November 5, 2015

My uncle died today. When I checked my phone I had two texts from my dad. The first was shortly after noon to say that Hospice had come into the hospital for him this morning and they thought he only had a few days left. The next text was from 2:45PM saying he had passed away an hour earlier. It really sucks. That is an understatement but there are no words to describe it. It doesn't seem that long ago that he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Cancer that was really too far gone to do anything about but they tried. It doesn't seem real yet because I hadn't seen him since the diagnosis so my last memories of him are when he was still healthy. I will always remember him most for taking a million pictures at every family gathering, enjoying movies and gardening, and picking out random but cool gifts for Christmas.

So today obviously sucked but I didn't find that out until later in the day. The majority of my workday was the same old thing. I had classes in the lab and I tried to occupy myself with whatever when I didn't. This morning I went down to help one of the cooks with her computer. I didn't really do anything because switching out cords didn't do anything, but her computer was working again when I left, so at least for today I'm claiming victory.

I helped one of the fourth grade teachers by installing a couple printers on her laptop this morning and then went back up to help her connect it to her projector this afternoon. I also went up there to help one of the fifth grade teachers with her laptop cart because one of the laptops had come unplugged and I had the key. While I was there I also helped her with one of the laptops by suggesting she make sure the wireless was turned on. It wasn't. I stayed up there and talked with her and a para for a little while and she lent me a book. I would say what it was but at the moment I can't remember. It is a book that I vaguely remember reading the first few pages or so of many many years ago. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't finish it but such is life. My goal is to maybe read a few pages each day at work until I finish up classes and then I can knock it out.

Speaking of classes, I ended up working a little more on my website today. I also very briefly looked into stuff for my weekly assignment before going to the sixth grade music assembly. I'm liking the look of my website, even though it is just the basic design and doesn't have any actual content yet. Tonight I added a few lines of CSS so that my menu bar stays locked to the top of the page when you scroll down. I also made it slightly transparent. Like barely perceptible but enough that it looks neat.

For most of the night I fought and lost with my motivation to do my weekly assignment. Then, when I finally managed to start working on it, the internet crapped out on me. It is really annoying considering the only part I have left involves looking at a few different library websites. Kind of hard to do that without the internet considering that's where websites live. I've tried resetting it multiple times so I'm pretty sure it is something on their end not ours. I hat our internet. We don't get the advertised speed because I think everyone in the neighborhood has the same service so we're all pulling from the same pool. It's also shoddy as hell and frequently drops for short periods of time. It really makes online classes difficult when you can't get online. I'm going to keep trying up until midnight, after which point it won't matter because even if I submitted my discussion post it would count as being submitted tomorrow. This means I'll need to post at least one response tomorrow, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, so it doesn't look like I was slacking. Although that's what I get for slacking. If I had just done the assignment earlier in the week, or even earlier today, I would have been fine. Oh well.

I'm going to go reset the router again.

I gave up on the internet for about a half and hour and left the router unplugged the entire time just in case. When I came back and plugged everything in, it was working. I had enough time to look at a couple different library pages, finish writing my post, trimming it down because I tend to be a bit wordy and we were limited to 250 words this week, and then I submitted it. I feel mildly better. Now I need to find the motivation for my research paper.