December 7, 2015

Tanner has been peeing up a storm lately. I feel like he has completely given up on the idea of peeing outside and saves it all up for the living room. This morning I had to clean up a lake before work. When I got home from work there were two more giant lakes. One of which was next to and slightly under the couch and I ended up just flipping the whole couch over to get at it. Usually I just slide the couch out of the way but there was too much pee this time. I think I'm officially a cat person, despite the allergies, because dogs suck.

At work I helped out with literacy centers in one of the kindergarten classes. It is the farm week where the listening center just listens to several farm-related books and doesn't have an activity. I think we only made it halfway through the third book because I spent the first several minutes untangling headphones. The coiled headphone cord seems like a good idea until you have six of them all in the same place and a bunch of kindergarteners involved.

I spent the second half of my morning and most of the afternoon adding Type To Learn, Reading Counts, and a couple shortcuts to an entire cart of laptops (minus the one broken laptop). That is the second or third time I have had to do that this year so I knew what I was getting into but good grief. It takes so long because the computers are so slow and Type To Learn is so big. But I got it done.

The dynamic duo second graders returned to the lab again and it went much better than last week. To crying or tantrums. I think it helped that the tantrum girl had literally just woken up from a nap in the office. Her mind was still groggy and couldn't muster a tantrum. They both also got through everything much quicker and were able to get on the computers (which I logged into and got setup beforehand so they wouldn't lose that time. There was almost a tantrum at the very end because she was in the middle of game and wanted to finish it but I managed to talk her off the ledge.

In my free time when I wasn't working on laptops I made bookmarks for the librarian. When schools borrow books from each other it is apparently a thing to leave a little Thank You note in the book when you return it. Or at least this is a practice with one of the schools and our librarian wanted to do something similar. The example she showed me was taped in the books and our librarian wanted to have bookmarks, which is more functional than a small note taped in a book. So I made bookmarks. Rather than copying the single line about thanking the library for sharing their book, I composed a poem. One that I would repeat now but I currently don't have access to it because access to work email is unavailable after ten o'clock or so at night. It's inconvenient. It was simple, four line poem, and it wasn't too bad. I initially created two different bookmarks, one that was more “cute” based on the clip art and font I chose, and one that was more serious looking. Later on I created a “fancy” one by replacing the plain black border on the serious one with fancy corner accents. I figured I'd give the librarian some options.

My last class of the day was fifth grade. When the teacher left for a minute, two of the kids informed me in a roundabout way that I was in a competition for the teacher with her boyfriend, who is a para at school. I asked them what kind of competition, like sports or video games or something else. Then throughout the class one of them kept turning around and giving me knowing looks and winking while I was talking to the teacher. It was super strange but also pretty funny. I don't think the kids know this teacher has been waiting for her boyfriend to ask her to marry him since before I knew her, which is at least four or five years. While ignoring the looks, I talked with the teacher about her grad classes and the struggle of trying to book a place for a graduation party for her boyfriend, that turned into a big thing at the last minute when it turned out thirty or so people might be attending, not just a handful.

Before dinner I got a call from my sister asking if I wanted to help get her old bed out of the old house. The only thing left in the house. There is a potential buyer and the deal is supposed to be closed on the twenty-third, so we needed to get the bed out. I went over there and talked with my dad for a bit while my brother and sister took apart the bed. Then I helped bring it all out of the basement and put it on the trailer. From there we went over to my sister's house to unload the bed. Then I followed my dad to his house so I could get the board with the train track attached to it. The goal is to put my Christmas tree in the middle of it and my village houses around it. It looks good in my head but I'm not sure how it will work out in real life. Maybe tomorrow night I'll find out.

When I got home it was way past my usual dinnertime so I ate some food and watched some livestreams. Then I read a chapter out of two different books. For fun. What a concept. One of the books was The Tao of Pooh, which the school librarian checked out for me today. I mentioned that I was going to start reading Winnie The Pooh again, which I started after the Summer semester. She said she really liked it and it seems pretty interesting so I'm looking forward to getting further into it.

I ended the night watching a livestream and playing a few matches in Hearthstone. I working on leveling up the Warrior to level ten, while also beating all the other characters once. The Druid repeatedly kicked my butt, and usually it was a severe kicking. I kept getting really weak late game cards and this asshole was pulling out big ass taunt cards and heavy hitters every single round. It was rage-inducing. In the final game, when I finally beat him, it was a battle. I got him down to single-digit health and I had over forty at one point counting my shields, but he managed to whittle me down into the teens and then even lower. It was ridiculous. I had one card left in my deck when I was finally able to get enough minions and attack damage on my guy to take out the Druid. I don't know how often games last that long but it was a relief to finally come out on top.

Now it is almost midnight and I am going to go to bed. My sleep schedule still hasn't recovered from Thanksgiving break. I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing at work tomorrow outside of the normal classes in the lab.