January 7, 2014

Finally back at work. And waking up this morning wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I even managed to exercise a little bit.

The heat wasn't fixed at work so one of the first grade classes was in the workroom/lounge and the other was in the music room. I wasn't really affected by any of that. Other than having to go in and help one of the teachers get a DVD working in the music room. I also figured out a DVD problem for one of the sixth grade teachers. He had a DVD from the library that was a region 0 DVD, which I think is worldwide. But you need a region-free DVD player to actually play it so he kept getting an error on his laptop when trying to use Windows Media Player. My first thought was to take it home, copy it, remove the region encoding, and burn a new copy. Actually that was my second thought because I briefly thought about VLC before that, and ended up going back to that after because the VLC player ignores the region thing and plays the DVD. And that ended up being the fix. Luckily VLC was installed on all of the computers this year.

I worked a little bit on storybooks today but I spent most of my free-time making a spreadsheet for one of the fourth grade teacher's research project for her Master's degree. She is collecting pre- and post-test scores for a bunch of different math tests for all the kids in third through sixth grade, and she wanted a row at the bottom that would show the percentage of kids who passed on each test. There may have been an equation that handled it better but I ended up cobbling together three or four different things to come to my final answer. And then I hid all of the rows with random numbers and equations so everything looked nice.

I also had a late and truncated lunch because I helped supervise indoor lunch recess for second grade. One of the regular supervisors was in one room and I ended up with the same class I do reading centers with, so that worked out. I pretty much just walked around and mingled and helped a kid with a puzzle. And speaking of reading groups, my first group today had to write a list of things at school with a 'ch' sound and a list of things at home with an 'sh' sound. That is surprisingly hard. Then I played a game with a couple kids in my second group because the main group was split in two and the teacher was working with the other kids.

Tomorrow I want to take another storybook break and work on getting classes set up in Type To Learn so teachers can start using that. I got it installed on all the lab computers before break but they didn't have all the kids added to the database yet so I couldn't do anything beyond installing. So that's the goal.

After school I scheduled a haircut that is at least two weeks overdue, and then I went to Target. I wanted to get more of the cashew/almond/cranberry trail mix that one of the kindergarten teachers got me for Christmas. I also finally pulled the trigger and finally bought a different type of deodorant. I have been wanting to change things up for a long time now, probably a couple of years, and today was that day. I didn't really need deodorant and the only option for my current deodorant was a two-pack. So it is still going to be a bit before I need a new stick and they are trying to sell me two. No thank you. I ended up going with one of the Old Spice ones because the name sounded familiar. I smelled it when I got home (because I feel weird about standing in a store aisle smelling deodorant) and thankfully it smells pretty good.

When I was leaving the school the librarian mentioned that it sounded like I was going home to a flood. I expected the worse because the washer has been acting up again. My mom apparently thought that as well because she called the plumber and left work early after getting a call from my sister. But then it turned out to be at my sister's house. My mom met the plumber at our house (because that's where she thought the problem was) and then they both headed over to my sister's house. My dad made it over their before and was able to get the water stopped and the plumber did something and I think it is all fixed, minus all the water everywhere. At some point the plumber will need to come back here for the washer. Plumbing.

Tonight I didn't do a thing. Just YouTube. And now I am going to read a little I think and go to bed. I started Mr. Penumbr's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan last night and I am liking it.