February 3, 2014

Today went by incredibly fast. And it wasn't particularly action packed, it just sort of happened. The first part of my day was spent downloading all the MAP reports and printing them off for the teachers. That took awhile because it involved not only the class reports but individual student reports. So much printing. But I got it all done fairly quickly.

I only had two classes in the lab today, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And I had second grade reading groups this morning but that was fairly uneventful. Which was nice. I had the listening center and they were listening to a story about George Washington Carver. Before they read the story they had to write down what they already knew about him and questions they wanted answered. One kid thought he was a president and another wanted to know which president he was, in terms of number. So close yet not really. The most surprising thing was that they actually sat through listening to the story. That is unheard of. And from the story I learned that he added his middle name of Washington when he went to college (I think) and there was someone else named George Carver, he came up with over 300 uses for peanuts and over 100 uses for sweet potatoes in order to prove their value to farmers, to get them to start rotating their crops which would improve the soil.

This afternoon a tech guy came to fix the broken computer. It has been broken for weeks, at least a week or two before MAP testing started. He replaced the hard drive and checked that it would boot up, which is did, and he called it good. Later on I went to check it and when I turned it on I immediately got a blue screen of death. After that, every time I turned it on I would have to choose to start Windows normally. When I got to the unlock screen it took at least three seconds for the computer to recognize my key presses and switch to the log-in screen. Then when I attempted to log in, I would get the Welcome screen with the spinning icon but it would never make it to the desktop. It would either spin forever or sometimes go back to the lock screen. So who knows. I need to submit another trouble ticket.

After school I went to the pet store to get dog food, the gas station to get gas, and Target to get foodstuffs. I really only intended to get trail mix but ended up with a lot more. Including Brussels sprouts because I want to make those again.

Tonight I played BF4 and had a lot of fun. I found a 64-man Conquest server that was 24/7 Operation Locker with a whole bunch of tickets. The first two games were pretty bad and we got beat with the other team still having over 1000 tickets left. But then there was some balancing and every game after that was a pretty close battle up until the end. It was a bit of a cluster at times but even when my team was getting completely dominated the first two games it was still fun. With fewer players it is easier to get completely pinned down and picked off before you can get a shot off. With 32 players on each team, it can be a lot easier for one side to cut off all the paths, but there are so many players that you at least get to kill a bunch while you're stuck in your spawn. I also learned the choke points are an easy way to get resupply ribbons by dropping ammo boxes where everyone is stuck. Thanks in part to that, and using some XP boosts I have gotten in battlepacks, I went from level 17 to level 23 tonight. That is pretty ridiculous. I feel I got somewhat lucky with the evenly matched teams but I added the server to my favorites so I can try it out again.

This afternoon the preemptively announced a snow day for tomorrow. The snow is supposed to roll in sometime tonight and continue through tomorrow, with up to ten inches of snow. So just in case that happens, school was canceled. And if we get all that snow, on top of the incredibly cold temperatures we are expected to have on Wednesday, school may be canceled that day too. That would kind of suck because it is an early release day and I'm supposed to go to a meeting after school and help a teacher with his iPad. But if Wednesday is also a snow day, then this will only be a two day week because we already have Friday off. I've got stuff I could be doing at work, and I like getting paid, so I would prefer not to miss anymore than I have to. I won't mind sleeping in tomorrow though. Especially because I am currently up way past my bedtime.