October 29, 2015

 Yesterday I watched the livestream of the spacewalk. Two astronauts, Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren, went for a seven hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. It was fairly dull viewing but I found it fascinating. I watched a guy using a grease gun for an hour. But it was in space so it was interesting. After the spacewalk they came back into the space station and had to stay in a small chamber, still in there suits, for quite awhile so they could decompress. Or something like that. After that they were pulled into the station one at a time by one of the other astronauts. Several pictures were taken, mostly of their gloves, and then their suits were taken off. It kind of looked like they were being born, slowly pulled from the small chamber into the station and then the suit being slowly taken away, one piece at a time to reveal the person inside. It was pretty cool and only made more so by the fact that the guy doing the work (and the other astronauts taking pictures) were all floating around the two in the big bulky spacesuits.

I had my dentist appointment this morning. I learned when I got there that my new insurance through the school district has separate health and dental insurance. I learned after school when I went to the HR department that vision is also separate. It was my fault for assuming that everything was combined because that is how my insurance has always been. It was the districts fault for not making that separation more clear. Apparently there was a box to check somewhere. A box that was not mentioned when I went to sign up for insurance. It is also too late to sign up for dental and vision. Fantastic. After school I went back to the dentist and paid $150 for my cleaning. A cleaning that was kind of pointless because my teeth are great, as confirmed by both the hygienist and the dentist.

Today at work I had a clever bit of troubleshooting. The projector in the small ELL room in the back of the computer lab wasn't showing red. All the other colors seemed to work fine but red always showed up as black or blue, if it showed up at all. This is kind of an issue when you're trying to teach kids English and you want them to find the red object on the screen. We tried various setting on the projector itself and reset everything just in case it was a setting that got mixed up. That didn't fix it. Then I decided it was either the cable or something inside the projector. To narrow it down I went down to the library and borrowed a VGA cable and a VHS/DVD player. I plugged the VHS/DVD player in, crossed my fingers that a black and white VHS wasn't in there, and hit 'Play'. It was an old VHS (obviously) but there were clearly red objects in the scene, so that eliminated the problem being inside the projector. Then I swapped out the VGA cables and the color red could be seen. Success. It probably took less than ten minutes to get it sorted out and the teacher was impressed with my troubleshooting skills. I'm right there with her.

I sent out another email reminder to everyone about sending me pictures for the yearbook. It was well crafted, if I do say so myself. And it worked because I got several pictures from several different teachers. I'll have to continue sending them out every couple months but we're getting there.

After lunch I went up to the office to wait for the librarian to get out of a meeting because she wanted help with a projector issue. The meeting went about fifteen minutes long but I had a magazine and nothing else to do so I was fine. But everyone who walked by asked me if I was in trouble. It was all in jest but I began to wonder if I give off some sort of vibe if everyone's first thought is that I'm in trouble. Then my mom walked by and asked if I was in trouble and everyone started laughing.

My group member sent out a spreadsheet that had all of our book lists compiled and asked for feedback. Tonight I did a little formatting on it, tweaking the color, some border heights, and froze the heading rows, but everything else looked pretty good to me. I ended up with way more books that everyone else because they were able to include some reference materials that were pretty expensive. I probably should have looked for that kind of stuff. I also made a couple posts on this weeks discussion thread.

I didn't do much with the rest of my night because I had a headache that was only getting worse. In the past few minutes it seems to have gotten a little bit better and I don't know if it was because I was rubbing my temples and neck or if the Ibuprofen I took a few hours ago finally kicked in. I'm not complaining either way.

I'm going to go to bed now, though. I want sleep.