January 30, 2014

New day, same old thing. More MAP testing at work. Today was the last day with scheduled tests but there are still a handful of kids that need to take tests tomorrow. And if they don't, oh well, they won't have scores for the Winter round of MAP testing.

When I wasn't testing (which felt rare today), I worked on storybooks, had a couple classes in the lab, and went to the first grade assembly for their Kansas Day performance. There was a little bit of choreography so it was worth it.

This afternoon I had a few fifth graders come to the lab to work on papers about the history of archery. I'm assuming they got in trouble during PE, where they are currently doing archery stuff, because they were spending their PE time researching and writing these papers and they were assigned by the principal. The principal emailed me beforehand and told me to keep them separated in the lab and it was kind of funny when they came in and tried to convince me that the principal said they were supposed to work together. Two of them used the internet and the other one used an almanac. The one with the book was actually done writing his rough draft first. Take that internet. One of the other kids thought, instead of 'bow and arrows' that it was 'bowing arrows'. And interesting take. They were in the lab for over an hour, made decent progress, and weren't too annoying. They were a little worked up when they first came in and the lab was empty but they settled down once the second grade class came in.

Yesterday Chipotle night was missed due to my brother's birthday. So I decided to go there tonight. And surprisingly, my mom and sister both wanted stuff, so it was an actual Chipotle night. Not just me eating half a burrito while they eat whatever else. I even had time to show some YouTube videos before going to see the new volunteer kid.

It was probably one of the better visits in awhile. It lasted about an hour and ten minutes and we sat and talked about testing in school and a lot about different books. It was pretty cool. The kid also got a job this week as a dishwasher. He's been looking for a job ever since he got to current placement so it nice that he was finally able to find something. Especially after all the crap he went through trying to get a job at Sonic, where he was hired but couldn't actually work because he couldn't get a picture ID.

My genealogy kit from National Geographic arrived today so I am going to try and do the cheek swabbing thing in the morning and get that sent off tomorrow afternoon after school. I'm kind of excited to see how that turns out. I have a vague idea of my ancestry but with both grandpas being adopted it is a bit limited.

All week I have been off a day. It has always felt a day later than it was. I think this is because of last week where we had Monday off. And every single day this week has felt off. I was convinced for the majority of yesterday that it was Thursday. And today really felt like a Friday. So tomorrow is really going to suck. At least I'll get some reading done at the theater. I just hope the weather doesn't get too crappy. It is supposed to snow possibly tonight and maybe do other stuff later. I'm obviously poorly informed but I remember hearing something about something.

January 29, 2014

I'm incredibly tired right now so this entry will probably be slightly truncated. Just saying.

The second grade spelling words this week are homophones (ex. Their, there, they're, would, wood, to, too, two) and that means I need to provide sentences so the kid knows which version of the word I am talking about. I learned this when I was handed the list so I didn't really have any time to think up good sentences. I was doing fairly well until I got to 'two'. I started off very confidently but then what I said hit my ears and I tried to save it. “I have two balls... in the batting cage.” Yeah. The sentence doesn't even make sense. I think I got away with it but I got lucky. I'll have to do better on Friday.

There were two more MAP tests today. The first went on for two hours this morning and it felt like at least eight. The other test this afternoon went faster. Mostly because first graders tend to race through the test. One kid actually had to redo the second part because he finished 35 questions in under four minutes. I'm glad they added that feature in this year but they need to up the time a little bit. I think now it is at five minutes. That comes out to less than ten seconds per question. Not enough time to answer most of the questions.

When I wasn't watching testers I was able to finish a storybook and start on another one. I'm down to only four left. So close. I haven't looked at them yet to see how much work needs to be done but I am hoping for not a lot. The one I just finished as fourteen pages plus the cover, and the one I just started is about half that, so it should go a little faster. Hopefully.

After work I went to Hobby Lobby and got frames for my Doctor Who prints. They look good and they were half price. When I got home I wrapped the books I got my brother for his birthday. I don't know if he ever reads the books he gets me but this time I put a twenty dollar bill in the back of both books, so even if he just flips through them he should at least find those, if not a good story.

A little bit later I went and picked my sister up and we headed down to the restaurant my brother picked for his birthday dinner. A steakhouse. At the last steak place we went to I was able to order several different sides and they put them all on one plate so I wasn't having to juggle a bunch of plates. At this place they had something called a Veg Plate, that was just the option to pick four sides. I went with green beans, rice, fresh vegetables, and french fries. They put it all on one plate but the only thing really on the plate were the fries, everything else was in a little cup. And, the best part, bacon on the green beans. I avoided the salad in the off chance that they put bacon on it (like at the one steakhouse I went to awhile ago) and then they put it on the green beans. I started to pick it out but then just gave them to my dad because the bacon was everywhere and the beans were kind of soupy so I might as well have been drinking bacon juice. Also, the fresh vegetables were somewhat overcooked broccoli and somewhat undercooked baby carrots. Needless to say, I've had better meals. The fries and rice were good and the rolls were really good. So there's that.

Ignoring the food, dinner was good. I talked to my brother about videos games, my dad about elephant teeth, my dad and sister about corporate business, and my dad and grandma about the book I read for book club, Orphan Train. It turns out there wasn't much of a story to my grandpa's and his sister's orphan train experience. She was three years old and my grandpa was three days old and they don't really know the history for why they were on the train. It is good that they were so young though because they were picked out and adopted for the fact that my great grandparents wanted children, not because they wanted someone for manual labor.

At one point during dinner, and this is apparently a thing, they turned up the music and all the waiters and waitresses in the place started dancing and kind of singing. Never have I seen so much energetic movement on people who's faces are dead. None of them were into it and it showed on their faces, but their bodies hadn't gotten the memo. There was one girl who had been in the middle of cleaning off a table so she did a miniature version of the dance while standing between two of the chairs at the table, looking less than thrilled. My dad had been in the bathroom when it started and as he walked by one of the waiters dancing in the aisle he asked him “I don't have to dance do I?” and the waiter replied “Tell me about it.”

When I got home I ate a little food to fill out my dinner a little, cleaned the frames for my Doctor Who prints and put the prints in the frames, clicked around the internet, and watched the best of Jimmy Fallon on SNL. I've been tired since this afternoon and I have a headache from having to talk over the music and background noise at dinner. So I'm going to go to bed and hope I wake up feeling rested.

January 28, 2014

I had a glass of orange juice with my breakfast trail mix and it was amazing. I forgot how good cold orange juice can be.

This morning was almost non-stop testing, from just before 9:00AM to noon, with a fifteen minute break thrown in the middle (thanks to a teacher thinking her test was at 10:30AM instead of 10:15AM). Three hours of staring at the back of kids' heads is rough. I'm not a fan. There were actually only two tests this morning but the first class didn't all finish so as the second test was wrapping up, kids from the first class started coming back in. There were also kids from another class that came in to finish tests during the first class's test. The lab was basically just a revolving door of test takers this morning.

In the afternoon I had a bit of a break from it with the two kindergarten classes but then I had kids back in to finish tests. Including the fifth grader who finally managed to finish today. It only took her three hours and seventeen seconds. It would have been about five minutes shy of the three hour market but she ended up taking a nap during the middle of the test this afternoon. She was the only one in the lab, sitting in the back row, and I got tired of standing there watching her stare into space, so I went back to my computer to work on storybooks. After a little while I stopped hearing the scratch of a pencil or the click of a mouse, and when I got up to check, she had fallen asleep. Whoops. But she finished, thank goodness.

After school I stopped a few places before going home. The first was the Post Office. And color me surprised, my missed package yesterday turned out to be my Doctor Who prints. I'm still trying to figure that out. I just got the email yesterday morning saying that they had gone in manually and found my payment, and shipped my order. But what I received obviously wasn't shipped yesterday. So did they actually know about my payment last month and ship the prints but not update the website? And did the email yesterday refer to updating the website and acknowledging the shipment of my prints (even though it specifically said they were shipped yesterday)? Or was the person who responded not aware that prints had already shipped and shipped another set? It's all very confusing. Not in a troubling sort of way because I have my prints so I don't really care. But I wouldn't object to a second set of free prints for all the confusion.

My second stop was to the bank to deposit a check I got for Christmas and just remembered the other day. And then I went to the store. I wanted to get another head of lettuce and I also got some lemons and a couple cans of soup for my mom because she is still sick. I found out when I got home that she had my sister go to the store earlier in the day and get her soup. So now she has a whole bunch of soup. Good thing that stuff lasts awhile. My sister also made some bread and brought it over because my mom wasn't a fan of the wheat break I bought yesterday. My sister included some honey and cinnamon butter she made. The combo of that and homemade bread is really good.

I continued my new thing of reading when I get home up until dinner, instead of getting on the computer. I'm still reading the latest issue of National Geographic and read an article by Garrison Keillor. He did a personal geography of his town, telling about the landmarks that have important personal significance to him, like the area on the river where he swam as a kid and where one of his friends drowned, or the apartment where is ex-wife lived and having to clean it out after she died, or the library he would go to instead of going to swimming lessons because they were done in the nude and he was shy. It was a really good article and incredibly personal and honest. That is the kind of writing I would like to do. It is kind of hard to be that honest in writing. It takes a lot of internal searching to reach the truth about certain events and not just the things we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better.

I spent most of my night getting into Ruby, the programming language. My book arrived today and I'm not too sure about it. Rather than teaching you to swim by starting out in the shallow end of the pool, it throws you into the middle of lake. There were a couple other books I had my eye on so I might think more about those. But I'll keep reading in the current one to see where it goes. All I know is that the beginning started with a lot of assumptions and I was confused. So I skipped that and worked through a tutorial online that made a lot more sense because it actually stepped through stuff, starting in the shallow end. I am liking the potential of Ruby so far. It is also fun writing code again. It'll be even cooler when it starts making more sense and I can come up with my own stuff, not just typing what a tutorial says. We'll see if I make it that far.

January 27, 2014

There were only two MAP tests today, one first thing in the morning and the other in the middle of the afternoon, but it felt like I was testing all day. Unless I put some effort into the thought, I would say I was testing all day. But I wasn't, there were some breaks. I got to help out with second grade reading groups for the first time in awhile. My first group was the listening center but the CD wasn't available so we sat on the carpet and the kids took turns reading. It could have gone better but it also could have gone way worse. I think it helped that the principal was in the room, only a few feet away at the time. My second group wasn't really a group. I just watched kids playing a game where they had to draw words from a pile, pronounce them, and then put a token on a game board depending on the type of word it was (ex. ir, er, ar, or , ur). I watched two kids and then a group of three. I've done it before and I enjoy it because a tiny group is easier to handle, and I like annoying the kids by asking them after every word if they know what the word means.

The afternoon MAP test was first grade and it was a bit rough. At least for a few of the kids. One kid was having a massive allergy/boredom attack so he was finding it hard to focus. One girl got caught up on how hard the test was and spent most of the time crying. She eventually finished. And then there was a kid, blissfully ignorant, answering maybe a three or four questions right out of the nearly forty questions in each part of the test. The teacher and I were standing behind him at the back of the room watching as he got question after question completely wrong. A lot of times you can see the thought process behind a wrong answer but with him there weren't any connections. And you would think that, even guessing randomly, he would get more right. But he didn't.

During that test I had three fourth graders come down to finish, and then a fifth grader. She ended up staying down there the rest of the afternoon and is still somewhere in the 30s, out of 53 questions. She took forever last time and that appears to just be her thing.

After work I went to Target. I planned on just getting bread and trail mix, because I have a very sad diet, but then I also picked up some saltines and Sprite for my mom because she's sick. And I got some orange juice because I have been in the mood for orange juice lately. I got on a kick several years ago where I was drinking a lot. To the point where my dad was worried I was going to hurt myself. I don't think I'll get to that point but I need to change things up every now and then. The only thing I really drink is water.

Last night I think, I decided that I need to read more. I get in at least twelve hours a week thanks to working at the theater Friday and Saturday, but I could be doing a lot better. Especially considering the number of books I want to read. And the number of books I haven't even heard of but probably want to read. So, the plan is to read when I get home for work, and go until dinner time. That's about an hour and a half, depending on the day. That's a decent amount and I can add in more if I read before bed or something. Today was the first attempt so I didn't turn my computer on when I went into my room, I sat down on my bed and opened up the latest issue of National Geographic that arrived in the mail today. I read all the random stuff in the beginning and then started reading about the human brain. One of the random bits was about elephant teeth. Humans have two sets, starting with baby teeth and then going into adult teeth. Elephants have six sets. They have two teeth on the bottom, two on top, and they start growing from the back of the mouth and move forward, until they get ground down and fall out, with the next teeth growing in behind them. They can reach the size of a phone book. When they're kids the teeth last about three years but as adults they last about ten years. But once they make it through the six sets of teeth, that's it. Apparently older elephants in captivity often die from starvation after they lose their teeth and are unable to chew. Asian elephants eat about 300 pounds of food a day and African elephants eat between 400 and 600 pounds of food a day. That is incredible.

Before Christmas I ordered some Doctor Who prints and the order showed up on my bank statement a few days later, but it didn't show up on the website. I little while ago I emailed them to find out what was up but never heard back. I emailed again last night and got a response this morning saying they never got the notification from PayPal but when they went in manually to check they did have the money so they updated my account. And they finally mailed my prints so I have that to look forward to in the next month or so (shipping from Europe). On a slightly unrelated note, I almost got two things in the mail today, not counting the National Geographic, which would technically make it almost three things. The thing I did get was the book my mom got me for Christmas, but a textbook was sent instead. After going around and around with them, the book arrived today. It looks a little beat up, and I think some of that is an intentional design choice, but I also think part of it is just a poorly handled book. Sometimes third-party Amazon sellers are garbage. The thing I didn't get in the mail today is a mystery. In it's place is a card saying they attempted delivery and that I can pick it up at the Post Office tomorrow, because I guess I need to be present to receive it. I've been trying to think back on anything I may have purchased recently that would come via USPS and require my presence, but nothing is coming to mind. The only thing are the Doctor Who prints, but it obviously can't be those. I'll have to wait until tomorrow.

January 26, 2014

Another typical Sunday. I watched YouTube videos and some DVRed stuff, played a little Battlefield 4, did laundry, played guitar, and some other stuff.

From reading Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore I was curious about the programming language Ruby so I went to Hastings to see if they had a book. On the way I stopped at my sister's to help her husband carry a giant fish tank into the house. It still had several inches of water in it so that was kind of a bitch, with stairs thrown in for good measure. I immediately wished I hadn't done so many pushups right before. But we managed it. At Hastings, I was not in the least surprised that they didn't have the book I was looking for. The books went from Python to SQL. No love for Ruby. I ended up ordering the book on Amazon so it should be here by Wednesday.

I checked out a few shows today that looked interesting when I saw commercials for them but hadn't gotten around to checking out. Those being: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Enlisted, and Chozen. And that is how I would rank them in order of quality. I really want to like Chozen because I like Bobby Moynihan but it just doesn't seem like something I can get into. Enlisted was good, not great, and it made me want to see more than the three episodes so far. I was surprised by how good Brooklyn Nine-Nine was. Also not great, but I was impressed. It has such a diverse cast of characters and somehow they manage to make it work. I like it.

Once again I was hit with the realization today that I can't bring myself to do anything that would advance my life. In any aspect of my life. I can't apply to graduate school even though I know that is what I want to do. I can't make new friends even though I want people to hang out with, people that are interested in the things I'm interested in. I have a few friends now, and we share interests, but they are all so different from me. I think really I just need friends that I can play video games with or talk about geeky things with. Or just hang out with to get me out of the house. Along the same lines, I can't talk to girls even though I know I want a girlfriend and eventually a wife and a family. I really enjoy my job at the school. For the first time ever I actually feel needed at a job and that I provide a valued service. But it is a job that pays crap. I have two college degrees and two jobs that don't require a college degree and pay just over minimum wage. My idea of feeling like an adult involves a job that actually pays money. And requires a college degree. Mainly because I spent five years getting a couple of them. So I need to go to graduate school so I can become a librarian, I need to make friends so I have people to hang out with, I need to talk to girls so I can increase my odds of finding a girlfriend, and I need to get a job (with that graduate degree hopefully) that I enjoy and pays grown-up money. All of these things, minus the job maybe, are fairly easy things to do. It doesn't take much to apply to graduate school, or talk to people, but I just can't do it. I will stare a wall for hours rather than making proactive moves toward the future that I desire. I don't really understand it. I spend so much time in my head but I still can't figure it out. It's like my feet are glued to the ground. I'm so tired of it. I want to move forward and I just can't. I know what needs to be done but I don't know what to do.

January 25, 2014

A boring day. I watched YouTube videos, played a little Battlefield 4, and took a nap. I only played a couple games of being an actual soldier in BF4 and kept getting my ass handed to me, so I switched to Commander mode and played a few more games that way. I earn points way faster as a commander. I can level up faster that way but not actually improve my skill at all, so there are pros and cons.

At work tonight I finished reading Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. I assumed that when I left off last night I was on the homestretch to a happy ending. I was wrong. Another tragedy was thrown in and it sucked. But there was a happy ending so there's that. It is hard to believe that orphan trains were an actual thing. Over 200,000 kids were shipped to the Midwest on orphan trains in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I also continued reading Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, knocking out about eighty pages. I am really liking it. The writing is funny and relatable, and I like the real life references. The main character in the story creates a digital representation of the bookstore using the Ruby programming language and now I want to look into that language. I have always been interested in programming and Ruby sounds interesting. A also learned that notes in the margin of a book or paper are called marginalia.

All night I have a pretty decent headache. Most notably when I do anything other than sit perfectly still with my eyes closed. So I'm going to go to bed now and hope I wake up without a headache. But I will end this entry with a few of my favorite quotes from tonight's reading of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.

"My limbic system has grown accustomed to a certain (very low) level of human (female) contact. With her standing right next to me, her elbow poking me just the tiniest bit, I basically feel drunk." (p.52)

"She's wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in it, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she's a cartoon character – all of which are appealing alternatives." (p.58)

"Now I've resigned myself to sitting at the front desk, but I can't stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages." (p.80)

January 24, 2014

The fifth grade glass that failed to show up to their test on Wednesday actually showed up for their test this morning. So that was a good start to the day. Except for actually having to stand there and watch them take the test. There is a kid in the class who has a pretty good sense of humor and at one point during the test he asked if I could pronounce a word for him so I looked and said "Quadrilateral... it's a thing." I added the last bit because he was looking at me like he wanted me to give him more a hint. And then he replied "Well, it apparently is a thing" and then he went back to trying to figure out the question. That definitely seems like one of those "had to be there" kind of things but it was pretty funny.

There weren't anymore scheduled tests today but I did have a fourth grader come in during my lunch to start a test. When I didn't have a test or a class in the lab I worked on storybooks. Slowly making progress. I took a break from that to go watch the school spelling bee. A few rounds into it I felt bad for the kids missing words but I also wanted it to be over with so I was conflicted. The best were the first graders because there were always after a taller kid so they would walk up to the microphone stand and slowly pull it all the way down to their face. And they had a tendency of running or skipping back to their seat after they spelled their word. Not surprisingly they were out pretty early and that is when the whole affair just got boring. I couldn't hear all the words because the acoustics weren't that great, but of the ones I could hear, I could spell all but three or four, and I guessed a couple of those correctly. So if I got lucky enough not to get one of those words, I totally could have one the grade school spelling bee.

After school I really wanted to take a nap but there really just isn't enough time. I usually get home between 4:20PM and 4:30PM, and then start figuring out dinner around 4:50PM so I can be eating by five o'clock and have enough time to change and get together everything I need for the theater. I could eat later but I don't like the feeling of eating and then running out the door. That timeframe does leave enough for a twenty minute nap, which would be good, but it takes at least five or ten minutes of laying there before I drift off and a ten minute nap is just sad. This all means I didn't get a nap.

The theater was uneventful. I spent the whole night in relative silence (projectors are noisy), reading Orphan Train. I made it within about forty pages of the end so I can finish that up tomorrow. I think I've made it to the happy ending portion of the book. Hopefully, anyway, because there was a lot of dark stuff in the hundred pages or so I read tonight. Thanks to the midnight show, and the two bastards that decided to go to it, I still have another hour to read but I need a break from the book.

I also fixed the 3D lens on one of the projectors. I fixed it a long time ago and it somehow held up this long, but today it became unscrewed. The last time I had to take the whole thing off completely and then use a plastic knife to hold the loose nut bit inside the lens housing in place while I screwed it onto the bit connected to the main projector lens. I tried to do the same thing tonight but couldn't get the lens off. Instead I got lucky and held it in just the right way to get it screwed back in place. It is definitely a flawed system because you can only spin it one way, to put the lens either in front of the regular lens or put it up for 2D movies. The second you turn it the other way, the whole thing unscrews, and you're screwed. But the 3D lens in powered and has a cord connected to it, so if you only spin it one way, that cord starts to get wrapped around the connecting piece. Because of this, you have to unplug the lens when you want to move it, and then plug it back in, and it is one of those round power plugs with a bunch of little pins that get bent easily. It's a pain in the butt. I fixed it, though. Again. And hopefully it will hold out for as long as it did last time. It'll probably be screwed up by next weekend.

January 21, 2014

Today was a long but productive day. I had some time before work so I went down to the second grade room and installed the state assessment software on the laptop cart in there. Fourteen or fifteen laptops maybe. Possibly more. I lost count. It's not a hard process (despite the apparent need for that meeting) but it takes awhile to pull all the laptops out and log into them and go through all the steps and then put everything away.

The first MAP test was uneventful. Just a bunch of kids, in a room, taking a test. When it was over I went down to the third grade room to start installing the state assessment software on those laptops. I got a few into the process when the third grade teacher came in (they had gone to the computer lab after the test) and told me there were a couple fourth graders wanting to finish a test. So I stopped what I was doing and went to go watch them test. Neither of them finished because they only had about fifteen minutes before lunch, and they're incredibly slow (or thorough) test takers. When they left I went back and finished installing the software on the third grade laptops. And then came back to the lab and emailed all the teachers to give me a heads-up if they wanted to send kids to the lab to finish tests so I would know to be in the lab and not off working on something else.

This afternoon there was another test. Uneventful except for the fact that the lab was really hot. It was blasting heat this morning and when I turned it down the heat went off but the air never came on. With the added head of twenty-seven computers the lab just got hotter and hotter. I propped the doors open with a couple reams of paper and told the secretaries. They got in contact with the maintenance guys, who were able to do something on their end, and the air came on, which was occasionally cold, but it wasn't enough to combat the heat in the lab. I had closed the doors at the beginning of the test but we ended up propping them open again and I left them like that for the rest of the day. Hopefully overnight everything will normalize. And not be freezing cold. Although I would prefer that over sweating.

Speaking of the reams of paper. I propped the doors open by putting the paper in the door jamb. Turns out they were right about head-level for a kindergartener because one of the really anyone kindergarteners walked into one of them. He exclaimed “Ow, who put that there?” And the kindergarten teacher replied “Maybe it was put there to test if you are paying attention.” A perfect response. And the kid obviously wasn't paying attention because he walked into a big ream of paper while he was concerned with something going on behind him.

The highlight of my day, only narrowly beating out the kindergartener, was the fifth grade teacher giving me an apology card she made for missing the MAP test yesterday. She thought it would be funny to kind of make it sound like it was her kids' fault so she had all of them sign it. It's pretty great. I think it's the only apology card I've ever received but it is definitely the best.

I was so exhausted after work. I think it was a combination of the long day and the hot computer lab and maybe a touch of sickness or allergies. Thankfully I was able to take a short nap before going to see the new volunteer kid. We sat at Sonic for about fifty minutes, randomly talking about stuff while he worked on his homework. Some of which was Physics. He was stumped on one question and I had no clue but I was able to ask the right questions to get him to notice the right stuff and think in the right way to figure it out. If that makes any sense.

And now I am going to go to bed because I am freaking tired. And tomorrow is going to be a long day. I need to quit the theater. Friday doubles suck big balls.

January 14, 2014

Today I was supposed to have three MAP tests. I discovered I only had two after logging all the kids in and then calling the teacher ten minutes after they were supposed to be in the lab and asking if they planned on joining me for their test. They did not. The teacher thought she had signed up for tomorrow morning. And we had an assembly this morning so if they had raced down they would have only had about ten minutes to test, which would have been ridiculous. So later in the day we decided on a new test time of Friday morning. This morning was just practice for me, because I need that.

At the assembly, the gym teacher's phone went off again. It feels like it goes off during every assembly. Today was the worst because he was sitting in the middle of the gym, along the side. His phone went off and he couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so he got up, walked to the middle aisle, walked all the way to the back of the gym, and didn't get it turned off until he was out of the gym. It was a bit ridiculous. After the assembly the librarian came up to me and said we need to have a tech. in-service and teach the gym teacher how to turn off his phone.

The two MAP tests that I had today went well. No one fell out of their chairs and almost everyone finished. I also had a group of fifth graders come back down to finish a test they started yesterday and they all managed to finish. One of them took I think somewhere over two hours last time so I was worried that was going to happen again but she managed to go a bit faster this time around. During one of the tests I looked up and my friend's sister was standing outside the lab with a friend, waving very enthusiastically. Apparently she's part of the group that comes to grade schools and talks about animals. When I was in grade school I always thought those people were adults. It turns out they are just high school students. So all this time they were just kids. When I was walking through the office later in the day one of the secretaries was telling me how excited my friend's sister had been when she came back through the office, telling the secretary she didn't know I worked at the school. They secretary thought it was hilarious.

This afternoon I did amazing things with video. At some point in the past the preschoolers put on a little play/recital thing and the principal recorded it on the librarian's iPad. She got two videos. The first was all good. The second one was also good but not all good because once downloaded to the computer, it was upside down. And not on purpose. The librarian also could get it to burn to a CD or a DVD. I came down to the library to take a look at things and made a little progress before having to take a break and go watch the fifth graders finish their test. And I had to take a quick break from that to go up and help a parent in the sixth grade room figure out a presentation website thing. My first question was wondering if the firewall had been taken down. She didn't know so I decided to try a different browser first and then we would try the firewall. Halfway through the new browser the sixth grade teacher came in from outside (where he was playing foursquare with his class and losing and feeling sad about that) and he had the insight that maybe it was the firewall. And it turned out to be that but I didn't mention that it was my first thought so he could have that victory.

Eventually I made it back to the library. I knew that VLC could rotate the video but I didn't know if it could save it so I did a bit of Googling and discovered that it could. It took me a couple attempts to get that right but eventually I got it transformed and converted so it would play right-side up in a player other than VLC. It still wasn't being recognized as a valid format for a DVD though. So I messed around with VLC some more and got the video converted to another file type, and was finally able to burn a DVD. It was a lot of work but I think it all worked out. At the beginning I was fairly certain I would have to take the files home and put it together in my video editing program but I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of things that could be done with VLC. It is much more versatile than I originally suspected, even though I've been using it for years.

Chipotle was good tonight but it felt like the rice was smaller. Not in amount but the size of the individual grains. It was very interesting. The burrito was fine though. I spent the rest of the night watching YouTube videos, playing Cook, Serve, Delicious, and playing a little guitar. Not a very exciting or productive night. I really need to figure out how to bump up the productivity of my evenings. So much time is going to waste.

Tomorrow it is supposed to be cold as hell outside. Which is a ridiculous phrase considering the most commonly held belief about the temperature in Hell but whatever. At least one nearby school is having a two hour delay because of how cold it is supposed to be in the morning. I would like a two hour delay. I'm not banking on it though.

January 21, 2014

I got so caught up in my complete sadness last night that I forgot to mention I spent a lot of time yesterday in a bit of a nostalgic music coma. I spent about two hours with my headphones on, eyes closed, rocking in my chair, and bobbing me head to all sorts of different stuff from my high school days. There is a lot of good music still being made but it will never be as good as the early 2000s. The memories just aren't there. All the nostalgia also lead to be getting out my guitar and messing around on that for a few hours for the first time in forever. Muscle memory is a wonderful thing and I was still able to remember some of the riffs I used to be able to play. Or can still play, I guess.

Work was pretty boring. It was good to be back but it was the same old thing. There were two MAP tests today and one of the classes only had a handful of people finish. So I'll be seeing them again. And not just for the second test. Watching kids test is still boring but a kid feel out of his chair during one of the tests so that added a bit of momentary excitement. Later in the day a kindergartener also fell out of his chair. That usually only happens about once a week so there must have been something in the air today.

When there wasn't anything going on in the lab I updated my MAP spreadsheet and worked on storybooks. I also listened to the latest episode of This American Life and it was really good. There was a story about a seven-year-old boy who became a vegetarian when he was three or four after finding out where meat actually comes from. He had a five year old brother who loved meat so it was a constant battle between the two of them. The older one would try to negotiate with the younger one to not eat meat, like offering to buy him toys if he didn't eat meat for two weeks. At one point the brother really wanted to eat the pepperoni pizza at school and when his mom asked how his brother would feel about that he said he would just lie to him.

The other interesting story was about an old guy who kept hearing the same hold song at several different doctors and he really liked it and he turned it into a bit of a mission to find out what it was called. They played a clip at one point of the guy asking to be put back on hold so he could listen to the music. His daughter-in-law was doing the story and she said the family initially tried to ignore the guys search but she eventually got on board with it. Somehow they figured out that all the doctors' offices used a Cisco phone system and the hold song that the guy liked was their default hold song. From there they were able to learn that the song was made the default by a guy and his friend had made the song when they were sixteen years old. When they grew up and the one guy was working at Cisco he called his friend up and said he could get the song in the system, kind of like an easter egg in a movie. The lady went to the guy and interviewed him and was able to get a high-quality version of the song to give to her father-in-law. And This American Life included it with the episode this week so I actually downloaded it and that is what I had going on a loop this afternoon while I was working on the computer. It was pretty relaxing. It would be nice if it were longer than five minutes but I still like it.

Tonight I didn't do a thing. Watched YouTube videos, played guitar, and listened to music. Now I'm going to go to bed. I didn't sleep very well last night. I slept through the night but it took forever to fall asleep and it wasn't very restful. I am hoping for a better result tonight. I have three MAP tests tomorrow so I imagine it is going to be another one of those fast days that just creeps along at a snail's pace. Fun.

January 20, 2014

I stayed away from Battlefield 4 today. Not necessarily on purpose, I just never got around to it. And I kind of wanted to take a break. My right pointer finger is really feeling it, especially after I switched to DMRs because they are single-shot guns so I've been spamming the button a lot. I'm happy that the game turned out good (for me at least) on PC because I wouldn't have been able to play it nearly as much if I got it on Xbox and had to play with a controller. The mouse and keyboard are much friendlier to my fingers, wrists, and arms.

I did play a bit of Cook, Serve, Delicious. I'm still only a one-star restaurant but I bought some new food, a frier, a trash service to cut my trash duties in half, and had a few good perfect streaks when it came to serving the food. I'm still in the honeymoon period of the game and I'll probably lose interest soon enough but I'm enjoying it at the moment.

I finally got around to boxing up the two pairs of headphones I didn't choose out of my recent testing. One was bought through an Amazon seller so I have to wait to here from them to get a return label, but the other is all packed up and I can drop it at UPS tomorrow. Hopefully I hear from the other sell soon. Yesterday I had to email a website I ordered some prints through before Christmas and they payment showed up on my bank statement, but my account on the site says payment hasn't been received yet. They received it almost instantly but even if I had mailed the payment it would have gotten their by now. I want that to get resolved so I don't have to go through a whole big thing but also because I really want those prints.

I returned my rented DVDs tonight so I got out of the house once today. I didn't have anything else that needed doing out and about but it was a nice drive across town. The students are back in town so traffic is heavier and that is unfortunate, but the hot college girls kind of make up for it. Not really though. I would much rather not have to deal with traffic and be able to find decent parking spots than occasionally see a hot girl walking around.

I watched two movie today. The first was R.I.P.D. and I liked it. If I remember right it bombed pretty hard but I'm not sure why. It was pretty much Men In Black with dead people instead of aliens, so it had that going for it, but maybe people forgot they liked Men In Black. It was also leaps and bounds better than Green Lantern. That movie was awful and maybe people still had a bad Ryan Reynolds taste in their mouth. Who knows. I liked it though, and I'd watch it again.

The second movie was About Time because I have wanted to see it since I saw the first trailer for it on TV. I'm glad I didn't go see it in theaters. It was such a good movie, easily on track to make my top five because I was completely into the funny awkwardness of it. And then Bill Nighy. He is great and unfortunately he reminds me a lot of my grandpa. So that whole part of the movie was fucking terrible. It did make the movie better, I guess, but I was hoping they would go for the less said route of the uncle. I was worried for a bit it was going to be the sister but that was just a bit of misdirection. Then there was a glimmer of hope until they decided to have a third kid. If it had been me, I would have said no. Without hesitation. Two is enough anyway. It was neat that he could go back and have closure and end things in the best way possible but screw that. They should have stuck with two kids. So, the last bit of the movie was all pretty much downhill for me. It did have a nice, heartwarming ending, but they couldn't really recover from Bill Nighy. I was crying during the movie and then it took me a good ten minutes to stop crying after the movie. Leaving me slightly dehydrated with red, dry eyes, a slight headache, and now I'm going to have to go to bed with a still partially stuffed nose. Right now I'm just avoiding the whole thing in my mind because I can still feel it just below the surface and I don't need the flood gates to open again. I watched Gangnam Style when I calmed down a bit and the happy dude in the elevator made me laugh, which helped. I just want to fall asleep and wake up with these feelings a bit further in my past.

January 19, 2014

I ventured outside twice today. The first time was to go get my car washed. It looks so good now. Afterward I drove around for a little bit listening to music, helping the car dry off a little faster. It was such a nice day outside that when I got home I opened the window in my room to let some fresh air in. It was a nice break from all of the winter recently.

I spent a good portion of my day playing Battlefield 4. I played a bit of the actual game but spent more time playing the Commander mode. I'm getting better at it but it is very dependent on whether or not your team is good. Depending on the mode, various Commander abilities are tied to specific objectives on the map. So if your team is in control of a certain objective you may have access to a gunship or cruise missiles or scans to check for infantry or vehicles. If your team sucks or for some reason can't/won't capture those points, then as a commander all I can really do is drop UAVs and EMPS, which is useful but not nearly as useful as all the other stuff. I got incredibly lucky today and managed to get good teams in all but one or two games. As a commander you can tell squads to go to specific points and in the game they have the option to accept the order, decline the order, or just ignore it. I don't know how prevalent commanders have been in games that I have played but I can't ever remember being told to go somewhere by one of them, so I don't know what the options are like for the person on the ground. Based on the number of times I got completely ignored I am assuming it is a very unobtrusive request that goes unnoticed or the players don't understand that it helps everyone out if they accept the order, even when they have no intention of following it.

I played several games on my tablet as well as on my PC. At the moment I prefer the tablet but that could be because I have played more on the tablet. I like being able to press on what I want and drag it to where I want it. On the PC you left-click where you want something and then right-click on the menu that pops up. Or click on a squad you want to move and then left-click where they should go and right-click on the menu option. It would be much nicer if clicking and dragging was an option. My coolest commander so far, and probably forever, happened on the PC tonight when I sent a cruise missile at a roof that has several snipers camped out on top of it. It takes awhile for the missile to launch and make the journey and by the time it made it to the roof there happened to be a helicopter flying over. So I took out one of the bad guys on the roof and the helicopter. I only wish I could have seen it from inside the game, not just a birds-eye view of the map.

Tonight I was going to watch the second episode of the new season of Psych but it started with a “previously on...” and I had no recollection of ever having seen any of that stuff. I got on Netflix but they didn't have last season (number seven) so I went to the Psych website. They had the episodes but when I tried to play them nothing happened. This lead to my second journey out of my house today, to go rent the seventh season.

I went to Hastings and lucked out because they had all three discs. And I got them for free because I still have a bunch of credit from returning movies the next day. I will be doing the same thing with these. Not only for the credit but because it will give me a reason to leave the house tomorrow.

When I got home I ended up watching the last two episodes of last season. The second-to-last was vaguely familiar but not entirely so I went with it. I had definitely not seen the last episode and I'm not exactly sure how I missed it. Unless it was during a period when my DVR was acting up. Regardless, it was a good episode and it made the first episode from the new season make a lot more sense. It took place mostly away from the normal setting so I wasn't completely lost but I definitely would have been with the second episode of this season, which I watched immediately after the last episode. It is such a good show. It just makes me happy.

While watching the show I played a little bit of Cook, Serve, Delicious, a game I got from a indie bundle or the Steam sale, I can't remember which. It's a game similar to the cooking games on the CoolMath website, where customers place orders and you have to fulfill them. This game is a little more involved though. You have to pick out which food you are going to serve, buy the necessary equipment, and filling orders is timed, so if you're not fast enough orders will expire and you'll get negative feedback. They also throw in chores that you have to try and squeeze in between food orders. To control the game you can either use the mouse to click stuff or you can use the keyboard. For the most part I stuck with the keyboard because it seemed faster. And faster is good because it can quickly become very overwhelming when you have four things to do at once. On numerous occasions I missed out on orders or chores because I was caught up doing other things. Later on in the game the number of orders or chores you can receive at once is supposed to increase and that just seems too overwhelming. We'll see if I make it that far.

I was going to have this finished at a reasonable hour but then I got lost on a YouTube tangent that lasted for way more videos than I thought it would. But now I've made it to the end and I am going to go to bed. We're off work tomorrow and I will probably not do anything productive with my day. Very annoying.

January 18, 2014

I reached level ten in Battlefield 4 sometime recently and today I finally got to try out Commander mode. This is where all you get a giant overview of the map and you can order squads around, deploy UAVs or EMP UAVs, drop resupply crates, and other stuff. When played on the PC you can also see the POV of individual players on your team but on a tablet it is much more basic. I ended up playing more on the tablet so I could watch YouTube videos on my computer, and I had fun but it was also kind of pointless. I didn't really feel like I was having much impact on the game. But it is a more “productive” use of my mobile gaming because the points I get go toward leveling up my BF4 character.

At work tonight it was day two of training the future manager. More stuff went wrong tonight (wrong movies being loaded, cues not working, preshows not working, manually starting stuff, loading just a movie without all the trailers or ads or cues, leading to manually turning everything off, and things I have forgotten). I also showed her how to check how many hours were on projector bulbs and how to adjust the lens. So almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong in the last two days, which isn't great normally, but it does serve as a perfect learning experience. When we weren't fixing broken things, she continued reading The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, and I played Animal Crossing and continued reading Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline, the Book Club book for next month.

Last night I was at the theater until after 2:30AM but tonight we didn't have any midnights so I got off at eleven o'clock, after the last movies had started. I much prefer eleven o'clock to two o'clock. Now I can make it to bed before one o'clock which will hopefully allow me to experience more of my Sunday. It is supposed to be nice out tomorrow so I would like to go get my car washed. We'll see if that happens.

January 17, 2014

Today was a fairly laid back day at work. There was one MAP test this morning, shortly followed by a kid coming to finish a test he started yesterday. The kid got lucky, only in the sense that he got to finish his test, because I was actually going to help out with second grade reading groups but they were still out at recess when I went down to the room. I was just about to leave the lab again when the teacher came down with the kid to take the test. Kinda sucked. This kid scores well on the tests but he is very slow at doing it. It is the same way with his brothers. I spent the whole time drawing. Or attempting to draw. I lack any innate talent and I don't practice enough to earn a little talent.

I didn't have either fifth grade class at their normally scheduled time because they were on a field trip, and that left me with only one class in the afternoon. I took the time to cut some stuff out for one of the second grade teachers, and take another crack at getting the student pictures into the librarian's database so the pictures show up when a kid's library card is scanned. We tried it last week I think but were unsuccessful because I didn't know the formatting. The librarian figured out today that she needed a different CD but the secretary misplaced it. Or the cook took it to the central kitchen and they misplaced it. I'm just glad I have copies of the pictures in a couple different places because our yearbook would be screwed if I relied on the safety of that CD.

Anyway, the librarian found one from last year and figured we could just put the pictures on from last year so at least some of the kids would have an almost updated picture. After installing the software I noticed that it was the same software that I had installed months ago to make class rosters for subs and different resource teachers. But I'm fairly certain it was wiped from my computer after one of the random reformats. I started to go through and pick out the kids from the old pictures who I knew were still in school, but then I decided to try and make a new database from the new pictures I had saved on the faculty drive. It took me a couple of attempts but I got them imported eventually, and then exported them based on the instructions that the librarian had. After all of that, all it did was create a zipped folder with all the student pictures in it, and they had been renamed to their student number. All that work for that. I already had a folder with the student pictures named with their student numbers. Had I known that we were going to go through all of those steps just for that, I could have saved us a lot of time and stress on the part of the librarian. That was kind of annoying. But what's done is done and we were able to upload the pictures into her database without a problem, and now when a kid's card is scanned their newest pictures shows up. Hooray.

I spent the rest of my afternoon working on storybooks. I think I got one and a half or two and a half pages done. Not bad.

After work and did the same old thing and then headed to work at the theater. When I got upstairs there was a girl already here and I would like to say she looked familiar because she has apparently been working here for awhile and is going to be the newest manager, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen her. Or at least never noticed her. I could say that about almost everyone who works here now. I see them every week but I couldn't pick any of them out of a line up. But this girl is going to be a manager so she needs to be trained in projection. I find this somewhat beneficial but really you just have to work up here a bunch to learn how to do stuff. I walked her through everything but I know when I was first trained I didn't really retain anything that I was told. I learned how to do stuff when something would go wrong and it had to be fixed. Thankfully, almost all the little things did go wrong tonight, so that sped up the learning process a little. Curtains didn't open, cues were missing, movies didn't start, 3D lenses fell halfway down in front of the regular lenses or stayed down during a 2D movie, and maybe a few other things that I probably forgot. It was all stuff that I would have caught and no one would have known about had I been up here by myself but I wasn't so my schedule was thrown off a bit. This was kind of the perfect scenario for a training night though because she got to see the various things that can and do happen on a weekly basis.

As for the non-working part of the night, I had a good conversation with the girl about John Green and The Fault In Our Stars because she started reading it tonight, and that transitioned into a discussion of other books and movies. Then I spent the rest of my night reading books and playing a little Animal Crossing. Until the midnights started. I was struggling to keep my eyes open most of the night and by one o'clock I gave up and watched Ride Along. I missed the first five or ten minutes but caught the rest and I would say I enjoyed it. I would like to see it with a larger audience because the midnight group was pretty sparse and they weren't laughing as much as they should have been. It was a very predictable, paint-by-numbers kind of movie, but Kevin Hart is funny and I liked the jokes. Also, I now have a crush on the actress who plays the girlfriend/sister.

I have been up for twenty-one hours now and at work for over sixteen hours of that. So it's time for bed. Way past time for bed actually.

January 16, 2014

I still haven't quite gotten the hang of writing 2014. I rarely get it right the first time, even when I'm thinking about it. Very annoying.

Today was uneventful. There were two MAP tests today. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. So exciting. I didn't have a chance to work on storybooks today because I got caught up with my MAP spreadsheets. I did a lot of data entry and then some formatting. I think it is actually getting used more this year so it isn't all pointless. I would much rather be working on the storybooks though. Those are never going to get done at this rate.

The only thing out of the ordinary today was one of my volunteer supervisors coming and fingerprinting me to update whatever it is that needs to be updated. She was much better at it than the cop who did it the first time. She didn't keep telling me to relax my hand or apply a little too much pressure or treat me like a criminal. It is interesting being treated like a criminal when you are voluntarily going through a background check to advocate for children dealing with horrible situations.

Speaking of that, I had a forty-five minute visit with the new volunteer kid tonight. First we went to the gas station because he wanted chips, and then we ended up going to see his grandparents. They work at a hotel and I think maybe live in the back room because it looked like the same setup they had in their trailer the last time I saw them. I'm not sure what happened to the great grandma because she was nowhere to be seen. The kid talked with them and I sat and watched what looked like some version of COPS and then wrestling came on. Sting is still wrestling. He either didn't save any money from back in the day or he really really likes wrestling.

When I got home I watched a video my friend sent me of Norm Abram replicating a very cool antique cabinet. Ridiculous stuff. Especially all the work he put into making the moulding. It would be so cool to be able to do that kind of stuff. All I need is the motivation. And the space. And the tools. And also the talent, probably. But mostly the motivation and the space.

It's not quite ten o'clock but this is another one of those nights where I could have easily gone to bed at seven o'clock. So I'm going to go brush my teeth and then call it a day. Although I really wish tomorrow wasn't Friday because I'm not looking forward to the school/theater double. Oh well.

January 15, 2014

More MAP testing today. And that makes sense because we are only three days into the testing window. Both were in the morning because it was an early release day. I think there are also two tomorrow as well but I can't really remember. The testing today was uneventful. Some would even say boring. In fact most would say boring because that is really the only word that can describe it. Without getting too poetic or flowery about it.

When I wasn't watching kids test, I learned about pandas thanks to Here And Now on NPR. It turns out the stomach of a panda is designed to digest meat, and that makes it poor at digesting bamboo. This is why they have to eat fourteen hours a day, to get all the nutrients they need. Also, pandas in general appear to not like eat other that much. Females only show interest in males a couple days out of the year when they are able to get pregnant. But regardless of whether or not the female actually gets pregnant, she will exhibit all the physical signs of being pregnant, up until she is supposed to give birth. Or not give birth. I imagine physical encounters between humans would be much different if women had to look and feel pregnant for almost nine months after every time they had sex.

After school I was going to wash my car because it is dirty but the weather is supposed to drop below freezing again tonight and I didn't think it would dry out before dark. Maybe that isn't a thing that matters but I didn't want to chance it. So maybe tomorrow.

At four o'clock I had to go to one of the high schools for a meeting about installing state assessment software. I was on time getting there but then not so much because all the doors were locked. I tried three sides of the building and ended up texting the librarian (who was already there because I parked next to her) right before someone happened to walk by and let me in. She had the same problem and was let in my someone walking by. And then right before we got to the library where the meeting was being held, I let someone in who was waiting at a door on the side of the building I hadn't checked. We told the tech guys running the meeting when we got in that all the doors were locked and they didn't seem to care. Good guys. So nothing was done and people trickled in a few at a time when they managed to get lucky and catch the eye of someone passing by.

As for the meeting, it was pointless. It contained about ten minutes of information and it lasted an hour and a half. Most of it filled with the weird tech guy telling us stories and I think he was trying to show off. It's the same guy telling weird jokes at the interview I had a couple years ago, where I played along because I wanted a job and then didn't get a job. The main point of the meeting was showing us how to install the testing software on laptops and he ended up forgetting the crucial step of running the setup as an administrator so it didn't work right. One of the ladies in the meeting ended up catching that in the instructions but we convinced her not to tell him until after all the laptops had been put away so we wouldn't have to stay there even longer and try it the correct way. The tech guys are also horrible when it comes to talking down to women. Or should I say great? At one point when he was showing us how to erase IP addresses from a computer his examples for how it would clean out an internet browser included “the fancy handbags you bought from that website” or the “$1000 pair of pants you got for $50.” He couldn't just say it'll wipe your cookies.

I went right from the meeting to pick up Chipotle. During and after dinner we watched Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2013. After stumbling across it some time ago, I now look forward to it every year. After dinner I filled out all the information to renew my background check and privacy stuff for my volunteer thing. One of my supervisors has a kid in kindergarten at school and volunteers to read with a second grader so she is going to bring the stuff to fingerprint me tomorrow at school. I printed out all the forms and filled them out tonight but after using the printers at school, inkjet printers look like crap. I don't print nearly enough to justify a fancy printer, or the price of toner, but they look so much better.

Tomorrow, more MAP testing, maybe some storybooks, maybe a car wash, maybe a visit with the new volunteer kid. Who knows what the day may hold. Other than possibilities. So deep.

January 14, 2014

Today seemed to go by really fast, at an incredibly slow pace. There were three MAP tests today, one in the morning and two in the afternoon. Kids taking tests all look the same so it kind of felt like I was just standing in one really long test all day. All told, I spent about four hours watching kids test. Boring.

When I wasn't doing that, I made a little progress on storybooks but not really. I also made a class picture for the girl who is moving back to China tomorrow. The office called me near the end of the day and I was able to throw something together pretty quick and I think it looked pretty good, if I do say so myself.

On my way home I stopped by Target to get some trail mix and string cheese. It was an exciting trip.

Tonight I watched YouTube videos and played Battlefield 4. My K/D actually went positive several times. It was shocking. I will say it was because I ended up on teams that were way better than me. The annoying thing was that I wanted to play Rush but after two games it switched to a Domination server. And the same thing happened last night. I could have left but my team was so good that I didn't want to chance it by joining a different server. Domination is still fun, even if I was in the mood to continually throw myself at an objective and ruin my K/D.

And bedtime.

January 13, 2014

The first day of MAP testing went off without a hitch. It was a pretty easy start with only one test in the morning so my schedule wasn't thrown off too much. Tomorrow there are three tests so that is going to suck some balls. So boring.

After the test this morning I went down and helped with literacy centers in Kindergarten. My group only had two kids so it was pretty easy. They were much better behaved than my second grade reading groups which I had right after. I got stuck with the listening center twice in a row so I had to hear the same story four times, while simultaneously babysitting the kids who were supposed to be listening to the story. It was rough. And the story was good but it got old after the second time I heard it.

This afternoon I had a couple classes in the lab. I recently installed Type To Learn 4 and for some reason it is much more popular than the old version was last year. I think it was mostly used by fourth and fifth grade last year, occasionally by third grade. This year the first and second graders have also started using it. Or at least expressed interest in using it. That is pretty cool. Even though it seems like being able to type on a physical keyboard with your fingers on the home row will soon be a dying art.

In my downtime today I made a lot of progress on storybooks. I finished four or five pages. It is still taking me forever but I'm chipping away at it. Slowly but surely.

After school I watched the third, and last, episode of the third series of Sherlock. The series has been so long in coming and now it is over. Just like that. It was a good episode, though not on par with the second episode, and of course it ended with a cliffhanger. Goddamn cliffhangers. And now the long ass wait begins for the next series.

Tonight I played more Battlefield 4. I ended up in a server that had a guy bitching about his team in the chat every game. Then he switched to our team when we started beating them every time. And then he bitched about our team. He had a really good K/D every game but his blood pressure must be through the roof. And speaking of roofs, in the last game I played he maybe capped one point and then spent the rest of the game shooting people from the roof. We lost the game and he was going off in the chat again about our team not doing this and that. After which I just typed “Says the guy on the roof” and logged off. Nailed it.

It isn't even 9:30PM yet but I am going to go to bed now. I slept horribly last night. It was one of those nights where I woke up about every half hour or so. Not a very restful sleep and that has been slowly catching up to me. So I am going to hit the hay.

January 12, 2014

I am shocked. One of the buttons on my theater work shirt popped off in the washing machine. Such a quality shirt and a button just pops off. So unexpected. Now the trick will be remembering to sew it back on before I have to wear it again. I'm confident that I will not.

Today I did really do a thing. Just relaxed, watched some YouTube videos and played Battlefield 4. I am still awful at the game but it is fun to play. Every now and then I get on a decent team and go against guys worse than me, which makes me feel momentarily good. But most of my time is spent dying a bunch with the occasional kill. Right now I am level eight and my goal is to reach level ten so I can try out commander mode.

As for headphones, I tried out all three today, back-to-back, and at the moment the Astro's are in the lead. I'd say soundwise they are all pretty much the same so that isn't a thing. I really like the vibration of the Rosewill pair but they are really hot, not that comfortable, and the material on the earcups feels cheap. The SteelSeries come close in terms of comfort but I can still feel my left ear touching the inside of the ear cup and that annoys me. They also have the fake leather earcups and I prefer cloth. The Astro's aren't perfect but they are the most comfortable, they have cloth earcups, and the build quality seems better than the other two. They are weighted weird and it takes awhile to get them situated right so they don't fall off my head if I tilt my head down. I still have awhile to make my final decision and send the losers back so the testing will continue.

And that is really all I have to write about. It was a pretty boring day in terms of content. Not that other days are more thrilling. For the next three weeks we will be MAP testing at school. Fun. Watching kids test is boring as hell. And I'm still working on storybooks so I don't really need all the data entry of test scores to fill my downtime. I just want to finish the storybooks.

January 11, 2014

I didn't do much of anything today. I tried out Battlefield 4 with the latest headset and I was more focused on playing the game than on paying attention to the headset. Which I guess is a good thing maybe, because I wasn't distracted by discomfort or bad sound or something. I'm going to try again tomorrow and focus more on the sound. I would have to say it was pretty good though in terms of directional cues because I found myself able to turn and look up at helicopters flying by. And I didn't really notice the thin headband that I mentioned in my first impression. I still think it could be wider and more comfortable but as long it's not distracting I'm cool with it. This pair does seem to be more comfortable than the other two and the sound quality is good. It reminds me of the Audio Technica headphones I tried a bit ago, which sounded really good but crushed my left ear.

When I wasn't playing Battlefield 4, I caught up on DVRed stuff. I haven't done that in awhile but since I switched DVRs I haven't scheduled many recordings so I don't have a lot backlogged. Which is nice because I watched TV once a week or so at the moment.

At work tonight I watched bits of Lone Survivor and played a little Animal Crossing, but I spent most of my time reading. I finished reading Graveyard Shift by Chris Westwood, one of the books I got at the book fair. The book had an interesting concept, and spent most of the book setting it up, but then didn't spend too much time on the climax and resolution. It was kind of disappointing because I was looking forward to the journey. And then it was rushed and it was kind of a let down. Actually, it was a let down. It's like the author had the concept but nothing else before he started writing and tried to just wing it. It didn't work too well. After finishing that I switched back and forth between two other books until I went home.

And now I am going to go to bed, and hopefully wake up relatively early so I am able to go to bed relatively early tomorrow night, and be on track for a decent sleep schedule next week.

January 10, 2014

Last night there was a tiny bit of rain but it dropped close enough to freezing that there were random patches of black ice. The invisible stuff. I came across a few in the driveway but was cautious and didn't slip too much. I thought I was home free but the ice caught up to me right in front of the school. There are a few steps leading up to the front door and there is a ledge that comes out from them and goes toward the street, creating a sort of entryway of sorts on one side of the stairs. I was planting my right foot to make the left turn that would lead me toward the building but when my right foot hit, it just kept going. I'm pretty sure it happened in slow motion. There wasn't a lot of ice so after a foot or two, my right foot stopped moving. It went out far enough that I started toward the ground. I was lined up perfectly with the ledge, thankfully, so I put my elbow how and just kind of slowly when down into a kneeling position for a few seconds with my arm resting on the ledge. My knee hurt a little bit but the impact wasn't that great so I was able to walk it off. As this was happening a para and a student with his mom were coming from the other way and they all asked if I was okay. I raised both hands in the air after getting back to my feet and said I was good. I would have liked too be a spectator on the situation because in my head it was pretty smooth.

Most of my day in the lab today was spent getting ready for MAP testing next week. After the last MAP test I updated my sheets that I write down scores on because the scoring was a little different than last year. Unfortunately I had it saved to my desktop and it was lost after one of the random reformatting weekends that happened to my computer. So I updated the sheets again, including adding new students and getting rid of ones who had moved. I also added the new students to my overall MAP spreadsheet. Then I came up with the lab schedule for the next three weeks, adding in the MAP tests for each class into my regular schedule. I can't remember when I started doing that, maybe State Assessments last year, but it saves a lot of confusion and awkward encounters when everyone can see when the tests are and they can plan accordingly.

Outside of the lab, I fixed a fourth grade laptop by taking the hard drive out and putting it back in. I had to do that earlier in the year as well so it probably isn't the most stable laptop. Although I'm not sure if it's the hard drive or a connection to the hard drive.

I got all but one student intern wirelessly connected to the internet on their laptops. Most of them were able to get on without a problem once they had the right password but the kindergarten intern and the third grade intern were still having trouble. I worked on the kindergarten one for awhile and eventually managed to do something right because we were able to get her on. I was clicking all over the place so I'm not sure what ended up doing the trick, maybe turning her wi-fi off and on, but she's on and hopefully won't have a problem again. The third grade one was the one that stumped me. She has a MacBook, which shouldn't be a problem because other MacBooks are able to connect, and I was able to connect to the main network using my log-in information, but the guest network was a no-go. I messed with it for awhile and tried all sorts of stuff but nothing worked. It is probably something simple but it eluded me. On the plus side, she can use the third grade teacher's log-in information to connect to the wi-fi or plug in with an ethernet cord, so she's not totally out in the cold.

Second grade reading groups went much better than yesterday. I started with the annoying group but we weren't at the listening center and not all of them were there today. It was still a struggle and I wanted to take a whole bunch of points away (because the class is on a point system thing) but I don't feel comfortable with that. Yet. They were working on alliteration and it was like pulling teeth. One kid just couldn't quite get it. He kept wanting to write things like "J is for jellyfish" or "K is for koala". So close yet not really. I had the higher group after that and they had a lot more fun with alliterations. I was able to breathe a little and it was nice.

I had somewhat of a minor breakthrough with the first grader who is still struggling with logging onto a computer in the lab. There is always a lot of prompting and direct hinting but today when he came into the lab he came up to me and told me to come with him because he was going to log into the computer. When he first started calling me over he would say "what do?" a lot and I would eventually tell him how to do everything through pointing and copious amounts of backspacing to erase mistakes. Well, today I only had to give one real hint to get to the Shift key for a capital letter. I still had to prompt him a lot with "what's next?" and "now what?" but he got it all a lot faster than he has in the past. It was pretty cool.

Earlier in the day one of the paras (who none of the other paras really like) asked if I could help her with logging into laptops in the fourth grade room for her Math group. She didn't say the fourth grade room but she said the teacher's name so it was my mistake to assume. After going up to the fourth grade room on third floor I discovered that the para wasn't there. So I went down to the second floor and asked the resource teacher where she was and found out she was down in one of the second grade rooms. This made more sense because I knew she had a second grade Math group and she had talked to me awhile ago about it. So my bad for not going there first. Anyway, I guess she's been struggling with this all year and it seems like she just wasn't having the kids wait long enough at the 'CTRL' + 'ALT' + 'DEL' screen so the laptop didn't have enough time to recognize the network, so it couldn't connect to it. I think this is what I explained to her before but she assured me they were waiting. Guess not. And now that she only has two weeks left, I think I finally got my point across that you have to wait a little bit on that first screen before attempting to log onto the laptop.

After work I came home and did a quick load of laundry because I needed to wash my shirt for the theater. My laundry schedule was a little off last week and happened before my shifts at the theater rather than after. So I had that going and tried to relax a little before having to go to the theater. I was somewhat successful.

There was a lot of running around at school today and that hit me full in the face when I got to the theater tonight. I generally feel tired whenever I walk in the building but tonight when I got upstairs I just felt completely drained. After doing the trailer report I spent about a half an hour just sitting with my eyes closed, trying to pretend I could just go to sleep and forget about work. I spent the rest of my night reading a bit, playing Animal Crossing, and watching all but the first couple of minutes of Lone Survivor. It definitely got the Hollywood treatment and there was a decent amount of creative license but it managed to remain a fairly faithful adaptation to the book. They nailed the falling down the mountain stuff. It was even more painful than I had imagined it in my head when I was reading the book. I read somewhere about a stuntman getting pretty hurt on one of the takes but I would like to see a behind-the-scenes on how they actually pulled it off. You can't fake a lot of what they show. Despite the serious subject matter of the film, they manage to put in some comedic relief and the best line in the movie came when Luttrell was asking an Afghani kid for a knife. The kid came back with a duck and says "Knife". Luttrell replies "It's not a knife, it's a fucking duck."

January 9, 2014

Today at school was pretty normal. Not a lot going on. I finished a couple storybook pages. Getting ever-closer at finishing that project. Second grade reading groups started off kind of awful, so nothing has really changed there. I started with the bad group at the listening center. I assigned them parts/characters and they were supposed to listen to the story once, then on the second round they would read along when it was their character. Three of the girls rarely paid attention on either read through, one boy spun around in circles on his knees most of the time (but he did manage to nail his part (the Fluency Tip because we ran out of characters) so I'll give him that, and another boy was off in his own world a lot but he wasn't disruptive. One boy and one girl were actually good. It was rough and reminded me of how much I don't like certain groups. Some kids are just not group people. And some aren't even individual people. It is interesting to see how widely personalities can very between kids when they're all made up of the same basic stuff, just in different combinations. My second group was better because it was the higher group so they pretty much handle themselves. I just have to prod a couple of them every now and then to get them back on task.

Even though most, if not all, of the classes were going outside for recess, we still had indoor lunch recess. I wasn't asked to help supervise but that was probably because the principal was gone today. So I volunteered anyway. I got there early again so I talked with the second grade teacher until the kids showed up. Thankfully the teacher stuck around for awhile because the kids were a bit nuts when they first came in and she had to lay down the law a bit. At one point one of the kids came up to me and gave me a hug, then she back up for a second before thrusting her body against me, like a body-check in hug form. Little kids are boney and surprisingly strong. I might have bruises. So I put an end to that and then had to break up a few other girls who were doing it to each other, first as a hug and then getting farther and farther back before running into each other. I don't have the slightest clue what started it or what compelled them to do it. Easily one of the weirdest things I've seen so far.

One of the kindergarten teachers was acting principal today so when his class came to the lab there was a sub and a brand new student teacher. And a lot of the kids seemed to have trouble operating the computers today so I spent most of their computer lab time walking back and forth across the lab fixing things or telling kids to stop what they were doing or start whatever they weren't doing. I have to say I was glad to see them leave.

After school I went and got my haircut. Possibly the second-to-last time with the lady who has been cutting my hair since my very first haircut. They end of an era. She owned the business but sold it to one of the other ladies and is staying on until at least the end of February. For awhile now she has been looking to get a small place of her own to continue cutting hair on a lighter schedule for a couple more years but hasn't had any luck. Now she is also looking at renting out a chair somewhere that is quieter because all the sound in the current place really messes with her hearing aides. Regardless of the outcome, I will eventually have to figure out what to do about my hair. I could either go with one of the other ladies at the current place or just start cutting it myself. At the rate my hair is thinning, cutting it myself might be the easiest option.

After dinner I had my first visit with the volunteer kid is weeks. We went to Sonic and it was a solid hour-long visit. I gave him his birthday present, a sketch pad and drawing pencils, and his Christmas present, a bag of all the candy I got at my dad's for Christmas. He really liked both gifts so I did a pretty badass job. We talked about all the usual random stuff, nothing new really, but it was good to finally hangout.

When I got home I set up the latest pair of headphones that arrive today. The Astro A40s. I went big, to see what all of the fuss is about. Right off the bat they are more comfortable than the Rosewill headset, maybe not quite as comfortable as the SteelSeries, and probably on par with my old ones, which are Skarkoons. The would be a lot more comfortable if the headband was wider. Looking at it from the outside it seems plenty wide but on the inside there is just a fairly thing bit of padding that is pretty stiff. I imagine this softens up overtime but it seems like a pretty poor design. They are a beefy headphone and it would be nice if the weight could be displaced over a wider area. The ear cups and similar to my old headphones but I have to find just the right spot for my ears not to be irritated. But they aren't being crushed so that is good. I can't really speak on the sound quality in games because I haven't played any games yet but music sounds good. I won't get to try them in a game until Saturday probably but my expectations are pretty high. I also thing the headphones themselves would be a lot cheaper if they didn't spend so much on packaging. It is high-quality stuff which I guess shows how high-quality the product is inside of it, but I'd prefer a cheaper box so I could get cheaper headphones. It is similar to how I feel about the ASPCA or all the other organization that ask for donations and in return give you a bag or a jacket or whatever else. How about you just spend all the money on helping the animals or the people or whoever I'm donating the money to help, rather than spending a crap load on cheap gifts? Anyway, now that all three headsets are here I can do some better comparisons between them and see which one wins out and which ones I will send back. Decisions, decisions.