March 4, 2015

I'm mildly excited about going into work tomorrow for two reasons: a baby picture and a monitor, but I'll talk about those things later.

Today was picture day and I almost missed the staff picture. Right as I pulled onto the street by the school where I park my mom texted me and said they were about to take the picture and I needed to hurry up. I tried to walk a little faster than normal and walked into the library to a near ovation from the rest of the staff who were already arranged for the picture. I made it just in the nick of time.

After the picture was taken I headed back to the lab and walked with one of the second grade teachers and someone else, maybe a para, I can't remember. As her parting response when we were all going our separate ways she said “Well, I'm going to go ignore my Block B students.” That was pretty funny. Later in the morning when her class came to the lab, and the college students had left, she mentioned that they had taught a lesson earlier and I asked if she learned anything. Her response, “Yeah, how to yawn.” I don't know if both of those translate well into text but they were funny.

My first class of the day was fifth grade and the teacher had to leave twice to go across the hall and stir the dip she brought for birthday treat day (the first Wednesday of every month). It was a cream cheese and shredded cheese concoction with mayonnaise and jalepeno bacon mixed in. She was worried that it wouldn't look appetizing because the first time she went to stir it she said the fat had started to settle on the surface. The same happened the second time. We decided it would actually be in her favor if no one ate it because it was apparently really good and she would get to take more of it home. We played more FreeRice, this time going for grammar instead of vocabulary, and there were a lot of questions that seemed ridiculous. Several were the ones that might be grammatically correct but if you were to use them in the real world everyone would think you were wrong because they just don't sound right.

This morning I emailed the teachers the lab schedule for the next several weeks and it was almost immediately slightly changed. After the revisions were made to the testing calendar, I emailed the calendar out and asked everyone to double-check it to make sure everything looked alright and said I'd send out the updated lab schedule later when we were sure everything on the testing calendar was correct. It probably won't be but I didn't hear back so maybe we're close. I also printed out the information for accommodations and handed out copies to everyone involved so they could stay on top of things.

I spent a decent amount of time today editing one of the sixth grade baby pictures. I got it today and it was crinkled in a few places on and around her face, and there was also a lot of damage around all the crinkles. My first plan of attack was using the clone tool, which is how I've done the majority of my photo editing when it comes to cleaning up imperfections. Because there was so much damage on the girls forehead, I ended up doing a lot of cloning as well as copying and pasting various portions of her forehead repeatedly over the forehead to created and even color. It didn't actually look too bad but it was all a tanned skin look, even though the original had a large lightened triangular shape on her forehead from the camera flash. I was brainstorming ideas on how to recreate that, and I still think I could, but then I discovered the heal tool. Life changing. It works like magic. I ended up starting with a fresh copy of the original scanned image and was able to completely edit the forehead region in a fraction of the time it took me to reconstruct the whole thing with the clone tool and copying and pasting. I ended up using a combination of the two and made decent progress on the rest of the picture. I've got maybe a third of the picture left to edit, which will hopefully goes as well as the firth two-thirds. I'm still really impressed with how well the heal tool worked and I wish I had messed with it a long time ago.

This afternoon the librarian asked me to put in a ticket for the desktop computer in the teachers' lounge, not for it to be fixed, but for it to be picked up as e-waste because no one ever uses it, mainly because it is kind of broken. At the end of the day I had the thought of taking the monitor and hooking it up as a second monitor on my computer in the lab. I asked the principal and librarian and they were both cool with it and thought it was a good idea. It will make my job a lot easier because I am frequently having to reference two or three things at once and it is a pain in the but trying to arrange them all on one tiny monitor or having to constantly minimize and maximize them. Gone are the days of having to Excel documents open, one on top and the other on the bottom half of the screen, only able to see a handful of rows at a time. I'm looking forward to getting that set up in the morning.

After work Chipotle was a lot busier than it usually is, I'm not sure why, but this lead to a bit of a line. A line that moved much slower because one of the employees on the food line was one of the slow girls. Thankfully only one of them was working because if it was just the two new regular girls, the line would have been around the block. The guy getting everything started was fast, or maybe just normal-speed, but the girl was so slow on the second half of the operation that he was constantly having to wait for her because he ran out of room for the next order. He was a little stingy with the rice and beans but when I asked for extra rice on my burrito he piled it on. I was impressed. I was not impressed with how the girl at the end wrapped it. It's like she didn't even try.

I showed a few videos after dinner and then I came downstairs and read/finished a textbook chapter. That only took me a couple hours. It was nine o'clock at this point so I decided to call it a night, in terms of studying. I turned on my laptop and plugged in the HDMI cable connected to the monitor I have in my room. It has a built-in speaker and when I started watching a Yogscast video and switched the sound over to the HDMI cable, their voices sounded high-pitched. Not quite as high as the Chipmunks but they definitely sounded like little British boys. It was hilarious. I watched the whole video and then had my mom and sister come down to listen to part of it. I then pulled up Jeep Stuff by Neebs, which was hilarious, and then another couple of videos by those guys, one of which was Neebs freaking out after he got promoted and unlocked jeep stuff (aka C4). He sounded just like what I imagine a hyper Neebs sounded like in grade school. Hilarious. I spent the rest of my night watching videos with high-pitch voices. I'm afraid to unplug the HDMI cable because I don't want it to fix itself. It looks like maybe I'll have to delete the sound driver and reinstall it in order to fix the problem, which I'll try eventually, but for now it is really funny. The sad thing is that I can't record the funny sounds because when I do it just sounds normal. No fun in normal.