February 6, 2014

There was a very small opening between piles of snow to get out of my driveway this morning. And then there was a trash can making that opening even smaller. And I'm not coming at it straight on because I'm parked off to the side of the driveway. Needless to say, I backed into a pile of snow and had to pull forward and come at it again. It didn't help that my back window seemed to immediately freeze over as soon as I started to reverse. But I did manage to get out of the driveway, no thanks to the trash can.

In my car the temperature is displayed next to the clock. This morning it said -2 when I got in my car, and dipped down to -4 during part of my drive to work. I didn't even know it could display negative numbers. I would have been fine never finding this out.

Because of all the snow, all the streets surrounding the school were much narrower today. There was a bunch of snow where I usually park, and I could have pulled it off if I drove a truck, but I drive a car that is very near the ground, so I drove around the block. One of the streets on the other side of the school is narrow to begin with but this morning there were cars parked over a foot away from the curb on both sides. I barely fit. I ended up parking on the corner adjacent to the open I usually do. So I was parallel to the side of the building rather than being parallel to the front of the building. Not that it really matters.

Work was pretty much the same old thing. I finished working on my MAP spreadsheets, completely updating them with the data from the Winter round of testing. Now I can focus on other stuff, most importantly the storybooks. I didn't actually work on those today but I plan on doing that in the near future.

I helped out with literacy centers in kindergarten this morning and their room was freezing because the AC was messing up. It was a drastic change from the lab which was also broken but in the opposite direction, turning it into a sauna. I had the listening center but the space heater popped a fuse or breaker or something, killing the CD player, so I ended up reading the book to my group before we went over to the tables to work on their favorite toy drawings.

I also had second grade reading groups but it was sort of a catch-all day due to it being a two day week, so I just kind of wandered around the room, talking with the kids, getting them to kind of halfway stay focused. It was a lot better than trying to get a group of them to listen to a story two or three times in a row. And having to hear the same story two or three times in a row.

There was a middle school choir assembly today, that I learned about when there was an intercom announcement saying it was going to be slightly delayed. I had already logged in the first kindergarten class to Odyssey in case the assembly ended early enough. Thanks to being delayed, it didn't, but I left right after the last song so I could log in the second kindergarten class. And then they didn't show up because apparently right after the choir assembly there was a fundraising assembly. I think all this was mentioned in an email at some point but I obviously forgot about it. So I logged into twenty-two computers, and then logged forty-three kids into Odyssey, all for nothing. I certainly don't need the practice.

After school I went to Hobby Lobby to get pipe cleaners for a possible craft project. I also had my dark blue yarn with me to check on the color match with the dark blue yarn in stock. And I got really lucky because it was a decent match. Way better than the last time I checked. So maybe at the theater this weekend I can work on my crocheted blanket.

From Hobby Lobby I went to Chipotle and then stopped by one of my bankets to get a blank check so I could get the information I needed to add that account to my Roth IRA account. Now I can withraw money directly from that account, rather than writing a check to myself and depositing it into my other account. When I got home I added it and made another payment into my Roth IRA. It is kind of scary putting so much money into what is essentially one big gamble. I just need to remember to check my next bank statement because to verify my account, the IRA company is going to make two small deposits and then withdrawal it, and I will have to tell them the amounts. I could check my account online but the last time I tried setting that up it was pretty much a fail. So I'll just wait for my paper statement, whenever that shows up.

I didn't have a visit with the new volunteer kid tonight because I didn't want to trust the roads. I'm sure the highway and interstate would have been decent but maybe not, and all the roads leading to the main roads would probably suck. I didn't want to risk it. So instead we texted. Turns out he had three snow days so there wasn't a lot of education happening on his end this week. I asked him if he did anything productive with his free time and he said that he slept a lot, so productively conserved energy. I thought that was pretty good.

With the rest of my night I played a bit of BF4 and watched YouTube videos. My first game in BF4 sucked because when I joined my team was already pinned down to one flag (out of five) and there was no getting out of it. I kept trying to push but it needs to be a group effort, overwhelming the enemy and pushing them back, and none of my group was pushing. That seems to be a big problem in the large, close-quarters matches, trying to get everyone to push at once. They tend to just find a corner and hunker down. This is all well and good when you are on the team doing the pinning but when you are against a wall you need to push, or get crushed against the wall and wait for the match to end. In the second game, I was on the team doing the crushing. For most of the game we only held three of the flags, which makes the game more interesting for both sides because everyone has more options in terms of how they get around the map. At the very end we ended up pushing forward and captured four flags but up until then it was pretty fun. Still one-sided though, which isn't as fun as when the teams are evenly matched and the whole game is a back and forth struggle. The best part of the game though was that I managed to beat out the other sixty-three players and ended with the highest score. My K/D ended up being positive but I didn't have that many kills, and over half of my points came from dropping ammo boxes and getting resupply points. Thousands upon thousands of resupply points. I ended up with 63 resupply medals, which is insane. And cool as hell because I finally came out on top, which far removed from my usually spot somewhere in the bottom half. It'll probably never happen again so I made sure to save the report for the game. The only thing cooler was in BF3 when I one a game of Gun Master. Unfortunately that happened before I could record gameplay so I have no proof of it. Just the memories.