I can't remember if he has logged in or not so I should probably check on that to see if maybe they both weren't entered. On Monday I also need to see if she is able to take the MAP tests, which she should because those rosters are downloaded from Infinite Campus, but it won't hurt to check.

Because we were messing around with that I was a little bit late getting into the lunchroom and ended up serving cheese and salsa instead of wiping tables and opening milk cartons. The cheese sauce was only for the burritos but the salsa was for both the burritos and the tacos. I was unaware of the cheese restriction at first so one kid got away with it in his tacos but everyone else was denied. Which kind of sucked because there was plenty of cheese and only a handful of kids wanted it in their tacos. Whatever. Thanks to serving, I got out of the lunchroom by 12:20PM instead of sometime after 12:30PM, and I didn't have a class in the lab so I was able to eat my lunch pretty early compared to the last few days. That was nice.

I helped out with second grade reading groups today. There were parent volunteers so I just tagged on with one of them which ended up working out pretty well. It is easier dealing with two or three kids at a time than it is trying to wrangle five. I was sitting next to one kid who kept coming up with excuses why he didn't want to write, the main one being the other kids making noises, which he interpreted as them making fun of him. I think the real reason for not wanting to write is that he is awful at it. I can say from experience that his writing skills are about on par with those of a kindergartner at the beginning of the year. He had a backward 's', even short words weren't spelled correctly (ice cream became 'is krem'), and complete sentences weren't even close to being an option. And I don't know if you can really determine anything from a kid's artistic ability but his was also on a kindergarten level. It was a kind of torture trying to get him to write a draw. For both of us. We ended on a good note though, because in between groups we talked about the LEGO Star Wars book he had and he was showing me his favorite characters.

In the lab today I came up with a new option for the commonly used shortcuts. At the moment I have them in a folder on the desktop because regular internet links seem to get deleted. At least the ones I put on. But, my typing practice link hasn't been deleted and I made that as a webpage in Word last year. So I'm thinking that maybe documents don't get deleted. So today I went to all the websites and got the main title graphic, put it in a webpage Word document, and turned them into hyperlinks. Then I went around a put that on all the computer desktops. The main goal behind this is to make it easier for the younger kids who struggle with double-clicking, especially when they are trying to pick something out of a list. With the new shortcuts page I made they will still need to double-click to get it open but then they just have to single-click on the picture of the website they want. If it doesn't get deleted over the weekend.

After work I decided to take a nap, which was a really good decision until I had to wake up to get ready for work. I do think it helped though because I am not incredibly tired at the moment. I'm still occasionally yawning and do feel tired but I don't feel like I'm about to pass out like I normally do on Friday night's at the theater.

I spent my night at the theater making decent progress on my cross stitch and reading more of Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of Nimh. I also looked into connecting an external source like a blu-ray player or computer to one of the projectors. At some point in the near future we are supposed to play some movie or short-film and the director or someone stopped by tonight to see what his options were in terms of playing the movie. I guess it will technically be the world premiere before it goes off to festivals but I obviously no nothing about the whole thing so I'm not really that excited. Anyway, it seems like the best bet will be a blu-ray player but he'll need to bring it in beforehand to make sure it will actually work. We have all the inputs for pretty much anything on one of the projectors but we have never tried using them before. Another projector has a DVD player attached to it with component cables but I was reading that newer blu-ray players don't allow HD content over component cables anymore. So hopefully he has an old blu-ray player or one with an HDMI output so we can hook it up to the other projector.

And I was completely wrong about that nap earlier. About thirty minutes after I wrote that, my day hit me like a ton of bricks and I was almost immediately, entirely exhausted. Friday is definitely my least favorite day of the week. Waking up super early, working eight hours at the school, taking a very short break, and then working seven or more hours at the theater is rough. I'm too old for that crap.

Despite that exhaustion I was feeling more awake when I left, which tends to be the case, and I ended up driving around town for about twenty minutes, taking the very scenic route home. The main reason for this is they were playing live sets on one of the EDM stations I listen to on XM and I was enjoying the set by Kill The Noise. But now I am going to go to bed because I have written enough and it is late and I am tired.