December 16, 2014

It is creeping up on midnight and I've got a headache so I am going to try to make this quick.

When I first got to work one of the second grade teachers asked me to take a picture of the vending machine and print it out. She had a few kids in her class up to $400 in the class currency and she was running out of things for them to buy so she decided she'd let them pick something out of the vending machine and she'd pay for it. She wanted the picture so the kids could spend time deciding what they wanted without having to take them all into the teachers' lounge and stand around while they made their decision. It was definitely one of my most interesting side projects.

This morning I helped with literacy centers in both kindergarten classes. My groups listened to The Gingerbread Man and then had to draw characters from the story. The goal was to get three characters drawn and labeled but no one quite managed that. There were kids that were close and kids that barely had one character. But they were all well behaved so I was fine with it.

I spent most of my day reading about books and Christmas shopping. I'm so tired of spending money. Hopefully I remember this feeling next year so I can go the homemade route. Start early and make everyone something. It'll cost me more in terms of time but I will save a lot of money.

Speaking of, I could put that money into my Roth IRA. That comes to mind because today I got an email from the company I have my Roth IRA through saying the post office had informed them that my address had changed. I had completely forgot about updating it. So I got on the website and did that. I also looked around because I haven't checked in awhile, and my average return has been 12.1%. Not bad. Not long after I first opened the account I lost almost $900 but since then it has been trending upward. Now I just need to stop spending money on Christmas so I have money to invest next year.

After work I went to Hobby Lobby to get yarn and then headed to the old house to check out things on the internet. After dinner I washed my latest cross stitch, along with all the other ones I have made but never got around to washing. Now I just need to have my mom iron them. When that is done, I can give the latest one to the para at work and finally go get the book one I made for the librarian over the summer framed and give it to her.

When I was done with that I got started on decorating my Santa hat for work. Although I didn't actually put anything on the hat yet. I'm in the needlework phase. At work today I came up with a Creeper face wearing a Santa hat and the writing “SSSSanta Creeper”. I forgot my red yarn at the old house so I couldn't do that hat, and I figured some things out while working on the Creeper face so that turned into a practice one. The writing also turned into a practice one because I didn't like the color scheme or how the 'R' turned out when I added the fill color. It looked broken so instead I'm going to go with a lowercase 'r' and possibly make it look like a candy cane. I should be able to get it all sorted out and finished tomorrow night. Hopefully.