December 16, 2013

Today at work I put a little work into the storybooks but not a lot. I didn't even finish a page. Instead I worked on other stuff. I made a new lab schedule because people have been writing on the old one for weeks and it started to look kind of crappy. I lost my old design when my work computer was randomly reformatted so I had to make up a new one. The old one was in Word or Open Office but I made the new one in Excel because it was faster. I like the look of the old one better.

I also learned that in Publisher you can save files as jpegs. We're doing an SOS thing at school where a kid is assigned to a staff member. I got a kid and I have no idea what the whole thing means. The teacher who asked me to help out by emailing everyone a picture of their kid acted like I already knew all about it and when she emailed the school telling them to expect my email she didn't mention what exactly the SOS thing was. So I'm still in the dark. But today I used Publisher to add in the picture of the kid with their name, grade, and teacher below it, then saved it as a JPG because I figure that is the easiest format for people to open, and it keeps all the information in one place. Rather than typing the information in an email and then attaching a picture. After I got all the pictures made I inserted them into emails to each of the staff members involved, rather than attaching it in the email so no one should have to worry about opening attachments. We'll see if that works out.

This afternoon there was an orchestra recital. The orchestra is not very popular, with five sixth graders and one fifth grader. Last year there were five fifth graders and one sixth grader. The fifth grader is a beginner so she played basic songs along with one of the sixth graders, and then had to sit there while all the sixth graders played their songs. It had to be incredibly awkward to just sit there. Thankfully all the songs were really short so the whole thing only lasted about twenty minutes, but she still just had to sit their politely. The coolest part of the whole thing was that they played Jingle Bells and one other song and a good majority of the kids quietly sang along with them, with no prompting. It wasn't obnoxious or anything, just really nice. It kind of reminded me of a Peanuts moment.

Today I got a bag with some cookies and things from one of the second grade teachers and at the end of the day one of the first graders brought me a bag with some chocolate and a gift card to Starbucks. I also got chocolate from her last year. Her dad works for the district and I can't decide if they give Christmas bags to a lot of the staff because he knows the effort the staff puts in or if they are just really into Christmas. Either way it is pretty cool. One of the third grade teachers also gave me a pipe cleaner spider ornament. I believe it is based off a lucky German Christmas spider or something. They made them as a class and the ribbon she had to string through the body (which was a wooden bead) didn't fit very well with the pipe cleaner legs already through the bead. I made a bit of a crochet hook with a paperclip which she was able to push through the bead, snag the ribbon, and pull it back through. It was my MacGyver moment of the day.

After work I went to Hobby Lobby to check on yarn. They had the dark blue yarn I needed but the color was way off. I knew it varies with different lot numbers but this stuff wasn't even close. Well, it was close in that it was dark blue, but it was quite noticeably different. So I need to think about what I want to do. The trip wasn't a complete bust though because I got a sketch pad and some pencils for the new volunteer kid. His birthday is Thursday so I don't know if we'll have a visit but then there is Christmas. I usually get books for people but I know he is into drawing, at least he was, so maybe he'll get some use out of it. Also, when I went up to pay the lady at the register asked me in a very conspiratorial way if I wanted to use my coupon that I got on HobbyLobby.com on one of the items. I said yes, playing along. And it saved me four bucks. It turns out that I have the app on my phone (I wasn't sure if I had it installed on my new phone) so it wasn't really a bad thing, but it was pretty cool of her.

From Hobby Lobby I went to the cable place and got yet another DVR. This one looks completely different than the ones I have seen but I care more about it working than I do the looks. When I got home I plugged it in and it showed up on my TV but it was missing most of the channels and there wasn't any data showing in the guide. I ended up calling customer service about it and talked with a very nice lady and got it all sorted out. Turns out I basically just didn't wait long enough for everything to be set up. Normally I am more patient and probably would have figured out the fix on my own but I had a headache and I was tired of messing with DVRs. The good news is that I can now watch TV in HD on my TV. Hooray. The hardest part was actually trying to remember all the stuff I used to record on my old DVR. I probably should have written that down before I swapped it out with a new one.

A good chunk of my night was spent building an elliptical thing for my mom. It wasn't hard but it was a huge pain thanks to my headache and the amount of tape they used. So much tape. My theory is that whoever was in charge of packaging also has a bunch of stock in a tape company. It was ridiculous. But I got it all put together and the wiring worked and I only forgot four washers. Sadly they were the washers on the bottom of the foot things so it was a bitch getting those nuts off but I managed it. The major flaw in the instructions was putting the foot things on after the arm things that the foot things go on. It would have been much each to put the foot things on first when I could have done it in an easier position, rather than blindly without much room to maneuver. It appears to be a fairly solid piece of equipment so hopefully it holds up.

The rest of my night was spent figuring out what to record on my DVR, watching more of the livestream I recorded yesterday, and pretending I didn't have a headache. Now I am going to go to bed because I have wanted to do that for at least an hour.