October 11, 2013

This morning I drove over to my sister's house around seven o'clock to take a shower. Tis the season for the mornings to get darker and in this dim light I drove by several kids walking to bus stops. I do not miss those days. It sucked being up that early anyway but then having to go wait for a bus. And it only gets worse during the winter when it is really dark and really cold.

As for the shower, I forgot my shampoo so I spent the first part of my day faintly catching the scent of Herbal Essence following me around.

I only had two classes in the lab today so things were pretty laid back, but I did manage to be fairly productive. One of the second grade teachers had me tape up her class project about the life cycle of the caterpillar in the hallway. I didn't reinvent the wheel or anything but it didn't look too bad. Shortly after that I helped with reading groups. One of the paras was gone so it was just me, a parent, and the teacher. Thankfully my group just had to cut words out and glue them into columns. And then I dodged the annoying group because the teacher decided not to rotate groups.

In the afternoon I finished gluing the cards for the second grade teacher. I'm not sure how long they will last but I did my best. She might end up having to make a new set sooner than she would like. I also made progress on the SMART board in the SPED room. I found out which piece of software I needed to download and it is apparently the full version, not just a 30-day trial. We'll see in thirty days. I also figured out how to get around the error I was getting on the laptop yesterday that was preventing me from installing the software, about the H: drive being invalid. There was a line to type into the command prompt that would map the drive to the C: drive or something, long enough for the download to go through. I found it on a forum that was talking about getting the error when trying to update software but I tried it out and it worked. Success. Now both SPED teachers have the software on their laptops and it appears to work.

I spent the rest of my afternoon continuing to clean the computer in the lap. I made it through eighteen before running out of canned air. I was knee-deep in the tower of number seventeen when one of the tech guys walked in, thankfully the one I graduated with. I had submitted a couple trouble tickets on behalf of other people but he just looked at my name rather than the location on the ticket so he thought it was lab stuff. When he walked in he informed me that I wasn't ever supposed to open the towers and I was lucky that it wasn't one of the other tech guys. Whoops. But they're dirty as hell and I'm almost done so if I can get more canned air I'm going to finish. I didn't tell him that though. I also explained the tickets and he told me that technically he could cancel both tickets because the people they were for hadn't filled them out. I think that is kind of bullshit considering I marked that one was in the library and the other was in a specific classroom, but whatever. In the future I can just have people log into the trouble ticket site and I can fill it out under their name. When I ran out of canned air and couldn't continue cleaning out the towers, I switched to dusting off the outside of everything and cleaning the monitors. At least on the outside everything looks a little better.

When I got home I passed two phone company vans, there was a truck with an empty trailer on the street, and there were two plumber vans in the driveway. So they obviously didn't get finished while I was at work. It turns out that the phone company guys were leaving out house because the backhoe hit a phone line and they had to wait three hours for the phone company to show up, only to find out the lines were dead old lines. And not surprisingly the project ended up being a little less than straight forward. Everyone thought the pipe was in the big side of the back yard but it ended up being on the small side, which meant they had to take apart two fences to get the backhoe where they needed it, instead of just the one. And then they dug a twelve foot hole without finding the problem. At some point the backhoe reached its limit and they had to switch to digging the hole by hand. By the time they called it quits for the day they were fairly confident the problem was occurring right at the connection between our pipe and the city pipe, and it was completely blocked off. Sweet. This means that we are technically still without water but not really. One of the guys said we could still take showers because the water would just go into the hole and the dirt would soak it up. He also said we could use the toilets, and the same thing would happen, and he said not to worry because they had seen everything, but that still sounds pretty gross to me. And kind of disrespectful because they are still going to be down in that hole working. So in my opinion the toilets are still off limits.

I brought my mandolin to work and it turns out it is just like riding a bike. Eventually. It took me a bit to remember the only song I ever knew, but with a lot of trial and error I got it figured out. I just can't remember the name of it. Something about a washer woman, maybe? Irish Washer Woman sounds like a thing. I don't know. I do know that my fingers are way out of shape. Especially my pinky. Not to mention the lack of calluses on my fingers. It has been at least a couple years since I've played the mandolin, maybe even three or four, and it has been almost as long since I've played guitar or bass. So my fingers kind of suck at the moment. I should work on that.

I got off early because they were cutting hours again. Not a problem with me because I kind of feel like crap. Or at least on the verge of feeling like crap. There is a slight bit of light-headedness, my stomach still hates food, and I ache a little. I just want to go to bed and wake up feeling better.