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.