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.