May 11, 2016

 Today was a busy day and it went by way too quick. My morning started by getting ready a little bit earlier so I could go to the courthouse and get my drivers license renewed. On the way I was nearly in a car accident when I car merging onto the highway decided to continue merging into the left lane, without checking the blind spot or using their blinker. I was in the blind spot and ended up on the shoulder of the road, which was thankfully very wide and clear of debris. I didn't actually hit my break so I was just speeding along beside the other car that was slowly coming further into my lane. At one point I thought they had spotted me because they appeared to move slightly back into their lane, so I started to come off the shoulder but then they started coming back into my lane and I went back on the shoulder. I think I eventually got far enough up that someone in the car saw me and they moved fully back into the right lane. I took the opportunity to speed up and get in front of them. It would have been great to get in an accident on the way to renew my expired drivers license.

I got to the courthouse early so I drove around the block a couple times before going in. The office still wasn't open but there were already a few people waiting. When it was my turn to go I was quickly reminded that I needed proof of address. When we moved however long ago I got a temporary slip of paper from the drivers license people with my new address but that didn't count as proof. Thankfully, because I am registered to vote, I was able to go across the hall and have them print off my voter registration or something and that worked. The rest of the process went fairly smooth.

The work day started with a performance from the traveling middle school band. That is always fun. It is led by the band teacher who I first saw when I was in elementary school and he inspired me to join band so I could one day be in his band in middle school. He's still got it. It was also cool seeing former school kids playing in the band.

Yesterday or the day before I showed my graduation announcement (with a play on a birth announcement) to one of the second grade teachers. This morning she gave me a congratulations card, meant for someone who had just had a baby, but she crossed out the word “son” and wrote “diploma”. It was hilarious.

For a good chunk on the day I worked on my MAP spreadsheets. I got sidetracked from that later in the afternoon when the gifted teacher asked for my help. I went up to the third floor and helped her with an iPad question and then came up with a way to help her with an iMovie question, which I guess was also an iPad question. I've never used iMovie but it wouldn't let her zoom out of a picture. It apparently couldn't have any blank space and had to fill the whole frame. I could get it to scroll along the picture but she wanted to show the whole page at once. I suggested scanning the pictures, putting them on a black background that was 1920x1080. That way the bigger black image would fill the screen and the picture would be perfectly centered in the middle. So I went down, scanned the pictures (which were drawings by a student because the iMovie project was by a student turning her story into a video), edited them, put them on the black background, and sent them to the gifted teacher. She said it worked and now she wants the same kind of thing done for the text of the story. That is on the agenda for tomorrow.

Before going up to help the gifted teacher the librarian called me down to the library. She had a stack of yearbooks going back to 1995 and was wondering about using them for the retiring sixth grade teacher. I said I could take them and scan his pictures from the books and add them into the slideshow. That led to scanning almost twenty yearbooks. But only a page or two out of each book. Now I need to go back and cut out and edit the teacher's picture from each yearbook. I also proposed the idea of scanning each of the yearbooks and turning them into PDFs. Because I need more things on my plate at the end of the year. I should be able to do it using the copy machine, hopefully, which would make it a fairly easy process. If I have to manually scan each page with the flatbed scanner I probably won't be able to get it done by the end of the year. It would be too much for my plate to hold.

After work I picked up Chipotle and headed home. I had a bunch of videos saved this week so we ended up watching them during dinner and then for awhile following dinner. I think most of them went over pretty well.

I didn't get to do anything fun tonight because I spent most of it procrastinating. I eventually, like sometime after eight o'clock, started writing my practicum prospectus. And I eventually finished it. Tomorrow I will send it to my site supervisor, and if she approves of it, I will send it to my adviser who will hopefully approve of it and enroll me in the practicum. Now that the prospectus is done, minus the emailing it to people, it means I have a tiny break from school.

Tomorrow I need to figure out my suit because I have to wear it Friday. Friday I have to leave work early so I can leave town for the honor society induction ceremony that I don't want to go to and I'm not sure why I'm going. Saturday I have to leave town again for my graduation ceremony. Also something that I don't really want to do but it's kind of a thing. And I've already got my wrinkly robe so I might as well go. Sunday, should be my day of rest. Fingers crossed.

It's now after midnight. Good grief.