Wednesday, September 30, 2015

September 30, 2015

 I'm tired.

At work today I caught up on my spreadsheets, mainly getting all the formulas in order so the numbers at the bottom show up correctly. The tests that need to be deleted will hopefully happen soon so I can print off all the reports. Except for the two kids that still need to finish. The teacher, who is not only new this year but this is also her first year teaching, emailed me at the end of the day and said that things got hectic today which is why she didn't send them down. She suggested tomorrow afternoon when kindergarten will be in the lab and then a couple times on Friday. I replied that she should send them whenever she can and that the test is kind of a priority when it is this close to the end of the window because if they don't finish it Compass Learning won't be updated until the new year and their parents won't get an updated report at conferences. She seems a little too laid back about the whole thing. Or maybe I'm just uptight about it.

When I didn't have classes in the lab I worked on things for teachers. I made a change to a booklet I made for the resource teacher last year because she needed it tweaked a little bit. I remembered that I took pictures of the kids in one of the kindergarten class yesterday so I could make small pictures for the teacher to use for various things. So I edited those and made her a page with all the pictures.

My favorite project of the day was making a sign for the librarian. She is setting up a display or something for graphic novels and asked if I could make her a sign that said “graphic novels” on it. I already had a couple fonts from when I made my superhero metadata presentation last year so I was good to go. I did check online and downloaded a few more font options but I ended up going with the same one I used for my presentation. To give myself a little more room to work with I used the Legal size paper instead of the regular 8.5x11, which I think was a good choice. Then I typed up “GRAPHIC NOVELS”, which was probably the easiest part. The hard part was making it look interesting.

Originally I was thinking about a crazy spiked outline like they use for sound effects words. I tried all sorts of different combos but they all kind of sucked. Then I got back into the frame of mind my superhero presentation and decided I wanted to make the sign look like a single panel on a page. For the background I looked up graphic novels for children and arranged their covers all over the page. Leaving them like that would have been too distracting so I made a box, filled it with white, and set the transparency pretty low, so you could still see what was going on but the colors were fairly muted. I wanted a clean white border around the outside so I created a box in Publisher the size of my page and gave it a really thick white border, which covered up all of the book covers around the edge of the page. Then I added a slightly smaller box with a thick black border to give it the panel look. I finished by bringing back the text, which I made three copies of to make a top blue layer, a middle green layer, and a bottom black layer. I was pretty happy with it. When I went across the hall I could find any white paper so I went with tan, which may have actually worked out better. When I gave it to the librarian she really liked it, so mission accomplished.

There was a magic show assembly this afternoon but I forgot all about it. Turns out that was the reason the first grade class never showed up to the lab. I ended up spending that time working on the kindergarten pictures and listening to a Harry Potter audiobook, so at least I was productive.

After school I got Chipotle and my Powerball ticket. My burrito was decent but nothing amazing. I showed some good videos after dinner, at least in my opinion, and then I spent a good chunk of the rest of the night reading an article. Or rather a textbook chapter in the form of a PDF. I'm not a fan of reading long documents on the computer. I don't even like reading short documents on the computer. And this week all the metadata reading is electronic. I'm not a fan. And I still have one more article to read, which is thirty-two pages long. Good grief. I tried to start it tonight but my eyes weren't having it.


Tomorrow morning I want to maybe leave the house a little early so I can go down the the Treasurer's office and pick up my vehicle registration. I paid it online, and switched my address, but apparently switching your address online doesn't actually work. This meant the post office tried to deliver it to my old address and it bounced back. There was a message today from a lady explaining the whole situation, and saying that she had changed my address for me, but that I needed to come pick up my registration. And this was the last day of the month. So it would be nice if I could pick it up before work, not only to avoid a crowd, but also avoid getting in trouble for having an out of date registration, even though I paid on time. It probably won't make that much of a difference if I got after work but it would be nice to get it over with.

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