December 8, 2015

Somehow in the giant entry I wrote yesterday I forgot to mention something. The poster I made for the SPED teacher for her birthday. The ridiculous photoshop job of her standing in a field with a clown dress, wearing a birthday hat on top of the hard hat she was already wearing, and holding a piece of paper with a smaller version of the same picture, which was holding and even smaller version. I heard random references to it throughout the day and at the end of the day the SPED teacher walked in and said a little birdie told her I was good at photoshop. I ended up sending her the digital copies of the poster and just the picture itself and she emailed me back and loved it because she hadn't seen the color version of the picture yet. So I'd say the whole endeavor was worth it. It was also a good distraction from homework.

Today at work I had a lot of free time. I briefly helped with kindergarten literacy centers in between classes in the lab. And I had all the usual classes in the lab, but that wasn't enough to fill my day. Thankfully, one of the SPED teachers wanted a blank bell curve because she had to sketch one out during a meeting and it annoyed her. I couldn't find and good ones online but I did find a tutorial about how to make one in Excel. I adapted it to my needs to get the graph how I liked it, then I copied it and pasted it into Gimp, erased the white background, saved it as a PNG, imported it to Publisher, added the vertical lines, added in text, re-did the numbers so they matched the text and didn't look slightly blurry like they tend to do in pictures, and added in a legend off the page with dots and all the different categories that would make up points on the curve so the teacher can just copy the ones she needs onto the curve. I think it turned out pretty well and she really liked it. A success.

One of the third grade classes came to the lab today and it reminded me of something the teacher said yesterday that I wanted to include here. She put a twist on an old phrase when talking about the kids in her class. “You can give them a fish and they'll eat for a day. Or you can teach them to fish, and they'll probably fall in the lake.” Hilarious.

When I ran out of things to do near the end of the day I made an owl pattern in Gimp based on one I found online. In cross stitch form it is only about an inch by an inch and a half, so I made a second one where I used four squares to make up one square of the pattern. I was also able to read a few pages in The Tao of Pooh.

After school I stopped by Hobby Lobby to get string for cross stitching. I can't even remember the last time I went to Hobby Lobby. It has been a really long time, though. When I got home I got the train track board out of my car and cleaned it off before taking it downstairs. Then I got out all of my Christmas stuff, including the small tree which I put in the middle of the train track board. It is going to take me awhile to figure out ornaments so I moved onto the train instead. It probably hasn't been used in at least twenty years and that worried me. What worried me more was after plugging it in and hearing that it was on, the train didn't move. I messed with it a little and it eventually started working. Maybe it just needed to charge up or something. Regardless, I've got the train from my childhood around the base of my Christmas tree now. It's pretty cool.

I put a new protective screen on my mom's phone after dinner and then I started the owl cross stitch. I decided to start the small one first just to get an idea of the color scheme and see if it worked out. I made it through one color and then called it good for the day. I'll finish it tomorrow. Maybe.

Then I finished a chapter in The Tao of Pooh before jumping into Minecraft for a little bit. And now I am going to go to bed because I am determined to get to bed before midnight tonight. My late nights are catching up with me. I'll be in bed before eleven o'clock tonight and that sounds amazing.