Today was a light testing day. First thing I had a first grade class
and the slow sixth grader showed up to finish her test. This
afternoon I had a handful of second graders finish during their
regular lab time. And that was it. The third graders had a field
trip today and there was an assembly this afternoon so my slow third
grade friend was unable to test. The break was much needed for both
of us I think.
This afternoon we had the Physics assembly, which we have every year.
An old Physics professor comes with two or three assistants and they
show off various Physics things. It was mostly the same stuff as
previous years but there was some new stuff thrown in. He had a
large plastic tube that he held horizontally and heated one end.
When he turned the tube vertically with the heated end down it made a
loud noise, that stopped with the heated end spun upward, and sounded
again when the heated end was down. Pretty cool. The last
experiment inside was filling a large styrofoam container with liquid
nitrogen and then an assistant got decked out in a coat, glasses, and
gloves before climbing a ladder with a big container of hot water.
He then poured it all into the liquid nitrogen at once and it erupted
into a large white cloud and then spread across the floor. Very
cool. The assembly ended as always with a small bottle of liquid
nitrogen submerged into a large trash can filled with water, which
then erupted in a geyser of water when the bottle exploded.
Eruptions are cool.
Throughout the day when I there wasn't testing or kids in the lab, I
worked on the yearbook. There is no easy way to resize the teacher
picture on each class page so I have to eyeball it and try to line it
up kinda sorta with the grid lines. It also doesn't help that the
site is incredibly laggy, so I'll move the picture and nothing will
happen, so I move it again, and then it move way too much because it
has caught up with both moves. Simply listing the dimensions of the
picture as it changed would be an amazing addition to the website.
The same goes for lining up the text for the teacher's name. They
have a lot of premade layouts and they don't seem to be a fan of
people thinking outside the box.
I also came up with a rough idea of a graduation announcement using
Canva. It will be passable if I don't come up with something else
but I think I can do better.
When I got home I had three packages. All of the pen stuff I ordered
arrived today. The Amazon order took an extra day, which is annoying
because it is supposed to be two-day shipping, but I wasn't expecting
the orders from Goulet and JetPens to arrive until next week at the
earliest. It was a pleasant surprise. I looked at but didn't use
the fountain pens or the penmanship books because I said I wasn't
going to do that until after I finished my conference proposal. I
did write a sentence with each of the gel pens I got and the
Skilcraft pen. I really like the gel pens. They've all got Japanese
writing on them, which is cool, but they also write really nicely. I
especially like the Pilot Hi-Tech-C with the 0.25 tip. It kind of
feels and looks like a fine mechanical pencil, which means I can
write really tiny in pen and it is still legible.
Tonight I did not work on my conference proposal. I apparently
really want to see how successful I can be under extreme deadlines.
I don't like it. I think part of me is still burnt out from all the
effort I put into the tutorial video. It's been a week though so
that is really a weak excuse. Much like last Saturday was devoted to
my tutorial, this Saturday will be devoted to my conference proposal.
The really annoying thing is that I get to write it over a topic I
am genuinely interested in, but that is still not motivation enough
to get it done in a timely manner. I don't get it.
I did reply to a discussion post and paid the dues to join Phi Kappa
Phi tonight. So that was productive. I committed to go to the
initiation ceremony, even though I don't want to. It will mean
getting another hotel room, which I'm not thrilled about, but it does
mean I can sleep in a little bit before graduation because I'll only
have to drive ten minutes to get to campus instead of an hour and
fifteen minutes. Trying to think positive.
It's midnight and I need to go to bed so I can wake up and work on my
proposal. Before I go to bed I'm going to close all the distracting
browser windows on my computer so when I sit down in the morning I
can focus on the proposal. It's going to be a long day.
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