March 4, 2014

A day without kidney pain is a good day, I must say. Minus bathroom breaks, I got a full night of sleep and I made it to work on time.

I am pretty much caught up on everything at work which means I need to figure out more stuff to do. I worked on the slideshow stuff a little bit today but I'm caught up on the aspect ratio of it. It will be projected up onto a square screen but I think I should make it widescreen. Which I probably will, but I'm still thinking. I am also still trying to work out how I want to display the pictures, if I'm going to put all the pictures for one kid on one slide or one picture per slide or something else entirely. I still have a lot of time to figure it out, and I don't even have half of the kids' pictures, but it would be nice to get the game plan figured out.

The main productive thing I did today was finally take a look at the online yearbook. The PTO mom I'm working with already created all of the pages for the book but nothing has been populated yet. So I messed around with it and figured out how to upload all of the student and staff pictures. Then I figured out to populate each class page with the right pictures. When I got it all figured out it ended up being a lot faster than making the pages in Publisher like I did last year. The trickiest part was trying to get the teacher pictures for each class on the class page. I couldn't add it like I wanted to from the picture I had already uploaded, so I ended up uploading each teacher again and then putting their first name as 'Mr.', 'Mrs.', or 'Ms.' to get that right. I should have been able to manually move the pictures around but it wasn't working for me so I cheated and put a space before the 'Mr.', 'Mrs.', or 'Ms.', which bumped it to the front of the alphabetical order line and put the teacher first on each page. I'm going to keep messing with it and see if there is a better solution but for now it works. Tomorrow is retake picture day and I am hoping that all the newer kids will be there and get their picture taken so we don't have to worry about taking the pictures ourselves. I also hope that we get a copy of those pictures. I don't think we did last year. They'll have over a month to get it to us so fingers crossed.

On my way home I got my Powerball tickets and I got to keep the card I filled out with my numbers on it so next time I should be able to just hand them that again. That will make the whole process more efficient.

I made Brussels sprouts for dinner and they were delicious.

Tonight I watched a few YouTube videos, mainly two long interviews with Conan O'Brien. And then I spent the last three hours listening to possible slideshow songs. So far I've got eight on my list. I went with the classic cover of Over The Rainbow but also tried to pick a bunch of recent songs. I thought about going with songs from the year they were born but I haven't actually looked yet. When I did the math, and realized most of the kids were probably born in 2002, that made me a little depressed. It feels like 2002 just happened and for these kids it has been their entire life. I feel so old.