October 28, 2013

I exercised this morning. No one is shocked more than me.

When I got to work I hit the ground running by fixing the library printer (with a whole bunch of luck) and I also got the library scanner working. When I made it to the lab and logged into my computer I discovered it had once again been reset. Ridiculous. I'm beginning to wonder if I just need to start expecting my computer to get wiped every weekend. I lost the spreadsheet I made for one of the fourth grade teachers for her survey and she had more data for me to add, but luckily I was able to download the copy I had sent her last week.

I helped out with kindergarten reading centers this morning for the first time this year. It's like riding a bike. I had the listening center where the kids listened to a story and then drew pictures of their favorite foods. Luckily my group was pretty good and they all stayed on task. For the most part.

I had downtime and nothing to do after that so I copied and cut stuff for one resource teacher and cut out more game stuff for another resource teacher. I remembered to bring my scissors today which saved my thumb quite a bit of pain.

Second grade reading groups went relatively well. My first group was the more advanced group so they read the story individually and then worked on the plot worksheet. I helped them out on that a little bit. My second group was one of the lower groups so I read the story to them and had them follow along with their finger in their own books. Some of them had a harder time staying on task but it didn't go too bad when we got to the worksheet.

This afternoon we had our character assembly for the month, which involved the staff flash mob. I did not participate in the dancing but I did record it on my phone. Most of it anyway. My phone shut off twice during the middle of it so I missed out on the part where some of the teachers came down the middle aisle holding signs, but I got the beginning and end. Better than nothing.

After the assembly I helped decorate one of the second grade doors. I guess there is a door decorating contest coming up and the teacher needed help. And I had nothing to do. So I cut out a bunch of letters with the stamp press thing, taped a giant sheet of purple paper to the door, and then taped up the letters I had cut out, in the form of words. It was a good way to make more of my afternoon go by.

On my way home from work I stopped at the bank to deposit a check and then I went to Target. I had an urge for cereal and a determination to actually finish a carton of almond milk. I came close with the last one but didn't quite make it. My plan this time is to change up the cereal. I still have Golden Grahams from last time and today I bought Honey Bunches Of Oats and Corn Flakes. So hopefully I won't lose interest before I empty the carton. I also got trail mix, frozen vegetarian dinners (including one with pasta, broccoli, and asparagus that I had over the weekend and was really good), and some fruit.

I spent pretty much my whole night editing the video of the flash mob. It would have been so much easier if my phone hadn't cut out on me but I had to work with what I had. I ended up cutting out the two little chunks in the middle and sticking with the beginning and end sections. The final product doesn't really look that impressive but there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes. First I had to sync the video and audio because it was slightly off for some reason. And I had to do that on both sections. Then I couldn't really hear the song (Just The Way You Are by Bruno Mars) so I imported the song as an audio track. And then had to sync that up for both sections, which was really tricky because I could barely hear the song in the video. But I think I got pretty close. Next I joined the two clips with fade-ins and fade-outs so it wasn't too jarring. And lastly I added a fade-in to the beginning and fade-outs for the different tracks at the end.

After rendering it I realized I forgot to turn down the original video sound and all the background noise (a gym full of kids) really distracted from the song. And at the end I cut the song off in the middle of a word, which sounded weird. So I went back and lowered the video volume and ran into a wall when trying to fix the music. I tried to add on a bit to the trimmed end, and I could join them together without it being obvious, but I couldn't figure out how to make the sound fade evenly across both joined sections. I am sure there is a really easy way to accomplish this but I have very little editing experience, considering video editing is just another one of my ephemeral hobbies. So I ended up importing the song as a new track, trimming it down to where I wanted, zooming in really close so I could line it up with the track I had already synced using the little spikes in the song, deleting the original song section, and then moving the new one into place. And then re-rendering it. But that render came out weird so I had to render it again. I had a few renders freeze and the program froze a couple times, and I probably rendered a full version at least four or five times. So it probably shouldn't have taken all night but it did. I'm just glad the video wasn't any longer. I do wish my phone hadn't crapped out twice in the middle of the video but the final product isn't too bad.

And now it is way too late for me to still be up. Six o'clock will be coming up before I know it.