May 5, 2015

 We got a lot of rain here last night. I think the weather guy said three inches in an hour, which equated to one billion gallons of water. That's a lot of water. It lead to a lot of flooding downtown and on the other side of town, to the point of cars floating away or being completely submerged, and houses and businesses being damaged. I didn't know the extent of it all until I heard people talking about it at work today and saw pictures and videos on the news. To be honest, none of the videos, especially from national news agencies, looked recognizable to me, and I've lived here my entire life. Although it probably didn't help that everything was under water.

Today there was testing and a little more testing. The sixth graders who didn't finish their tests yesterday came down this morning. They all walked in with their snacks and I had them go back out into the hallway to partake in them because I didn't want to take apart another keyboard to clean it out. I also had the kids with water bottles leave them by the door. No chances taken.

This afternoon I talked to one of the fifth grade teachers while her class tested. In hushed tones of course. We've been talking about wisdom teeth because her mouth has been hurting and this morning she finally went to the dentist to get x-rays. After those were done it took forever the dentist to show up and when he did he seemed a bit clueless as to why the teacher was there in the first place. Eventually he got around to the x-rays and the wisdom teeth and she doesn't have any on the bottom but both wisdom teeth on the top are impacted. I think before she can get them out she has to get a filling redone.

Among other things we also talked about all the rain last night. There was a teacher meeting last night but it was ended early because of the downpour. The fifth grade teacher lives relatively close to the school and got to within two blocks of her house and then the rain really started coming down and she couldn't really see more than ten feet in front of her car. But she managed to make it home. Then around 7:30PM she heard a fire truck, which she hears a lot because she is near a fire station, but this time it stopped in front of her house. One of the firemen came in and started knocking on doors to talk to the residents (it's an old house that has multiple tenants). When he got to the teachers door and knocked, the door actually opened, because it's an old crappy door. The teacher knew he would probably be knocking, but neither of them realized the door would open. She said he looked a little confused and she was just standing there in her pajamas, eating a big bowl of pasta, also a bit surprised by the door. The fireman asked her if she had seen her outlets smoking. Prime opportunity for a cigarette joke, like maybe sticking one in an outlet. She had not but she thinks someone in the basement might have had some flooding with the rain and had a power cord on the floor that caused some sparks.

After the the fifth grade test, second grade came in. That test ended up lasting until 3:30PM because one girl is extra thorough, in the slowest sense of the word. Eventually the rest of the class left so I sat with her, encouraging her to read out loud, not only because I thought it would help her, but also so I would know that she was actually making forward progress, not just sitting there daydreaming. She ended up getting within six questions of the end before her class went out to recess, so we paused the test.

Over lunch I started reading the part of the textbook chapter I need know for the discussion post this week and got a start on my post. Hopefully I can finish that tomorrow. Also, at the end of school I made a new book fair flyer for the librarian. Her and the library clerk spent the whole day scanning every single book in the library for inventory. They went around with laptops and hand-held scanners to do this, which looked like a pain in the butt. Probably not as bad as it was before the laptops and scanners, though.

After work I got gas and went to Target. I was going to get a PowerBall ticket but the road I was going to take was closed. I took that as a sign that maybe I should wait for some birthday luck tomorrow. Instead, I swung by the old house to put the cover back on one of the smoke detectors and check on a light fixture in my mom's room. I couldn't find either so I left. They ended up being in the one drawer I didn't look in when I was searching the entire house.

We all ended up going back over before dinner because my mom wanted to put a tarp up outside just in case it rained again. She took the day off of work to deal with things and had the eaves cleaned out because that is believed to be the main culprit. After a lot of thinking I ended up securing one side of the tarp to two fence posts with some wire, which I then pushed into the ground and leaned against the house. We then put a few pots in the middle, to keep it from sagging and put rocks and bricks around the edges to hold everything down. I don't think it has rained tonight but I would be interested to know if my tarp design would be effective. I also put the smoke detector cover back on and figured out why the light fixture wasn't fitting. The fancy light bulb was too long so we swapped it out and everything fit.

Tonight I worked on my research paper. Most of my night was spent being really frustrated. I couldn't come up with how I wanted to start the paper. Just complete writer's block. I can kind of see the finished paper in my head but it is still super blurry. And it probably won't come into focus until this weekend. Late tonight I finally decided to screw the beginning and start writing about the pros and cons, since that will be the majority of my paper anyway. And I managed to get a page written.

Rather than going for my final draft right off the bat, I'm just writing based on my list of pros and cons and what I remember reading. Later I will go back and add in citations, hopefully remembering where everything came from and rewording it enough so that it makes sense. I've still got six or seven pages to go but one page is a lot more than I had yesterday. And I've still got five days left. But I also need to do the discussion post and the last assignment for my other class. Time management.

It is now almost 1:30AM and I am tired. I am hoping that I hit my sleep cycle just right so I don't wake up feeling exhausted. It is an early release day so I don't have to make it the whole day but it will still be filled with testing, which will be all the more rough if I'm dead on my feet. Fingers crossed.

Tomorrow night we will be getting together for my birthday. It has been awhile since we've been to the Chinese buffet so I am looking forward to that. I'm also hoping to maybe knock out another page of my paper before dinner and one or two later in the night. Kind of a crappy way to spend a birthday but such is the life of a procrastinating grad student.