April 12, 2016

 When I laid down to go to bed last night the room immediately started spinning and it wouldn't stop. I ended up having to prop my head up with another pillow which seemed to alleviate the spinning a little bit. Enough for me to eventually fall asleep anyway. When I got to work I was talking to the librarian and one of the paras about it and they both suggested I try a decongestant. I took one of those after dinner and my head still feels a little loopy, and I still feel congested, but we'll see what happens when my head hits the pillow.

I didn't have a test first thing so I got the basketball pictures from the librarian and started working on that slideshow. Throughout the day I downloaded the songs, imported the pictures, and started tweaking things. I rearranged some pictures and set up random transitions between all of them, which I then adjusted on an individual basis as I watched through it. I ended up having to edit one of the songs because it started weird, which then made the transition from the previous song weird. I opened it in Audacity, trimmed a bit off the front and also made it fade in, which got rid of the weirdness and made the transition much better. I also made a title slide. I used the wood background I found this summer when making the website for a basketball organization. It was made to be tiled for the background of a website so I opened it in Gimp and tiled it a bunch until I got up to 1920x1080. On top of that I added words and the high school logo, which took a bit of work. I could only find a small image of the logo and it looked a little odd when I scaled it up and erased the background. I went through and did my best to change everything to one color and trim/add bits here and there. Then I played with the brightness and contrast to turn it from light blue to black to make sure it was all one color and I hadn't missed anything. Then I was able to use the paint bucket and turn it back to the right color of blue. It was a bit of a process. It took between forty-five minutes and an hour to render and it was after the first render that I noticed a few things I needed to change. I wasn't able to start the second render until 3:30PM so I left it going and the librarian said she would check it before she left to see if it was done. If she has any critiques I'll be able to adjust things tomorrow because I don't think the banquet is until tomorrow night.

And speaking of the librarian, as a thank you for everything she gave me an Amazon gift card this morning for $100. That is ridiculous. I thought the $50 gift card she gave me for Christmas was way too much and this one is definitely way too much. I also don't want to bring it up and make things awkward, because that will happen. I help her with all the tech stuff at school and the slideshows and stuff for her kids because I like doing that stuff and it gives me something to do. It also gives me a chance to learn new things. I'm already on the clock when I do most of it and don't need to get paid more for it but I don't want to offend her by not accepting it. I haven't eaten candy for quite awhile now but I still accept it as payment from teachers because I don't want to make things awkward. Trying to deny money is way higher up on the awkward scale than candy.

There was more testing today. The third grader who tested for two and a half hours yesterday put in another hour and a half today to finish up the first stage of Math. She still has three stages of Math and one stage of Reading to go. It's going to be a long rest of the month.

The music teacher, and one of the second grade teachers that she showed the list to, liked the ideas I came up with for alternatives to healthy choices. Their two favorites were also my two favorites: “Vegetables before confectionables” and “et tu, brownie?”

I was supposed to meet with the academic librarian today regarding a practicum but she had to cancel. Kind of disappointing. I would really like to get this all sorted out so I can get everything submitted and get enrolled in the practicum so I can stop worrying about it. We are now working on rescheduling.

Tonight I started re-writing the script for my video tutorial. It is going much better. I can't remember what my schedule looks like tomorrow but it would be nice if I could get the script finished at work. Then I could maybe consider recording the video tomorrow night. Although to be honest that probably won't happen because I still need to read the articles and write my discussion post for my other class. Realistically, I see me reading the articles tomorrow night, and maybe even writing the discussion post, but that probably won't happen until Thursday. The recording of the video should also happen on Thursday, but might get pushed back until Friday. We have the day off from work so I have all day to record and edit it. At this point I am hoping adding the captions doesn't take as long as I think it will. Fingers crossed on that one.

I bought two pairs of Chucks tonight. Green ones and bright orange ones. The green ones are because I have wanted new green ones for over a year now. The orange ones are for graduation. At least that's the plan. We'll see what they look like in person.

Now I'm going to bed. It isn't even 10:30PM yet and I haven't made it to bed before midnight in way too long. Hopefully I sleep better than last night.