April 14, 2014

I have decided that if it ever comes down to it and I need to be assassinated, I want to go out like Nick Fury in Captain America 2: Winter Soldier. It was beyond badass. I do not want to be taken out like Jesse James. Although the odds of that are way better because I can more often be found fiddling with pictures on a wall (I did it yesterday at the church) than I am driving around in a heavily armored, and armed, car.

I definitely did not wake up at 6:00AM this morning. At least not any longer than it took to turn off my alarm. I could still kind of feel the exercise I did yesterday so I decided that had to count for something. A very poor excuse.

At work it was another day with four tests. That makes for a long/short day. Time flies by while still managing to pass at a snail's pace. And unfortunately there were no problems with the test. I'm kind of giving up on seeing an error message again. But I'll be honest, I'm mostly just saying that in the hopes that I jinx myself and things will go bad tomorrow. It makes my day more interesting.

Despite the test itself going well, I did run around a bit getting kids set up outside the lab to test. The two SPED teachers were in a meeting all day and they were scheduled to test with several kids. And one of the paras was gone. So there was some juggling. During the fourth grade test, two of the kids tested up in their room and I had to take two laptops up to them. There are already two laptops in the room but I completely forgot about them. I also never put the testing software on them so it wouldn't have mattered. But I forgot about them again about an hour later when the para called down to say one of the laptops was down to a 7% charge. It must have forgotten it was fully charged only an hour before. Anyway, the only place I could think of that had loose laptop charging cables was the SPED room. All the laptop carts have the cables zip-tied to the cart, and that is super inconvenient. So I went up to the SPED room, got down on the floor to get under the able and unplug the cord, and then took it up to the third floor. And as I walked in I saw the two room laptops, both of which were four feet away from the kid who's laptop was dying. And it died when I was two steps into the room. Instead of plugging in the cord I brought, I unplugged one of the room laptops and used that cord. Thankfully the laptop hadn't completely died, it just went into hibernation or whatever so when I plugged it in and hit the power button it resumed the test where the kid had left off. After that I went back down, got back on the floor to plug the SPED cord back in, and then went back to the lab to finish out the test in there.

During the fifth grade test we had the most juggling with kids outside the lab. Close to an equal number were out of the lab as were in the lab. We ended up getting it sorted and the kids in the lab got started a little late because I was in the SPED room and they had clicked on the wrong thing. And I realized while coming down from the SPED room that two of the kids in the lab had the wrong tickets, so they wouldn't have been able to get very far anyway.

The first test of the day also started slightly late because I was up distributing tickets for out-of-the-lab kids and hadn't put out the lab tickets yet. But everything worked out.

The last test of the day was sixth grade and they had a substitute teacher. Normally they will go back to the room when they're done but the sub didn't have anything in his plans about that so I just kept them in the lab. This isn't too much of a problem until more and more kids start getting done. Most had books to read and some had to go get one, but that only works for so long. They get especially anxious when the last fifteen or twenty minutes is spent waiting on one kid to finish. But everyone survived. Even Boys & Girls Club when I had to walk into the middle of their huddle in the office and tell them to whisper.

After school I went to Hobby Lobby to get yarn because I want to make a scarf for the first grade teacher who is retiring. I'm going with light purple yarn and I think I have picked out a pattern but I'll have to test it out first. From Hobby Lobby I went to the bank and then over to the gas station to get my Powerball tickets. I have officially switched to getting all my tickets for one drawing rather than spreading it out over the two weekly drawings. I even filled it out on the card I have them scan every week. Unfortunately there was a brand new guy working who threw the card away right after he scanned it. He also couldn't figure out how to apply the four dollars I won to the cost of the tickets I bought today. But whatever.

Tonight I did nothing. I watched YouTube videos and looked for art prints for my brother. I have kind of narrowed it down but not really. I would like to buy whichever ones sometime this week but who knows if that will happen. I also need to pay my hospital bill and that kind of money is going to make me a little wary of spending money for awhile.

Tomorrow there are only two assessments. So I'm going to need to find something to do. I haven't even started to make the sixth grade slideshow yet (minus getting all the pictures ready) but I already want to make one for the preschool and today I thought it would also be cool to make one using all the pictures I had submitted for the yearbook because very few of those will actually make it into the yearbook. I'll eventually get around to making at least one of those slideshows. Hopefully the sixth grade one since that is really the only one that counts.