January 16, 2015

It's late so I'm going to try and make this short. That shouldn't be hard considering my day was once again filled with four MAP tests. One week down and one to go, minus whatever stragglers have to finish up in the third week. And then a slight reprieve until March when state assessments start. And then April when MAP comes around again.

In the little bit of downtime I had at the very beginning of the day and at the end of the day I continued working on testing plans for state assessments, turning them into an easy to use spreadsheet schedule thing so people aren't haven't to sort through a stack of papers.

The last MAP test of the day was one of the fifth grade classes. There are only sixteen kids to begin with, six of them were out sick today and two were testing out of the lab, so it was a pretty relaxed test. As for all the sickness, I feel like whatever horrible things are going on in their classroom are the beginnings of scary story. And I kind of want to write it. My guess was that someone was sick and came back too early and the teacher said that was her guess to because there was a sick kid who's mother insisted on sending her back as soon as the twenty-four hour period was up. And the day after she came back six kids were out sick. One hell of a coincidence.

There is also the possibility that there is some sort of super strain virus in the room, bred from too much anti-bacterial cleaners that just helped it build a tolerance. At one point the teacher needed to borrow a pencil to write on the lab schedule for next week. I offered her mine but then had to write down a test score so she said she'd just borrow one from the cup I have at the front of the lab. My immediate response was “Thanks, just go ahead and poison the well.” An obvious reference to the mysterious illness falling on her class and the possibility that she is a carrier. I'm not one to toot my own horn but I was completely surprised by not one the speed of my response but also at how clever it was. I have never even used that expression before. Maybe it doesn't even mean what I think it means. It was just an autonomic-level response that I'm really proud of.

Near the end of the day I went to return a laptop to one of the preschool teachers, which involved me having to walk across the playground to get to the preschool trailer. On my way back to the building I took a break and sat with my mom at a picnic table and talked for awhile. It was sunny and in the 60s and more than half the school was probably outside, including the gym and music classes. My eyes never adjusted to the sun but it was really nice to get out of the lab.

One of the sixth graders this morning started calling me Mr. Rich Beard after screwing up my name and getting distracted in the middle of trying to talk. The next time I create a video game character with a beard he is definitely going to be called Rich Beard.

Tonight I worked for all of five minutes at the theater. That was super annoying. I ate dinner, got dressed, went to the theater, clocked in, went upstairs, and saw on the schedule that I wasn't scheduled this weekend. I had a real urge to check the schedule today at school but it was fleeting and I kept forgetting. I also kind of felt like I checked it earlier in the week. Apparently I had not. So I clocked out and came over to the old house to play Fantasy Life and watch YouTube videos. I still have over 2,000 videos in my Watch Later list, which I'm fairly certain is never going to happen. I have fallen behind and I'm going to have to start skipping a whole bunch of videos. The video I'm on at the moment came out on October 15, 2014. I'm three months behind and it feels like it. Oh well.

It is supposed to be nice all weekend so I would like to wake up at a decent time tomorrow and start putting a clear coat on my desks so those will be ready when we finally get the internet (soon, hopefully) and I move my desktop over to the new house. The desktop which should hopefully be fixed tomorrow when my new motherboard shows up. If it is in fact the motherboard causing the issues. I also need to dig up Ping Pong and rebury her at the new house. I've been meaning to do that but it has been so cold that the ground would have been impossible to dig into. Hopefully a couple days in the 60s will be enough to thaw it out a bit.

And now it is after midnight and I need to wrap things up so I can actually get up at a decent time. I need to stop trying to go all Babe Ruth with my entries and call short ones at the beginning because they almost always turn out long when I do that. I'm going to stop typing now.