March 27, 2014

About three-quarters of the way through adding borders to all of the sixth grade pictures I decided I wanted to also add a shadow around them because I came up with a new idea for the slide layout. I am going to have the background look like a wood table or desk and the pictures are going to be laid out on it, at overlapping angles. It would look too flat without the shadows and I wanted some realistic depth to it. Then I had to figure out how to do the shadow. The first tutorial I found kind of worked but not really because there was the white border around the picture, the shadow around that border, and then another white border. That would work if my background was white but it isn't. The next tutorial introduced the obvious solution of putting the picture on a larger, transparent background. It was a fairly convoluted tutorial that I had to tweak a bit because it wasn't quite right, and I didn't realize until I was almost done that I could have cut out several of the steps which turned out to be pointless because I already had the white borders around the pictures. But I managed to get all the pictures finished and made up a test slide and through it up on the wall with the projector and it actually looked pretty good.

I had a lot of time to work on that today because there were field trips today which wiped out reading groups and classes in the lab. Thankfully I had something to work on. I also had a brief refresher of Excel graphs when one of the SPED teachers got frustrated trying to make a graph and sent one of the paras down with her laptop to see if I could figure it out. It took me a couple minutes but eventually I stumbled upon a lucky guess and deleted the text in the first cell, and a graph showed up. I think I briefly messed around with graphs last year with the fifth graders but I haven't really made graphs in Excel since college. And maybe even high school. But having nothing in the first cell seemed like it was a thing, and it turned out to indeed be a thing. When I ran into the SPED teacher later in the day I couldn't resist giving her some crap and asked if she wanted to go make some graphs. It was funny.

The kindergarteners had a performance today. One song about animals rolling over and falling out of a bed was very repetitive, reminiscent of 99 Bottles Of Beer, but all the other songs were good. My favorite being the one where each verse changes the vowels in Apple and Banana to different vowels. I'm sure it has a name but I don't know it. Kids attempting choreography is still the best thing.

I didn't have a visit with the new volunteer kid tonight. I called the house and one of the other kids answered and said my kid wasn't there but he would let him know I called. I never heard back so there's that.

I ended up spending my night watched DVRed stuff and knitting. Thrills. I think I might be getting a cold. There is something going around the school and that's never good. I coughed a couple times today and it hurt but most of the time it wasn't a bother. But I still feel a bit off. I'm tempted to take some medicine before going to bed. That sounds like a good idea.