November 30, 2014

I slept in this morning and then spent awhile longer laying in bed, thinking over how I wanted to rewrite the reflective journal paragraph I wrote last night. I eventually came up with something and got up to type it out. It went a lot better than the one I wrote last night. I was also able to knock out two more paragraphs and finished the entry before lunch. I was pretty happy about that.

I wrote each entry in its own document so after lunch I went through and consolidated each entry into one document and then organized all of the references into alphabetical order. Tomorrow I will start on reading over everything and making any edits that I need to. I also need to start reading the chapters for my other class for the final discussion post.

I played some Minecraft today. I started making my map wall. The first try was a fail because I got my maps messed up. The second time was a little bit more of a success but I did kind of mess up near the end. And I think the maps are a little messed up on the wall because I had to rotate them but I forgot how many times I had to rotate them, so some of them probably aren't rotated correctly. I also ran out of room even though my wall is pretty big. I need to continue playing around with it when I have more time.

Over the course of the day I ended up finding seventeen baby spiders in my bathroom on the ceiling and wall above the mirror. I managed to catch them all and put them outside. Originally I caught eight and was hoping that was all of them but on subsequent trips to the bathroom I found more. Maybe there were only seventeen. Fingers crossed.

November 29, 2014

Waking up this morning sucked. I ended up staying up a little later after I got home because I started watching a Ricky Gervais special on TV. Always funny but I probably should have just gone to sleep. Live and learn.

I woke up with a headache behind my left eye, which seems to be a popular spot for my headaches recently. It stuck with me for the rest of the morning and I spent a lot of the first part of my day at work sitting in the dark with my eyes closed. Thankfully it eventually went away.

After I had recovered, I got a start on my last reflective journal entry. I did a lot of reading in my textbook as well as a bunch of online articles I had saved about net neutrality. By the end of my shift I had managed about 500 words on net neutrality. Not a bad start.

I spent my breaks playing a bit of Minecraft. I had it running in the background the whole time so my crops and trees would grow. So when I needed a break I would just run around and harvest everything and then go back to reading and writing. I decided I want to make a giant wall map in the basement of my house. Or maybe in a cool room near the beginning of the cave beneath my basement because I don't know how big of a map I will actually need in the end. I'm surrounded by a lot of ocean.

Near the end of my shift I was still trying to read but kept getting distracted by thoughts of having Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner. This distraction lead to less than stellar reading comprehension so took another break and texted my friend about my thoughts of food. She asked if I was thinking of my dinner in a good way or in a “God I'm so full” way. And my response was “The former, but in half an hour I plan on partaking in a journey that will lead me to the latter.” I was instantly a fan of that response.

And speaking of dinner, it was delicious. I also finally finished the piece of chocolate pie I started eating on Thursday but wasn't able to finish because I had too much for dinner. My sister knocked the chocolate pie out of the park this year. It is really good.

After dinner I dragged the Christmas tree up from the basement and then helped my mom put it together. It was heavy as hell but it went together easily so I can't complain too much.

When I was done with that I tried to work on my reflective journal entry. I got distracted by a Foo Fighters documentary and I really didn't know what I wanted to write about after the net neutrality thing. I threw together another paragraph but I'm pretty sure I'll have to delete it and start again tomorrow because it really felt disjointed as I was trying to string it together. So that's something to look forward to tomorrow. But I should be able to wrap it up tomorrow. Then I'll be able to spend the week editing the whole thing and have it ready by Friday. I'm getting there.

November 28, 2014

Today was one of those exciting days. I slept in and then spent the next several hours reading a textbook and taking notes on potential topics for my last reflective journal entry. I still haven't started writing though. I took a break for lunch and had Thanksgiving leftovers. I took another break to set up the new TV my mom got for her bedroom. She's been using a small old one and had mentioned wanting to get a bigger one. I've also been looking at TVs so I was going to show her those. I put my 24” monitor in her room just to see what it looked like, and it looked tiny, so I was going to recommend at least a 32” TV. But before I could tell her this she came home with a 32” TV she got on sale at Target today. I was still debating on the size I wanted for my room so after putting hers together I took it down to my room to see what it would look like. I decided that a 32” would be plenty big enough. I was leaning that way but the 40” was also tempting. I also put the TV on the mantel above the fireplace downstairs to get an idea for a TV there and we both decided that we'd need at least a 40” up there so it didn't look tiny.

After all of that I ended up heading over to the old house so I could buy my TV. It will be here sometime next week. Tuesday, I think. I'm kind of excited about it. Until we get the internet at the new house I'll still have my 24” monitor in my room so I can have my laptop hooked up to either that or the new TV and watch TV on the other one.

Tonight for dinner I had the second half of my Chipotle burrito, rather than Thanksgiving leftovers, just so I wouldn't have to worry about it later. Then I went to work, where I split my time between cleaning theaters and reading a textbook. I'm still not sure how I want to start my reflective journal entry. There are so many things to talk about. I'm leaning toward starting with net neutrality. That is a topic that I could probably right the entire entry over but I'd like to squeeze in some other stuff as well. I'll figure it out. I still have more to read but tomorrow I need to actually start writing. I want to be done this weekend so I have enough time to go back and edit. I will also have the final reading and discussion post to do for my other class so it would be nice not to have too much work to do on my reflective journal. I also hope that in the editing process I don't come across something completely awful that doesn't make any sense. Thankfully, most of my entries are pushing the upper limit of 1000 words so I have some wiggle room if I need to cut something out. Although this could also be a bad thing if I find something that I need to expand on a little more. I'll find out later in the week.

I ended my night by playing Minecraft because my brain was a little fried and I needed a break. We didn't have any late shows tonight so I got off a little after 1:30AM. Late, of course, but it could have been worse.

November 27, 2014

I slept in and then spent the rest of my morning, and a lot of my afternoon, sort of reading through my textbook and sort of watching TV. My attention was very divided. I learned that there is a TV series based on The Transporter movie franchise. I'm a big fan of those movie because Jason Statham is a badass and the movies were perfectly cheesy. Especially the first one. The TV series is obviously not as good as the movies but it is decent. The lead actor reminds me of Sting, the singer, not the wrestler, so I couldn't really believe him as a transporter. I kept waiting for him to break out in song. Another slightly annoying thing about the series is that it was originally made for a channel that allowed cursing and nudity because there are a lot of curse words that get muted and the occasional blurred nudity.

Speaking of cheesy things, while watching The Transporter I kept seeing commercials for the upcoming TV series based on The Librarian movie series, which were super cheesy but I really liked them. The show, called The Librarians, looks to be even more cheesy than the movies, which I'm not against, and I know that I like at least a few of the actors in it. Now I just need to remember to watch it.

Going back to reading my textbook, I kind of got a start on my last reflective journal entry. I started reading through the chapter and writing down potential things I want to talk about. One of which is net neutrality, which I learned some new things about. The textbook came out four years ago and it is interesting to see how topical this particular chapter has become as of late. I'm not exactly sure yet how I'm going to tie it into libraries and librarianship but I'll figure it out. I'm still on track to have the entry finished this weekend so I can spend next week editing all my entries and putting it all together. I got a hundred percent on my infographic assignment, which I believe currently gives me a hundred percent in the class. So as long as I'm not completely off-base with how I've been doing my reflective journal entries, I should be able to get an 'A' in the class. I'm okay with that.

For dinner tonight I actually contributed for the first time in Thanksgiving history. I used the toaster oven I got from my grandma's house and made Brussels sprouts. It was my first time using a toaster oven but it turned out to be just like a tiny oven and everything worked out great. I would say the Brussels sprouts were probably the best I've ever made. I took a picture of them and tonight I emailed my grandma and included the picture. She hates Brussels sprouts but I wanted to tell her about me contributing to the dinner and that I used her toaster oven. And the picture looked delicious, I think even if you don't like Brussels sprouts.

As for the rest of the dinner, it was also really good. I had green bean casserole with tater tots, mashed potatoes with gravy, stuffing, rolls, cornbread muffins, deviled eggs, and half a piece of chocolate pie. I tried for a whole piece but I ate way too much during dinner and I just couldn't force myself to finish the piece of pie. I don't know that I have ever eaten to the point of hurting like that before. Now that I have recovered I can say that it was worth it because all the food was really good.

Tonight I watched YouTube videos, clicked around the internet, and researched TVs. I'm still vacillating between getting a 32” and a 40”. Right after becoming fully convinced I want the one size I go back to thinking I want the other size. I want to make my decision by tomorrow because the TVs I'm looking at dropped in price this week and I don't want to wait too long and have the prices go back up. So we'll see.

November 26, 2014

I was late to bed last night and early to rise this morning because the dish guy was coming to give us cable. Originally he was coming between 8:00AM and 12:00PM. That was then refined to 8:45AM. And then it was even later because five minutes away turned into closer to twenty or thirty minutes because he got lost. His GPS didn't have the street. No surprise there considering we don't exist to the cable company either.

He set up a temporary pole outside to put the dish on and someone will come around in the next week or so to put in the real thing, that way it won't have to be attached to the house. He was also able to connect to the cable already on the outside of the house so he didn't need to drill any holes or run any cable. That sped up the process quite a bit. It still took over two hours and a lot of that was updating and setting up the wireless receivers. Rather than picking the four rooms we wanted wired we went with a wireless option for the three rooms other than the living room so in the future if we change our mind, we can just move the wireless receiver to that room. Now we just need the internet.

After the dish guy left I had lunch and then went down to my room to work on my reflective journal entry. I ended up finding an easy listening music channel on TV and taking a nap. And then I worked on my reflective journal entry. I made a little progress and was able to finish it up after dinner. I ended with a bit of a rant about Amazon offering a monthly subscription for ebooks. Like a library that you have to pay for. People act like it is a great thing when they could just go to the library for free. My suggestion is a campaign, kind of “Got Milk?”, to remind people that libraries exist and they offer a lot of what Amazon offers but they do it for free.

Tonight was Chipotle night and for the first time in awhile they actually listened to me when I asked for extra rice and beans. And then I got sofritas on top of that so my burrito was humongous. That would have been nice on a week that didn't include Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving leftovers.

After dinner I showed my sister LEGO: Pirates of the Caribbean because she was looking at Little Big Planet and saw the LEGO games recommended and wondered what they were like. Luckily I happened to have a few of the games downloaded on my laptop. She played that for a little bit and then I showed her my latest Minecraft world and letter her play around in that for awhile. Her run ended in death by zombie while I was having her move some meat down to her hotbar. Thankfully I have keepInventory on so I didn't need to worry about making it all the way back to the far off island we had traveled to.

I ended my night by clicking around the internet and watching YouTube videos. Not a bad way to spend a night, in my opinion.

Tomorrow I will be attempting to participate in Thanksgiving for the first time. My contribution is going to be Brussels sprouts. I haven't made them in quite awhile and my main concern is that I am going to try and make them in the toaster oven I got from my grandma's house. I've never used a toaster oven before. I think it will go alright but even if it doesn't, the meal isn't dependent on the outcome of my Brussels sprouts, so the world isn't going to end or anything.

November 24, 2014

I helped out with second grade reading groups this morning. Really I just watched one group of kids color turkeys and a couple other groups cut out words and glue them on a page. At one point one of the kids was confused about silent “e” words so they asked the parent helper in the room and it was like seeing a live interpretation of Who's On First. The mother kept trying to explain it but the kid just wasn't getting it. All I could do was stand back and laugh because it was really funny.

The second grade teacher had another doctor appointment today so a para and I were in charge of the kids when the teacher dropped them off at the lab. The teacher wrote “Cool Math” up on the board and the idea was that if the class got too loud than the para and I would erase letters off the board. If they made it to the last ten minutes of lab and there were still letters on the board than they would get to go to Cool Math. We got down to “Cool M” but overall they were pretty well behaved. Normally they leave the lab at 11:15AM so I told them to log off and line up at that time. And then the para mentioned that they were actually supposed to stay until 11:25AM and go straight out to recess. So even though all but one or two of the kids had already logged off I told them “just kidding” and had them log back in and go back to playing games. Some of the kids groaned about having just logged off but when I told them the quicker they got back on the more time they would have to play games, they changed their tune. Then, tent minutes later I had them log off for real and we went back to the classroom so they could get their coats and cold lunches if they had them and head out to lunch recess.

I passed the other second grade teacher and she asked me if I was supposed to be watching the kids because her class was also outside and there weren't any recess supervisors or whatever they're called. I said I had no clue what was going on but I went down to the office to check. All they knew was that the guy who usually comes wasn't coming in today. So I went down to the lunchroom to find the acting principal, also known as one of the kindergarten teachers, and asked him. He said the regular dude had a replacement and by the time I made it down to the lunchroom she was already outside. So all was good.

One of the third grade classes came to the lab this morning just so the teacher could see what their typing ability was. They have to write on the state assessment this year and the teacher just found out about this. There was a really wide range of skills. I don't know that any of them used home row but some were fairly “fast”, average between five and nine words a minute. And then there were kids who averaged around two words a minute. I don't really think the typing thing is fair for the younger kids on the assessment. It is going to be an indicator of their typing ability much more than their ability to form a well thought out point.

I had already clocked out and was about to eat lunch when one of the paras came down to ask for my help with a projector. I went up and messed around with it for about twenty minutes and didn't get anywhere with it. I finally went down and looked up a manual online while I ate my lunch. I went back up later in the afternoon to grab the projector so I could play with it down in the lab and not interrupt the group of kids she had in her room. The manual ended up not really being much help so I ended up just doing a factory reset on it and everything started working just fine. That took me maybe two minutes once I got the projector turned on. Should have done that to start with.

This afternoon I had one of the kindergarten classes because the teacher was the acting principal and whenever he has a sub he generally tries to get into the computer lab if it isn't already his day. That's just thirty minutes less that he doesn't have to worry about planning something so I would probably do the same thing.

Tonight I started reading over the chapter for my next reflective journal entry and formulating some ideas. I should be able to make a decent start on it tomorrow. Going back to what I mentioned yesterday about personal library organization in a virtual environment, I just thought about the Oculus Rift. There is definitely some potential there. Actually being able to walk around and browse in a virtual space would be a lot nicer than scrolling through a list. When I have an urge to read a history book but have no idea which one, I like to go to the bookstore and just wander around in the history section until something grabs my attention. It would be cook to be able to recreate that because it is lacking when browsing an online catalog. Pictures of book covers just aren't the same.

Before coming over to use the internet, I briefly finished putting together a couple bar stools that my mom started. The foot part was kind of tricky.

Tomorrow is the last day of the work week. Until I go work at the theater on Friday and Saturday. Can't wait for that. In the mean time, I'll be working on my reflective journal. I'm almost there.

November 23, 2014

I got to sleep in a little this morning, not as much as I would have liked but there was work to be done. And I eventually got around to doing that. I think it might have been after lunch before I actually typed anything but by the end of the day I was able to finish my fifth reflective journal entry. Only two more to go. And as soon as I finish the next one I'll be all caught up because technically I should be on the seventh one at the moment. Almost there.

During lunch I watched the A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and The Mayflower Voyages (because it was on the same disc). A Charlie Brown Thankgiving always reminds me of my grandma and grandpa because I remember watching it over at their house when I was kid. And we watched it while eating air-pop popcorn because they eat popcorn in the movie. In The Mayflower Voyages I learned that the average speed of the Mayflower was two miles an hour. I don't know how accurate that is, and I don't want to look it up because I want to believe that ridiculously slow speed.

In my reading about libraries today I learned how easily the organization of materials in the library can become biased. Even the Dewey Decimal System has been accused of being preferentially biased toward Western cultures. In my journal I argued that the organization of materials will always be biased by some degree for the same reason that all research is biased, because a human is behind it and just by virtue of being alive in a certain place at a certain time in history, a person becomes biased. My offhand solution was that someday libraries will be able to be modeled virtually and people can organize them however they see fit. I think that is an interesting idea.

November 22, 2014

I got to bed shortly before 3:30AM last night and I was up around 9:00AM. That kind of sucked. I could have stayed in bed for at least five more hours. Wouldn't have minded a bit.

Work today was uneventful, which is not surprising considering I spent most of the day upstairs by myself. I managed to finish my fourth reflective journal entry and got over two-hundred words on the fifth entry. Progress. Slowly but surely. I spent a lot of time reading the textbook today but probably spent considerably more time just sitting and thinking, trying to come up with a line of reasoning that would make sense. Lets hope the professor agrees with what I came up with.

Speaking of, I got twenty out of twenty on my newspaper group project. That is great news but it also probably means my partner got twenty out of twenty. Undeserved, I might add.

During my breaking from writing and thinking, I played some Minecraft. I have set up animal pens near my house for sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens. The worst part about survival is needing food because I'm not a fan of killing the animals. Especially the pigs because they grunt when you do it. My small garden is also slowly getting bigger. I finally got enough leather to make a backpack but I wanted a green backpack so I set off in a boat to see if I could find a cactus for dye. This was near the end of my shift and I had to end things after finding a big cool island with stratified brown colors. At least I'm assuming it is an island. I can't remember. It was a fairly impromptu adventure so I didn't really bring much and ended up having to dig myself a hole to hide in. Maybe tomorrow if I can finish the fifth reflective journal entry I'll jump back in and continue my journey.

After dinner I read a bit of the chapter I'll be referencing next in that journal entry and then I headed to the old house. I started out watching YouTube videos but have spent the last couple of hours watching Sark and APL livestream Sniper Elite 3. Always an entertaining stream.

I am also currently downloading Tera. I haven't played in forever but there is a new expansion coming out. I don't think I'm a high enough level to actually experience it but they are offering a free white tiger mount if you log in before December 15^th and I want the mount. Hopefully it is not level restricted.

Tomorrow the plan is to hunker down and knock out my fifth reflective journal entry. And some laundry. If the fifth entry goes smoothly I might feel motivated enough to start the sixth one. Regardless, I want to finish the sixth and seventh this coming week so I will have the next week to read back over everything and make final edits before turning it in on the 5^th. Everything is going according to plan.

November 21, 2014

I got to sleep in this morning and it was glorious. I woke up the first time kind of early and I was perfectly snuggled into my pillows and blankets and I knew I didn't actually have to get up so I just got to lay there and enjoy being entirely comfortable. Then I fell back to sleep. Sleeping in has to be in the top five of the best things ever.

After getting up I watched the video lecture for this week and read the assigned chapters before writing my discussion post. This week the topic was literature reviews and I found it pretty informative. I had to write at least a few literature reviews in college and I don't remember ever getting much instruction on how to do them. I think mine turned into expanded annotated bibliographies, which isn't great. In one of the chapters the author said the paper should flow from topic to topic, not citation to citation. That would have been good advice back in college.

We were asked to come up with why literature reviews may be important to librarians and after thinking about it for awhile I started to appreciate literature reviews for the abundance of information packed into a small space. Librarians can't be experts in everything but they are experts at finding and evaluating information. If a librarian is asked about a topic or a field they have little knowledge of, they can look up a literature review and get a good overview of the current state of the the topic or field. They can then use that as a jumping off point, even using some of the articles from the literature review, to dig deeper and find a good answer. This would be way more efficient than looking for individual articles right off the bat.

I added a little bit to my latest reflective journal entry but didn't make very much progress. I continued working on it when I got to the theater. I made decent progress but wasn't able to finish it. Intellectual property requires a lot of thought, and I did a lot of thinking, but it is hard to put that into coherent sentences at one o'clock in the morning, even after sleeping in this morning.

We had a late night showing of Mockingjay which kept me at the theater almost 2:45AM. Thank goodness once again for getting to sleep in this morning. Working so late after being up since six o'clock in the morning is awful. After deciding to call it a night on writing for school, I switched to Minecraft. Progress is slowly being made on my survival island.

And lastly, it was incredibly foggy this evening on my drive to work. My favorite part about fog is pretending I'm in an old school video game with a crappy render distance.

November 20, 2014

I didn't start my morning by dumping a bag of chips on the ground while making my lunch, so that was nice.

This morning at work I was supposed to help out with kindergarten literacy centers but there were student teachers in the room so I wasn't needed. I went into the other room, which was wrapping up literacy centers to see if I could at least move the baskets over but that wasn't needed either. Just so my walk to the other side of the building wasn't entirely pointless I helped move the tables back to the right spot. The teacher saw me doing that and asked if I had been there the whole time and I made a comment about how I just showed up to the move the tables. He said that he didn't know that table moving was a service I offered and I told him it was a passion of mine. On my way back to the lab I ended up walking with one of the kindergarten parents and she told me that if I ever wanted to move more furniture she had a few things I could move. That was pretty funny.

I had one of the first grade classes in the lab before lunch and I had a good conversation with the teacher, as always. We are very similar when it comes to how we handled our academic lives. Very much into procrastination and doing just enough to get a good grade. We also talked about books, because her and her husband wanted to get rid of all the clutter. He ended up pulling out her books and she ended up pulling out his books, so they ended up not getting rid of any books. Then we talked about high school reunions and her son (who's my age) and other things.

After lunch I helped a second grader take a Reading Counts test. He was the one from yesterday who ended up having his computer unplugged in the middle of his test. Today he was testing over a different book and I didn't see the book but I did see that he liked the book, so he couldn't have done too bad on the test.

At 12:45PM I clocked out and headed up to the high school for my meeting about being a trainer of teachers for Compass Learning. I parked across the street from the high school and as I was about to cross the street I heard someone say my name. I paused, and there was a car that had stopped for me so I waved them along (and they took awhile to figure that out) and looked to see who said my name. Turns out it was a girl from the theater. She said she had just gotten back from student teaching. Or maybe she was going to student teach. I'm not too sure but she was headed to the high school so we walked and talked. When we got up to the building we were greeted by my friend's sister, who is a senior this year. I actually saw her earlier today because she came to the school to give a presentation to one of the classes about an animal. I'm not exactly sure why she was standing out in front of the high school but whatever.

After I signed in I followed a few other people who were also going to the meeting. The high school really looks nothing like it did when I went there but I think the room we were in used to be a bathroom. Like they knocked out the walls separating the boys and girls bathrooms and created a small computer lab. I could be wrong but there is no way to tell. Which is a lie but I'm not going to look into it any further.

The meeting was actually really informative. I'm not used to going to meetings and actually learning things. It's weird. It makes me actually want to get more involved with the program and get teachers to use it more productively, not just as a way to fill time. I would say most teachers do use it productively at our school but improvements can always be made. I also learned different reports I can run to track progress and other things. I'm going to have to try some things out. I'm glad the first grade teacher put my name out there to become a trainer because I already help teachers out with Compass Learning and it is nice to actually learn a few things the official way rather than having to figure things out myself when a teacher asks me a question.

The meeting ended up wrapping up around 3:15PM instead of 4:00PM so I headed back to work. I got there when third grade was in the lab and found out one of the kids hadn't been able to log into Type to Learn 4. This is the same kid who wasn't able to get in last time and I ended up having to add him in and add another number to his lunch number (which is the username) because his lunch number was already being used. That happened earlier in the year and I discovered that at least on one occasion it was because some other random kid in another school was already using the number. Even though lunch numbers are unique. So after the class left the lab last time I went through, school by school, and ended up finding the kid at the school he was at earlier in the year. Had I known which school he was at earlier in the year I would have started there but whatever. I transferred him to our school and added him to the right class, and thought all was good. Apparently not.

I sat down and logged into Type To Learn 4 and saw the kid and added him to the class and then tried logging in as him but it said his account was inactive. I went back in and tried creating a different account for him and then tried other things and went around and around trying different things. And then it turned out I was an idiot. I found a little checkbox that would allow me to see the inactive students and the kid popped back up. Then I noticed there was a checkbox next to each kid that you could check to make a kid inactive. I had clicked it accidentally when I was trying to highlight the kid and save my changes. So I unchecked that box, saved it, and was able to log in as the kid. Success.

Today I popped the battery off my motherboard and awhile later I was able to check it with my multimeter and the voltage seemed to be good. That kind of sucks because that pretty much means my motherboard crapped out. I don't know if I had a warranty on it but the ones I saw online were three years and I hit the three year mark about five months ago. So I would have been screwed anyway. Now I need to start researching motherboards. Or rather, finish my schoolwork for the semester and then research motherboards. The hardest part will be figuring out which one will be compatible with my CPU. It seems confusing but I'm sure I can figure it out. The next hardest part will be replacing the motherboard because everything is attached to the motherboard so I will have to take everything apart and then put it all back together. Again, I'm sure I can figure it out.

Tonight I watched the Neebs livestream and made no real progress on my reflective journal entry. I thought about it a lot and have some ideas for where I want to go with it but need to actually write it. I'm getting a grade based on the thoughts once they are in word form, not when they're still in my head.

I also need to read the chapters and watch the lecture video for this week and write a discussion post by Sunday. I keep forgetting that. I work at the theater tomorrow night but don't have to work at the school so maybe during the day I can knock out the reading and the video and write my discussion post. And finish up the reflective journal entry. I would like to finish the one I'm on and write another one over the weekend. At this point that seems like a pretty lofty goal considering how long the current one has drawn out.

Now I'm going to call it a night, at least in terms of writing this entry.

November 19, 2014

There were things I remembered after I wrote my last entry and I wrote them down, but I wrote them down on my desktop computer and I am writing this on my laptop. Thank goodness I have a laptop.

At the moment I am not in the mood to write so I will probably neglect things I otherwise would have written about. We'll see how things turn out.

The second grade classes came to the lab this morning. One of them came first thing but I can't remember if they came back at their regular time. I don't think they did, which would explain why they came early, but I can't really remember.

In my free time today I got a decent start on my latest reflective journal entry. I referenced a book written by the dude who wrote the forward to the case study book that the entry is based on, so that's cool.

Right after I clocked out for lunch and made it back to the lab a few second graders showed up and wanted to take a Reading Counts test. I think two of them had earlier tried books that weren't in the system, so they had new books and were good to go. The third kid was just trying to get out of class I think. Or she was just clueless. Earlier in the morning she had taken a test and gotten all the questions right. She came back with the same book and wanted to take the test again. I explained to her in several different ways why that wouldn't work. Including that it didn't make any sense to take a test you had just taken and hadn't missed any questions. So she tried to find a book she said she had read but didn't have the book so she wasn't able to find it. I told her to just go back to the room and she said she was going to find another book. I told her that she wasn't going to do that because she had already passed a test and didn't need to take another one. We went back and forth with me having to get progressively more forceful in telling her to go back to the room and stay there. She came back a few minutes later with another book that she said she had read. She obviously hadn't because it was above her reading level but I didn't have to call her out on it because the kid that was still in there called her out on it and I left them to argue because I had already missed almost twenty minutes of my thirty minute lunch. They left a little while later. I eventually had to clock back in and then come back to the room to finish my lunch.

This afternoon I had both fifth grade classes in the lab, both uneventful, and spent the rest of my time working on my reflective journal entry.

After work I went and picked up Chipotle and Jimmy John's and then stopped at the grocery store before heading to the old house. I needed to buy a bag of potato chips because this morning I opened a new bag, set it on the counter, and it immediately tipped over and fell on the floor, spilling over half of the chips on the ground. And I couldn't find the broom so I just kind of shoveled them up with a dustpan. It was a good start to my day. So I bought a new bag. I also got sourdough bread and fake hamburger for my Thanksgiving green bean casserole. I already have the MorningStar brand but the Boca brand works better I think.

When I got to the old house my computer was on but the monitors were off and my mouse and keyboard weren't lit up. After a lot of messing around I couldn't resolve the situation. Last night when I put the computer to sleep, Shut Down was the first option because there was apparently an update but I skipped over that to the Sleep option. Sometimes that works and other times the computer will install the update later when I'm not around. I think that is what happened but then something happened because it isn't working right now. The computer turns on, the fans come on and the lights on the fans light up, but none of the USB ports work or any of the ports on the back. So my guess is the motherboard. That kind of sucks. Now I need to start researching motherboards. I don't really want to spend the money on a new motherboard, and I'm going to continue trying other things before I spend the money, but I need my PC.

I'm thankful I have my laptop though so I can still work on school stuff. It has an HDMI port so I plugged that into my 32” TV/monitor and I dug out a VGA cable and plugged that into one of my 24” monitors, so I still have three monitors going, so it is kind of the same, but I know it's not the same. I'm glad my laptop is a beast and can handle all the extra load. I have so many tabs open on each monitor right now, along with YouTube going and Spotify.

Going back a bit, Chipotle night was good. I got sofritas again. Still not sure if that is going to become a thing but it is still novel. After dinner we sat around and talked for awhile and then I became an amateur electrician. Two days in a row the dogs managed to turn off the lights in the room we put them in during the day. My mom bought a new light switch that will hopefully be harder for them to turn off. I kind of think it will be easier but we'll find out. It was a bit of a struggle, first finding the the right breaker to turn off. I don't know if I needed to turn off the breaker but I figured better safe than sorry. Even with that my mom felt a little buzz at one point so there is a chance it didn't make a difference. The next hurdle was getting the wires out of the old switch. But then it was smooth sailing and the new light switch works, so I did something right. Even if the dogs manage to accidentally turn it off it should be a lot easier for them to accidentally turn it back on compared to the old switch. And we put a night light in there just case.

And now I have written way more than I intended to write. I'm going to call it a night.

November 18, 2014

I forgot that yesterday I stopped by the urologist's office after work to figure out when my next appointment is. I scheduled it almost six months ago after my surgery and had a card and everything but during the move it disappeared. I think I put it in a super safe place and then it turned out to be a little too safe. Turns out the appointment isn't until the end of December, so I'm good. I thought it was much earlier in December.

This morning I'm sure I did some things but I can't really remember. Eventually I went down and helped with kindergarten literacy centers. That was a bit truncated because immediately after we had an assembly. And then I went back to not really doing anything.

This entry is very distracted.

I went out to the preschool today and figured out their SMART board. Last week their trial of the software ran out and I remembered that an older version of the software is free. I helped one of the teachers get it figured out and today I got it working for the other one. One of the paras was trying to get it working and my advice was helpful but at the time I didn't think to run the installation of the software as an administrator. But after I did that, all was good.

I kind of worked on my next reflective journal entry, reading a bit in the case study book because that is what the entry is based on. I think I'm going to talk briefly about the importance of information ethics and then talk about intellectual freedom and privacy. The reading covers other things, because it is over almost one hundred pages, but I would like to go more in depth on a couple things rather than trying to cover everything. So I didn't make much progress on the entry, only a couple ideas and the opening sentence. It's a start.

Tonight there was an impromptu Neebs livestream, which is the main reason I'm only halfway paying attention to writing this. And I'm going to stop writing now because of that reason. And because it is almost ten o'clock and I need to call it a night.

November 17, 2014

The first time I woke up this morning, all was well. Ten minutes later, I woke up with a sharp headache behind my left eye. After some ibuprofen the headache eventually subsided by mid-morning. Thankfully.

During second grade reading groups this morning there was a very pleasant kid. I didn't have him during my first two groups but I had the opportunity for the last group. First he wouldn't work because someone was in his seat, even though it wasn't really his seat, it was just the seat he wanted to sit in. Then he didn't want to work on the worksheets so he threw them on the ground. Then he demanded the mother helping or I clean off the desk he was at so he had room to work. Then he demanded that I sharpen his pencil. I must say, none of his demands were met. He would not make a very good hostage taker. Whenever we would ask him a question he would just point at one of his worksheets where he had written “NO!!!!”. He had apparently acted the same way in his first group. What a peach.

Later in the morning when that class came to the lab, I was put in charge because the teacher had to go to a doctor appointment. Thankfully the class behaved better normal and no one misbehaved. From the lab I was supposed to lead them outside for lunch recess but we ended up having indoor recess because of the cold. There is a Boys & Girls Club guy who is a recess supervisor at lunch but he was in the other second grade room and didn't actually pop over to our room until it was time for the kids to clean up. So it is a good thing I decided to stay so the kids weren't left on their own. I ended up playing Connect Four with one of the kids. I let him win the first game and then accidentally won the two games after that. I had no reason for the placement of any of my pieces and it ended up working out for me. He was a really good sport about it and even said “good game” afterward, which was surprising and pretty cool.

We got the higher resolution student pictures in today, which included the retake pictures, so I spent a little while today renaming all of those and remaking my sub charts. I then printed off a copy of the sub charts and took them down to the library along with the new picture CD (the low-res one because she doesn't need big pictures) so she could update her library system. She came down to the lab a little while later so I could help her do that. Last year it was a bit of a pain because we didn't have the picture CD and I had to figure out how the files needed to be named for her system and then I think rename the ones I had. Or find the right ones and get the folder sorted out. I can't remember. But it was a pain in the butt. This year it was super simple. We just dragged the image folder to her desktop, turned it into a ZIP file, and then imported it into her system. Super easy.

I ended up not having any classes in the lab this afternoon so I made a little progress on my latest reflective journal entry. I think I added a paragraph. I also emailed one of the researchers for the group that did library anxiety because I wanted to reference one of their articles. She sent me the article tonight, which was really nice of her. Tonight after dinner I finished writing the entry, including the reference to the article, but it was before the article, so I need to go back and add the author. I should have finished that entry, my third, last week but I wouldn't have had the idea for the library anxiety thing so it all worked out. Sometimes I feel like some of my ideas just can't be rushed, which is why procrastination becomes a thing. If I didn't procrastinate, at least in terms of writing, I would end up with an inferior product.

Speaking of articles, sort of, I got 38/40 on my annotated bibliographies. That is apparently half a point lower than the highest score and a little over a point above the average. Not bad.

Now, going back to the reflective journal entries. Now that I have finished up the third one, I have four more to go. I would like to finish the next two this week. I don't actually remember what they are over but I'm going to start on the fourth one tomorrow. I really hope I am in the ballpark for what the teacher is looking for because I never got around to sending him an example. And at this point I'm a little afraid to because if I am way off base I'm kind of screwed. So I'm just going to continue operating under the assumption that I am doing a decent job. And hope that I am not working under false assumption.

It is now almost ten o'clock and I've got a headache so I'm going to call it a night.

November 16, 2014

Today was uneventful. I slept in, which was great. And then I proceeded to not get anything accomplished. I added maybe a paragraph to the reflective journal entry I'm working on and I composed an email to Cox because they suck but I haven't actually sent it yet, because Cox sucks and I don't have the internet. I'm going to try email and forums and maybe twitter and anything else I can come up with. The people are really nice in the store but that doesn't translate into action of any sort, so other routes are required.

I also spent some time taking a picture of a teeny tiny black spot on the floor of my shower because I couldn't tell what it was. Turns out it is a tiny puncture in the floor with a large scratch on either side of it. Who knows if that will eventually compromise the integrity of the tub. I also took pictures of the crack in my bathroom floor. It started on on one tile but it has now progressed across two other tiles. Super great.

I played a little Minecraft today because I was making no progress on my reflective journal entry. I am slowly expanding my island with dirt and exploring the caves beneath. I miss Minecraft. I don't miss the knock-back ability of the skeleton's in the game. It is often impossible to get anywhere near them because they have incredible accuracy and every hit knocks you back far enough to negate any forward progress you may have made. It is supper annoying.

My sister came over for dinner. We had Sonic and I was supposed to get a breakfast toaster without meat or cheese. They managed to put both on there. You had one job Sonic. After dinner I came over to the old house because that is where the internet is and I wanted to watch some YouTube videos. That has been a success. But now I'm going to head back to the new house. I might end up playing a little more Minecraft because I'm not really tired yet. Or maybe add another paragraph to my reflective journal entry. But probably not.

November 15, 2014

Waking up this morning was rough. Not necessarily because I was incredibly groggy but I just didn't want to get up. I did eventually though.

This morning we tore through presentations. The only topics I can remember at the moment are library anxiety and digital humanities, both of which were interesting. There ended up being two different groups covering digital humanities and it sounded like a pretty interesting topic. I spoke with one of the researchers for the first group and he sent me his annotated bibliography so at some point in the future I can look into the topic a little more. Both groups mentioned quotes from Stephen Ramsay that other researchers had quotes but neither group was able to find any articles by Ramsay. I did some searching and found several different things, including his blog, articles, videos, and book chapters, so I sent that to the guy who sent me the annotated bibliography. He may have already been aware of that stuff but I figured I'd send it his way just in case.

My group's presenter ended up going last and other than speaking pretty quietly I think she did a pretty good job. I had to go up at the end to talk about the research process and I did not do a very good job. Once again I kind of just blacked out while I was talking and I don't think I mentioned half of the things I had planned on talking about. I probably should have written stuff down. Oh well. We'll say I was just going fast because we were trying to wrap things up and go home.

Normally class would have gone until five o'clock but we managed it by 1:30PM. We ended up not getting that much snow. The estimates were between one and five inches and in the end, I think one inch might have been pushing it. By the time we left it had pretty much cleared away. We probably could have stayed longer but I think leaving early was out of consideration for the people having to travel a long way back home and the potential for more snow coming later. It was also nice being able to drive home when it was still light outside.

Before heading out of town I made my now traditional stop at Spangles and then headed out of town and back home without incident. When I got home I wanted to do all the different things but in the end I settled on doing laundry and playing Minecraft. I needed a break from school stuff. Tomorrow I should be able to finish up the reflective journal entry I started the other day. I think it is the third one if I remember correctly. That is my goal anyway. We'll see what happens. I also plan on sleeping in. That is really my main goal. I can't wait to sleep in. I wouldn't mind staying in bed all day. I would be completely on board with that.

November 14, 2014

I forgot to mention a couple things last night.  First, there is a third grader who I get in hand slapping “fights” with.  This started last year when he was in second grade.  Last year his thing was to call me over, ask me to put my hand out, and then he’d swat it away and say “Get your hands off me.”  This turned into the hand slapping “fights”.  Yesterday in the computer lab one of his classmates asked him what we were doing and he explained that we were archenemies.  This was new to me but I went with it.  This is also the same kid who says “Give me candy” in a deep voice every time he sees my mom, which is a throwback to last year when she was playing a game with a group of kids that involved candy.

Also from yesterday, after school I was on my way to clock out and then head to the book fair when I ran into one of the fifth grade teachers.  We ended up having two entirely different conversations at the same time, each oblivious to the fact that the other person was talking about something different.  Essentially we were both giving each other crap for not being in the lab.  Her class normally comes down on Wednesday morning but last week they came in the afternoon because she had student teachers that needed to teach a lesson.  She told me it would be the same for this week so I ended up going down for second grade reading groups that morning (something I normally don’t do because the second grade teacher usually has student teachers on Wednesday but this week she had them on Monday).  It turns out the fifth grade teacher’s student teachers also came on Monday so her class ended up coming to the lab Wednesday morning.  Something I wasn’t aware of.  So she was giving me crap for not being there and I was giving her crap for cancelling on me because of her student teachers.  We eventually sorted out the confusion.

As for the book fair, I ended up getting the three books I saw earlier in the day when I was down there helping out with the first grade class.  There were obviously way more books that I wanted but three sounded like a healthy number, especially considering all the other books I have and still need to read.  One of the books is one I found out about while looking for science books a little while ago for a second grader.  The other two belong to the same series I started last year at the book fair.  The series is called Deadtime Stories and it is kind of in the same vein as the Goosebumps series.  According to Wikipedia it looks like the series actually came out in the 90s, so around the same time I was still reading Goosebumps books.  Last year they had one of the books and this year they had two books bundled together.  I don’t have time to read any of the books now but on December 6^th I will be done with class and finally able to read for fun (without guilt). 

I also donated my change (four dollars) to go into the envelope to buy books for kids who don’t have the money for it.  It makes perfect sense but the thought of donating money hadn’t occurred to me until my mom mentioned it.  She was in the library looking at the sale and the librarian gave a book to one of the kids who had been looking at it but wasn’t able to buy it and she told him that it was because people had donated money but he couldn’t tell anyone.  (Later on he had to deny it to one of his classmates who said she saw him talking to the librarian).  So my mom asked if she could give some money.  They don’t have a sign out or anything asking for money but after I got my books I asked if I could donate it to go to a book for a kid and she said yes, so there we go.  I will have to remember that for next time.  If I remember right the book fair at the end of the year is buy-one-get-one so I can give even more money.

This morning I got everything together for my weekend trip and brought it all upstairs.  That way I didn’t have to worry about throwing it all together right before I left and it gave me time to think about all the things I forgot.  Turns out I didn’t really forget anything.  As an afterthought I added in my stocking cap.  I also packed my boots and extra jackets just in case something happens and I need to be outside for an extended period of time.

I had second grade reading groups this morning.  The first group just used Tumblebooks on the iPads so I just had to show them how to navigate around the site and use the videos and then constantly tell some of them to stop sticking their erasers to their body using suction.  (They were the erasers with a wedge shape that you stick on the end of your pencil when you wear down the pencil eraser.  You’re welcome future me who will have no idea what I was originally referring to). 

Reading groups were cut short because there was a traveling orchestra assembly.  They were really good.  The conductor lady was kind of funny but it was verging on mean.  Right after the first song she was explaining where the kids usually practice and how they have to adjust how they play when they tour schools and play in gyms.  She went through all of this explanation just to make the offhanded comment at the end that the kids didn’t sound very good during the first song.  Even though they sounded just fine.  She later had the cello section play a specific part of a song where they are supposed to sound like bagpipes.  That was a bit of a stretch but after they played there few notes she again had an offhanded comment about one of them being really out of tune.  She went on talking and all the cello kids tried to subtly check if they were the one out of tune.  I don’t know that I would want my kid in her orchestra.

I feel like I did something else before lunch but it might just have been entering information into a spreadsheet regarding parents coming to the Thanksgiving lunch next week.  And if there was something else I’ll probably remember tomorrow.

After lunch I went up to help the gifted teacher with internet things.  She had been having trouble connecting her tablet to the wireless again but that seemed to be working when I got up to her room.  She also recently got a Galaxy Note 3 (or maybe 4) and said it wouldn’t connect to her home wifi.  I got it to connect to the school wifi but in messing with it I discovered that when you were putting in the password for a wifi network, it wouldn’t even give you the option to connect until the password was eight characters long.  The teacher’s home network password is only four characters long.  She thought about figuring out how to change her password at home and I found a couple resources on the internet because she said trying to go through AT&T is a big pain. 

As I was sitting here writing this I had another thought and did some searching.  It turns out requiring eight characters for a password even if the network you’re connected to doesn’t have a password that long, is a known issue with Samsung phones and tablets.  And I found a couple of solutions.  The most promising one assumes that Samsung products assume that all networks are using a newer security setting that requires longer passwords.  The solution is to manually create the network you are trying to connect to (even if it automatically shows up in your list) and then change the security setting to the older one, which is hopefully what your network is using so you can use the shorter password.  That seems to make sense so I just sent the gifted teacher an email so she can give that a shot and see how it goes.

My last class of the day was out of the lab around 2:50PM and I was clocking out by three o’clock.  My mom wanted me to take her vehicle this weekend because it has all-wheel drive and my car does not.  Originally it was supposed to snow in the afternoon but now we’re supposed to get a few inches in the morning.  I was kind of on the fence about taking my mom’s car because I like the being able to listen XM radio.  Regular radio has too many commercials and it is annoying having to constantly flip back and forth to avoid them, and then inevitably hear the same song multiple times.  But then I remember she had a USB port in her car, so before making my decision I went out, pulled the thumb drive from my car, and tried it in her car.  And it worked.  So I decided I would take her up on her offer, not only because I’ll have to potentially navigate some winding back roads in the snow, but also because I can listen to my thumb drive that is packed with CDs.  I even remembered to get everything out of my car, including my sun glasses.  I did actually forget my driving directions but I don’t actually need those anymore.

After leaving school I stopped and got gas before heading home to pack up, make a sandwich for dinner, and then head out.  The drive down was uneventful and I’m okay with that.  When I turned off the winding bit and back onto the last stretch of highway, the bit where I keep getting stuck in long, slow caravans, I was again in the middle of a group of cars.  Luckily I had to stop and use the restroom, at the first gas station I came to.  My timing was perfect at the gas station because I got there right as the bathroom became available, and my timing was perfect when I left because there wasn’t a car ahead of me for the rest of my trip.  It was amazing getting to drive at the posted speed limit all the way into town.

The last time we met for this class we were in a computer lab and we were crammed in, to the point where some of us had to sit in chairs brought in from other places.  Tonight we met in another computer lab but one in a different building.  It was pretty fancy.  When the professor got there he mentioned how he was trying to find out where the building was and he should have just assumed to look for the nicest building on campus after he found out it was the building for the business school because they always have to most money.  Which is a true statement.

We started the evening off by talking about Curriculum Vitaes.  That was an interesting conversation and I think I got a lot out of it.  I made one a few years ago when applying for a campus job (that I didn’t get) and I would be interested to look back at it and see what it looks like now that I have a better understanding for what it should look like.

We then started the group presentations.  Earlier in the week the professor said he wanted to move things around because of the weather and be done on Saturday by three o’clock.  Tonight he said he wanted to stay a half hour later and do four presentations tonight, instead of three, and then come in tomorrow a half an hour early and cut back on breaks so instead of going for a lunch break we could be done around that time.  We all agreed with that.

The presentations went pretty well.  Instead of having the group up there it is only the person who made the presentation.  I am glad that wasn’t my job because it was bad enough when I was kind of solo during my last presentation.  The first guy got a little flustered and lost his place a few times but everyone else did a pretty good job.  After each of them spoke their group researcher went up and explained how they conducted their research.  That is going to be my part and I’m not looking forward to it but it is better than giving a full presentation.  When I eventually get done writing this long-ass entry I’m going to look back over my annotated bibliography just to refresh myself on the research (because some of the group researchers ended up having to talk about some of the stuff they found) and then go over some possible answers to the questions I’m supposed to be answering tomorrow.

I was talking to my partner at the end of the night (our other group member had car trouble so he was actually their via Skype, thankfully he isn’t the presenter) and we ended up moving onto talking about kindergarten because she is a kindergarten teacher.  She mentioned how bad her kids were this week and I told her how both of the kindergarten teachers at my school had both commented on how bad their kids had been acting this week.  Something must be in the air.  She said today she ended up making four boys cry (she has a class of fifteen boys and five girls, good grief) because they have apparently been having a peeing contest all week that involves peeing on the floor in the bathroom.  She was tired of having to call the custodian in to clean up the mess so today she just ripped them a new one.  It is kind of hard to believe because she is so quiet and soft-spoken, but there are teachers like that at my school who somehow manage to flip a switch and turn on their teacher voice.

At the hotel I got a room on the very end so I didn’t have to worry about noise on that side, and I don’t believe there is anyone in the room next to me.  I love it.  In the request section when I was making my reservation I requested a room that didn’t have an adjoining room so maybe that helped.  It was also recently cleaned because they just had their inspection, which they passed, but they had an issue where a room was supposed to be clean and it wasn’t and the guest was a little annoyed.  So they are on their best behavior at the moment.  Also, the girl at the desk remembered me.  The first time I came down she was in the middle of being trained and now she’s all on her own.  I think it was last time that she recognized me and I mentioned that I was down here for class.  Which she remembered this time around.  That’s hospitality.

Now, I’m going to freaking stick a fork in this entry because it is way too long and I am way too tired and I still need to look over stuff for the presentation tomorrow.  I could have fallen blissfully asleep several hours ago.  The morning it going to come way too early.

November 13, 2014

This morning I wasn't needed in one of the kindergarten classes for literacy centers but I was called down to help with the other class. Despite my group being less than interested in drawing all the animals going to school, things went alright.

The librarian had a dentist appointment this morning so she asked if I could come down and help the library assistant with the first grade class, mainly because all the book fair stuff is out and that stuff is very distracting. They watched a video of book trailers for some of the books available in the book fair and then they were supposed to check out books if they were able to or “gently” look at the book fair books if they weren't checking out a book. This was confusing to several of the kids. Some completely ignored the option to check out a book because they just wanted to look at the book fair books. These were usually boys wanting to look at the Minecraft books. Minecraft is pretty great so that is understandable. Other kids couldn't quite grasp the concept that they couldn't check out the book fair books, even after being explicitly told several times. It was kind of amazing. My main job during all this was to make sure the kids weren't being rough with the books and that everything ended up back where it started, not on some random shelf or in the hands of the kids as they left the library. I also read There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly to one of the kids. I've got to say it is kind of an annoying book because we never find out why she swallowed the fly. It very well could have been an accident but she refuses to say. Just fess up lady.

While standing there looking at all the books it really made me want to write children's books. Or young adult books. I like writing and it would be really cool to have books published. My grandpa did it but he wrote textbooks, something I have no desire to do. I like BSing and that is more in line with books for kids. When my brother was little I used to enjoy making up stories for why things were the way they were. My version of fables or whatever those stories are called. I probably should have written some of those down.

This afternoon I had the kindergarten classes in the lab. Minus the kid who needs some sort of focus medication, everything went alright. Later on third grade came in and that was pretty fun. The teacher was trying to help one of the kids with a fairly complicated word problem on Odyssey (mostly complicated because of the wording of the questions) and they were going around in circles with it. At the end of it all the student intern and I were trying to explain it to her and we were going around in circles and I'm not sure if we ever quite got there but when we were done talking about it the teacher looked at the kid and said “Alight, did you get all that?”, and he just shook his head. It was pretty funny.

Throughout the morning and afternoon when I had downtime I started reading through the chapter for my third reflective journal entry. I didn't ever get around to starting the entry because I was getting hung up on the meaning of “information service”, which is the main topic I am supposed to cover in the entry. After dinner I finally decided it was related to a service industry, so libraries are in the industry and they offer and information service. Once I came to that conclusion I managed to knock out several hundred words. If I get time tomorrow at work I might be able to finish it up but if not I'll probably have to wait until Sunday because I'll be focused on other class stuff when I'm down there for the weekend.

Speaking of, the professor sent out an email that he is wanting to start a little earlier on Saturday morning and cut breaks short so hopefully we can wrap things up a couple hours early. I guess the chance for snow is supposed to increase to 70% before our normal finish time and the professor wants to try and beat that. Regardless, I should be coming back into town with several inches of snow on the ground. I guess winter is here or something.

November 12, 2014

This morning I woke not too long after four o'clock because I had an itchy throat and kept coughing. I tried some sips of water but that did nothing so I ended up getting a cough drop. That helped tremendously and I ended up falling asleep with it under my tongue. Thankfully it stayed there.

I participated in second grade reading groups this morning. A college basketball player was there for most of the time so kids would go back one at a time to read with him. His go-to question was asking people where they were from, kid or adult, which was kind of funny but I definitely couldn't walk into a room full of kids and strangers and not feel totally uncomfortable and awkward, so I think he handled it well. As for the centers, I started with helping kids write letters to deployed soldiers, then was a girl's partner on a word scavenger hunt around the room because she didn't have a partner, and then I had a small group of kids reading tiny stories and having to decided if they were to persuade, inform, or entertain. Other than one kid who really didn't want to write his letter, I would say everything went pretty well.

After that I had the second grade classes in the lab. I had one teacher get on Type To Learn and take the pre-test. Then I had her try the drone control game on the level I'm at. The kids hate it because it is timed and they fail it repeatedly and can't move on until they beat it. On my level, I get thirty more seconds than the kids but I also have to type long sentences with big words. I think when I beat it I only had three seconds left. The teacher didn't quite make it.

I went down to the library to give the librarian the disc with all the student pictures on it because she needs it to update her student profiles in the computer and because the lunch lady asked for it. They use it in the lunch room to check kids out. Their picture pops up when they type in their number to get their food. Well, last year she got the disc and the central kitchen lost it and it took me forever to figure out how to get the pictures I had saved in the right setup so the librarian could upload them for her thing. So this year I gave her first dibs. In theory I should be getting another disc at some point that has higher quality pictures on it. We'll see if that happens.

Today was early release so this afternoon I didn't have any classes. I spent the morning before reading groups to work on my second reflective journal entry and I spent this afternoon finishing it. I am right at a thousand words, and I'll need to go back and edit it, but for now I'm good. I think the plan will be to get the rough draft done for all the entries and then I can go back and touch them up. This entry was a long rant about bureaucracies and then a long bit about who uses public libraries. Apparently high-income households with high levels of education use them way more than people at the lower side of both scales. This makes sense but at the same time it doesn't. So I explored that. Tomorrow I'll need to start on the third entry.

After school I came over to the old house and on my way over I got a low tire pressure warning. I think the same thing happened last year on the first really cold day. Which today was. When I was about to head down to Chipotle I texted my dad to see if he would have any time before Friday to fill up my tired. He texted me while I was on the road that he had time then so I turned around and headed his way. We got my tires topped off and froze our asses off while doing it because not only was it freezing out but the wind was also incessantly blowing. When we were finished we went inside and ended up talking about his job for awhile, because the thermostat is broke and it is 48 degrees in the building, and we also talked about the real side of Fury and what it would actually be like psychologically for those guys. And then my brother and I talked about livestreams and Halo for a bit.

Chipotle night had been pushed back until six o'clock because my mom had a book club thing, and then she said she was going to be late because they got started late. With my detour to my dad's, I didn't even head across town until almost six o'clock. This sucked for me because the area around Chipotle and Jimmy John's sucks at that time. I lost count of how many times I had to drive around the block to get a parking spot for Jimmy John's. It was way too cold to be walking for any length of time. After the nth time around the block I got a spot right in front of the building but then I had to wait while they filled a party platter. That was slightly annoying but whatever.

I only had to circle the block twice to get a parking spot at Chipotle. I had to wait in a normal line there and it gave me time to spot their newest menu item. I vaguely remember reading about it awhile ago when they were trying it out in a few restaurants but sofritas has finally made it our way. I don't know what sofritas means but it is basically just seasoned tofu. It looks kind of like shredded chicken and it tastes like seasoned enchiladas. I don't know if I will end up getting it every time but it was an alright change. I liked it.

At the moment I have a headache and my left forearm hurts, probably because I have been typing so much recently. So I am going to call this entry good so I can stop typing, take some ibuprofen, and go to bed.

November 11, 2014

I forgot to mention that I got an email from my group member yesterday who is working on the presentation. She sent the PowerPoint she has come up with so I spent some time reading over it and sending her some corrections. Just the obvious things I noticed as well as some things that didn't quite match up with what I remembered from the articles. Hopefully she will find that helpful.

Today was a very slow day. I had kindergarten literacy centers this morning so that took up thirty minutes. And the sixth graders came down to the lab for fifteen minutes to practice their typing. I spent my free time reading through one of my textbooks and starting my second reflective journal entry. I ended up working on that off and on throughout the day.

The first graders also came in and I was talking to the teacher about the Odyssey login because the password is ridiculously long for first graders. It's too long for some of the second and third graders as well. And it's too long for me because I log in all of the kindergarteners so I have to type it in almost a hundred times every week. Anyway, the teacher was talking with someone who said he knew someone somewhere in the chain of command that can change Odyssey passwords and they will actually stay changed, unlike when I did it several times and it kept changing back. So the plan is to get the password changed to the kids' lunch number, just like their username, for kindergarten and first grade. That will be nice.

The afternoon wasn't anymore exciting. Normally I have both kindergarten classes but we had an assembly that overlapped both of their times so they ended up not coming. Just in case I typed in the log-in information for the second class and then after the assembly I went around and hit 'enter' on all the keyboards to log everyone in. And they ended up not showing up but that ended up being a good thing because I finally learned how to close browser windows with a keyboard shortcut (alt+F4) which is way easier than having to go around and do a bunch of mouse clicks.

The assembly was the second graders' Veteran's Day performance, which they gave for a bunch of veterans after the parade, then they came back to the school for the assembly, and they had another performance tonight for their parents. That sounds exhausting. It was a decent assembly but there wasn't a lot of choreography so I've got to say I've seen better.

After school I went to Target to get some things. I mainly went for cough drops and peanut butter but I also decided to get cheese sticks. I normally get the Weight Watchers brand, not because I'm health conscious when it comes to cheese sticks, but because they taste good and they string well. But it appears that Target is no longer carrying that brand. There wasn't even an empty spot for it on the shelf. Instead I went with the Target brand because it was the cheapest, so their plan worked. I haven't tried it yet but hopefully it meets my requirements of taste and stringiness.

Tonight after dinner I nearly finished my second reflective journal entry. I went on a bit of a rant about bureaucracies and whether they should exist in libraries. I'll probably have to go back and trim it down a bit but for tonight I counted it as progress. It would be great if I could finish the entry off tomorrow and finish up a third one by the end of the week. That would put me ahead of schedule (while still technically being behind schedule because I didn't do the writing throughout the semester).

November 10, 2014

This morning my favorite substitute wasn't subbing but she stopped by the school with a present for me. She was at an auction and when the item came up she thought of me. It is a ceramic bowl with a hole/notch in it with a ball of yarn and a few knitting needles. It came in a box and is called a Knit Wit Kit. I did a bit of research online and it is apparently handmade in Nepal, which is cool. It comes with a pattern for a headband so I think as soon as school is over for the semester I'm going to use the yarn it came with to make her a headband. Maybe crochet a flower or something to put on it. It is a really cool gift, that I don't deserve, but I'm glad I have it. The idea of the notched bowl is so simple yet completely genius. I can't wait to try it out.

I normally would have had second grade reading groups today but the student teachers were there so I wasn't needed. I was productive with my time. Before I checked on the second grade reading groups I went down and fixed a printer issue they were having in the kitchen. Next, I typing up instructions for the fire/CO alarm at home. I also found a user manual for it but I didn't print it, just downloaded it. I still had some time left and one of the SPED teachers asked if I could put Reading Counts on the SPED laptops so I went up and did that, along with adding printers to one of the SPED teacher's laptop.

The second grade classes in the lab went well. Both were fairly uneventful. The tiny kid who was born angry actually came up to the teacher and politely explained a problem he was having. That was probably the first time he has ever done that. He usually just freaks out and gets supper angry.

With the rest of my downtime throughout the day, which there was a lot of because I only had one class in the lab this afternoon, I worked on my reflective journal. I managed to finish my first entry. Only six more to go. I was way over the word limit and kind of started to trim that back but ended up running out of time.

After school I got my hair cut and then didn't do anything productive until after dinner. That is when I went back and trimmed my reflective journal entry. It took a lot of work but I eventually got it down under a thousand words. Now I need to knock out another entry. If I can keep up the pace of two a week, that will leave me with just one to do in the final week. That definitely sounds doable. And not just because it has to be doable. I think from here on out I will pick a few important points from each reading and go into more detail on those rather than trying to touch on everything. That will save me from having to trim back my entries after I write way too much.

Right now it is just about freezing outside with a really strong wind. I think it was somewhere in the 60s today and it has since dropped thirty degrees. It is supposed to be even colder and windier tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. There is actually a chance for snow this weekend when I go down for class. The cold kind of sucks and the wind makes it worse, but I prefer the cold (not so much the wind) over it being hot as hell. I wouldn't mind a lack of snow for quite a bit longer, however.

November 9, 2014

Last night, in the middle of the night, I was yanked from my slumber by the sound of a blaring alarm. It went silent a short time later and I was quickly able to forget about it and fall back to sleep. It happened again around six o'clock in the morning. I made it to my door this time before it went silent and I ended up back in bed until much later.

It turns out, one of the fire alarms upstairs is acting up. In order to get the alarm to stop you have to push the button on it but sometimes this results in a test which sets off all the alarms in the house and warms of a fire and then warns of carbon monoxide. My mom didn't know this at the time so when it warned of carbon monoxide she ended up turning off the furnace and opening a window. We eventually decided the detector was just being a dick. This afternoon it started chirping like they do when a battery is low, which really freaks the dogs out. Apparently it isn't a battery thing because when a battery is low the detector actually says that, it doesn't just beep. I ended up pushing the button and found out about the test cycle thing. That worked for awhile but then it started chirping again so I switched out the batteries. Eventually it started happening again so I unplugged it and took it off the ceiling. There is another detector maybe two feet away in the next room so there isn't much worry there. After taking it down I learned about all the beeping stuff because it has information on the back of the detector, but no instruction manual. I'm going to try cleaning it out with some compressed air, because maybe it got dusty or something during construction, but if that doesn't work, we should be fine without it, at least for awhile.

Today involved a lot of unproductive avoidance of writing my reflective journal. I did eventually get about three or four hundred words written, which is good, but also bad because I'm way over the upper limit of a thousand words per entry. My method has involved basically summarizing everything while adding in the occasional reflective comment. I think maybe I need to give a brief overview of the topic and then pick one or two things to talk about, going into more detail on those things, rather than quickly talking about all of the things. I'm not sure if I'm just going to cut out stuff from what I've already written or just rewrite the whole thing. I don't have much time to figure it out so that should keep me from dwelling on the choice for too long.

I also did laundry and listened to This American Life while trying to distract myself from writing. I tried Type to Learn but it turns out you need an internet connection. That makes sense but it would be nice to have an offline option.

Tonight we had a family dinner night. Chinese food is delicious. I got steamed rice and broccoli, rice noodles, and french fries. French fries are a must when ordering Chinese.

After dinner I came over to the old house. I restarted my computer and now I have sound again, so that is nice. I don't mind wearing my headphones but they get a little hot after awhile. I got an email from my group member doing the presentation that she almost had it done yesterday and that she would email it when she finished. Haven't heard back so hopefully everything is still good. She's got until next weekend so there's plenty of time.

At the moment I am distracted by YouTube videos and I need to head back to the new house, so I'm going to call this good.