October 15, 2014

Today I didn't do a single bit of cutting. Didn't even go anywhere near the big paper cutter. The disc with all the school pictures came in today so I spent my downtime playing with that. I started by uploading the pictures to Infinite Campus to update the old ones. Then I tried to make the seating charts that I made last year for substitute teachers so they can see who kids are. That really didn't work out. The pictures we got this year are a lower resolution so they are smaller and they are way too spaced out on the automatic seating chart. It just looked weird. Instead, I went back to the sub charts I made earlier this year in Publisher using pictures from last year. It was a bit of a pain going through and replacing all of those pictures but it ended up looking a lot better. I need to see if we can order a higher resolution CD though because I don't think they will look that good in the yearbook as they are. Also, as a whole, I don't think the pictures look as good this year. Last year everyone sat down but this year people stood up, maybe everyone, I don't know. So that might have been part of it. They just don't seem as uniform as they have in the past. Heads are different sizes, the framing is different, and some pictures have different lighting. It's kind of annoying.

The longest part of the picture project today was setting up my batch file so I didn't have to go through and individually change the names of all the photos. Last year they had a weird ID number. This year they were labeled with the kids' lunch numbers but it is easier to deal with them if they just have the names on them. So I exported the data fields from the disc and imported it into an Excel file. Then I used the bits of code I figured out last year to rename things and join things and then dropped it into a batch file, which is just saving a notepad file at a .bat file instead of a .txt file. Then when you click on it, it runs the code. And voila, all the pictures were renamed. It takes awhile to get it all set up but in the long run it save a lot of time.

Along with messing with pictures all day, things were pretty slow. I had several classes in the lab throughout the day but nothing noteworthy happened. As least that I can remember, which should speak to the lack of noteworthiness.

We had a character assembly today. This month's character trait is 'Responsibility'. And that's all I really have to say about that. I'm apparently not in a writing mood.

But I will tell about my Chipotle story. I could find a parking spot after work because everyone was at the bars watching the Royals game. I couldn't even find a spot behind Chipotle so I parked in the Chipotle parking lot and then walked over to Jimmy John's to get my mom's sandwich. Then went back to Chipotle. When I got up to the counter one of the girls tried to guess my burrito order and she got pretty close. Then when I got down to the register the girl there rang everything up and it came to just over thirteen dollars. It's usually around twenty dollars so I asked her if she got the tacos, because sometimes they don't realize I ordered a burrito and tacos. But she said she had got the tacos but wasn't going to worry about being a few dollars off because I was in there all the time. When I got home I looked at my receipt to see what was up. She rang me up for the real price of my burrito, which should be cheap because I don't get salsa or guacamole on it. Then she rang up a cheap price for the tacos, as if they barely had anything on them, even though they had everything on them. And I don't think she charged me for the side of guacamole. I occasionally get the real price for my burrito but usually the only deal I get is them not counting the extra charge for guacamole on the tacos because I don't get it on my burrito. So today was a nice change, even if I have more than made up for it by paying too much most of the time.

After all of that, my burrito was pretty delicious, and not just because it was cheap. After dinner we had strawberry-rhubarb pie and I showed my sister all of the school pictures and my mom and I told her about all the kids. We usually have stories about them, and I remember finding those stories incredibly boring when my mom was telling them to us when she worked there before I started. And I imagine my sister still feels the same way but I figured maybe if she could put a face to the names it would help. Probably not, but maybe.

When that was all done, and my sister had shown us a video on her phone, I headed over to the old house. And accomplished nothing. As I have said before, I really need to put some effort in. A lot of things are coming together at once now. I didn't even realize that a rough draft of our newspaper and PowerPoint for my first group project was supposed to be due on Saturday but apparently other people did and they complained because the the other class met the weekend before us so they had an extra week to work on the project, so the professor bumped our date back a week, which means it is due next weekend, during our face-to-face. That just means I'm going to put off finishing it for a little bit.

We had last week off from reading and a discussion post for my research class but we do have work this week, which I also kind of spaced. So I need to read the chapter, watch the video, and make my discussion post by Saturday. As well as continue to search for articles for our group project, because I haven't found anything yet. And the rest of my group can't do their stuff until I do my stuff.

And I still need to catch up on my reflective journal entries for the first class, because those have really gone nowhere, so I'm really behind. I need to come up with a better organizational system. Like a giant calendar hanging on the wall that I can write stuff on. I also need a better time management system. I really feel that things will be better when I have the internet at the new house so I don't have to drive all the way over to the old house to work, because I lose interest in work on the drive over. Next semester will be better. If I can survive this semester.