November 3, 2015

I've had a headache most of the day so I'm going to write this and then go to bed.

Today was an uneventful day at work. I had classes in the lab, worked with my second grade reading group, and in my free time I worked on editing the picture of the SPED teacher. Today I made a version where she is wearing a clown dress. And that is all I can think to write about.

Tonight I accomplished nothing. I wanted to do some schoolwork but my head hurt and I couldn't find the motivation. It is going to be a rough last bit of the semester.

I learned Anno 2205 came out today. I briefly got really into Anno 2070 and the new game looks really good. I'm usually not a fan of that type of game but there's just something about the graphics that do it for me. I unfortunately don't really have the time to get sucked into a game right now.

My sister invented a new cookie thing that involves Rice Crispies, peanuts, and white chocolate. I didn't really know what to expect but I thought they would probably be hard, like a Rice Crispy treat. This was not the case. They were really easy to bite into and they were really good. If I hadn't had too much to eat for dinner I probably would have eaten all of the cookies that she brought over.

And now I'm going to take some Ibuprofen and go to bed.

November 2, 2015

Two nights in a row of little sleep is catching up with me. I plan on being in bed long before ten o'clock tonight.

Today was a pretty typical day at work. I helped out with literacy centers in both kindergarten rooms this morning. The kids listened to Bee-Bim Bop! and then had to draw their favorite food. Centers last thirty minutes and the story is pretty short, which left a lot of time to draw food. I would argue too much time. I couple kids in the first class were able to stretch it out but most of the kids finished really fast and I spent most of the time asking them questions and suggesting other foods they could draw. It was a challenge.

I decent chunk of my day, when I didn't have classes in the lab, was spent editing a picture of one of the SPED teachers. One of the paras sent it to me because she wants to make some sort of birthday announcement with it for the teacher's birthday next month. For some reason she is wearing a kids yellow hardhat with a goofy look on her face. I cut her out of the picture and added her into a field picture, leaning on a fence. She was sitting down originally so I found a stock image of a girl standing and was able to give the teacher legs. I think it turned out pretty well. She was also holding a sheet of paper and I erased what was on it and put a small copy of the cut out her on it, and then an even smaller copy on the paper of the small copy. I'm still messing around with it but I like where it's headed.

After school I went and got a haircut and then went to the car wash. I am hoping the birds have moved off from the trees around school. With my luck a whole flock will probably crap on my car tomorrow.

I did not really do anything tonight. I watched a few YouTube videos and then watched the Bob Ross marathon. It's addictive.

With a full night of sleep tonight I'll get back to schoolwork tomorrow. Hopefully.

November 1, 2015

 Last night I went to bed late and this morning I woke up really early for no particular reason. I really lost the benefit of Daylight Savings. This afternoon I took a brief nap but I think that was mostly due to boredom and not wanting to work on school stuff. I did manage to finish my reading for the week so there's that.

When I wasn't reading, I watched a lot of Bob Ross. He is just so good and I could watch him for hours. And I do watch him for hours. It is supposed to be a nine day marathon on Twitch but hopefully they will keep the channel going after that period. They have a sub button so hopefully that means they plan on keeping the channel. It would be kind of a bad on Twitch's part to set up a channel for nine days and let people pay five dollars to subscribe to it.

I played a little bit with the Unreal Engine editor today, which I downloaded a couple days ago. I have a vision of creating a virtual library that is a representation of an actual library's physical collection, and possibly their digital collection. The idea being that someone can walk through and actually browse the collection in a virtual setting. I've had the idea for years, ever since I started buying books mostly on Amazon rather than a bookstore. I missed just walking along the aisles and looking at the spines and I thought a virtual library would be the solution. I'll get there eventually. Or someone who actually knows how to program and make games will come along and do it before me. That is probably more realistic. Anyway, today I briefly messed around with making a bookshelf. Baby steps.

Tonight I streamed while I made a big cat and then a bird cross stitch pattern in Minecraft. I ended up with a few viewers and I got my second follower before my internet crapped out on me a couple times and they left. The cat and bird both turned out really well so I was happy with that.

Right now it is late but I am watching a livestream. I started watching this girl a week or two ago because I was in a Minecraft mood and she was playing Minecraft. I have learned that she spends most of her time streaming H1Z1, the battle royale mode in particular. It is a game I have no real interest in playing myself but it can be interesting to watch every now and then. A few days ago she ended up in a match with a guy from Korea who speaks very little English. Tonight when I turned the stream on they had someone hooked up again and now they are playing as a team and it is hilarious. In the current game the spent a long time hiding, practicing the “Gandhi method” and he put it, trying not to kill anyone until the end of the game.

The best part of the stream though was probably when they were driving in a car and she was killed as they drove by a couple of the other players. He was talking in the game chat which is location based, meaning that it is loud when you are close to someone and as they move farther away the voice gets quieter. After she was killed she fell out of the car and he kept driving, his voice getting quieter until he realized that she had been killed. Then you could hear the car getting louder as he turned around and drove back and then his excited talking as he drove back over where she had died and headed toward the killers, shouting about revenge. And then he was killed. It was really funny.

But now I'm going to go to bed because it is after 12:30AM and I need to wake up in the morning.

October 31, 2015

 This morning I woke up earlyish so I could go pick up my Navy friend at the airport. I wanted to get gas before I left but when I went to the station I normally go to my card wasn't working. I tried two different pumps and I assumed it was their machines. I drove across town to another station and my card worked, which confirmed my suspicion about the other station. I thought about standing by the pump because I only needed half a tank but I didn't. This turned out to be a good thing because while sitting in my car I heard a splashing sound. That was the gas overflowing from my tank because apparently the auto-shutoff wasn't working. I jumped out and stopped it but not before gas went everywhere. Had I been standing by it, I would have been able to stop it sooner but I also would have been covered in gas. I used the windshield washer/squeegee thing to wash off the side of my car.

The first part of my journey was spent getting high on gas fumes because I guess I stepped in the puddle of gas. I was hoping that it was because of all the gas that had spilled on the car, not that it was in the car. After getting back in the car with my friend at the airport it still smelled like gas, so it's probably on my floor mat now. Hooray.

When I was halfway to the airport my friend texted me to say he was going to be an hour late. I had no need to worry about being late myself after the gas fiasco. I didn't mind the late thing because I brought my textbook and I would just get more reading done. The time got pushed back a couple more times and it was some time after noon when they finally arrived. I think this was partially if not wholly due to the overcast weather. When I was first leaving down it looked like the clouds were maybe fifty feet off the ground. I've never seen clouds so low before when I wasn't on top of a mountain.

I ended up driving past the airport because I was looking for a road that I later found out didn't have a visible sign until after you were on it. I had a pretty good feeling that it was the turn I needed to take because it had a bunch of old planes next to it but I have a tendency to freak out and turn too early so I fought the urge and kept driving. And then I eventually came back. Then I circled around the parking lot a few times and took a couple side roads because the place looked completely abandoned. I finally decided to park and go in to check and it the inside of the airport also looked abandoned. I could hear a TV and assumed there might have been one or two workers at the cafe but that was down a hallway and I ended up going over and sitting on a couch facing the runway. I chose that spot because it was quiet and it let me focus on my book.

About forty-five minutes to an hour before my friend landed a small Navy prop plane landed and right after my friend landed another Navy prop plane landed. My friend actually new the pilot of the second plane and it was a complete coincidence that they both came in at the same time at the same airport. I asked my friend if this airport was a regular Navy stop off and he said it wasn't even kind of a regular stop and that it was a complete fluke that three planes ended up there on the same day in such a short period of time.

I didn't get to see the jet land because it ended up coming in on the other side of the building from me, but I did get to see it taxi to its parking spot. Once it was parked and everything was set we were waved out. The pilot of my friend's jet had a bunch of friends and family there to greet him and my friend had me. Better than nothing. We were able to walk all around the jet and I took pictures. My friend asked me what I thought it would feel like and I figured hard metal, but then I touched it and it was actually kind of soft. Not like squishy or anything but definitely not a hard metal feeling. That was interesting. I also looked inside the back wheel well, which had tubes and pipes all over the place inside. It was crazy. My friend walked me around and explained all the different parts and I even got to climb up and look in the cockpit. It was really cool. One of the pictures I took is now one of my desktop wallpapers.

Before heading out of town we stopped and had lunch at Chipotle. Whenever I eat in I get a bowl so I don't have to mess with a burrito and the bowls are always delicious. I think the key is the lemon I squeeze on it. I need to integrate that into my burrito somehow.

When we got back into town I dropped him off at his parent's house and I stayed and talked with his parents for a little bit before heading home. I wanted to do some productive things but I was also tired. I did manage to download the two articles I need to read this week and I eventually wrote a response for the discussion thread. So I did things, just not as much as I would have liked.

I watched Bob Ross and YouTube videos and tried not to fall asleep. To help with that I played a little Minecraft, adding a few Halloween themed patterns in my cross stitch world. When my friend was done watching the World Series game I went and picked him up and we went down to the bars. It was nuts. We drove all over looking for a parking spot and we were going to give it one last shot when we ended up getting a spot on the main strip. There were so many people and the vast majority were dressed up in costumes. Some were awful and a small few were really good.

We went to one bar because my friend only wanted to have one beer. After he took a sip he was convinced it tasted like pineapple, when it shouldn't have. He wanted me to try it but I don't drink and wouldn't have been much help. He ended up getting a guy sitting at the table that we were standing by to try it and he agreed that it didn't taste like the beer it was supposed to be. My friend took it back and found out it was in fact the wrong thing. We stood there and talked about random things while he drank his beer and I drank my water, and then we left. Thanks to all the different costumes it was better than most of my bar-going experiences.

It is now way too late, even with daylight savings. I have been looking forward to sleep since about the time I woke up this morning.

October 30, 2015

 At work today I watched a lot of Bob Ross. Last week I think they released the first season of his show on YouTube. Today on Twitch they started a nine day marathon. A good portion of my day at work was spent watching the marathon. I had it up on my second monitor while I worked on various things.

The workday went by pretty fast. We had a tornado drill this morning and I had a couple classes in the lab. This afternoon I think there was another class but I can't remember. Most of the classes were having Halloween parties today so One or two didn't come to the lab.

Near the end of the day I went upstairs to help the gifted teacher with a few computer things. That didn't take too long but we ended up talking for quite awhile. She is older and should have probably retired years ago but I learned during our talk why she hasn't. She followed her ex-husband around the country as he got various jobs and because of this wasn't able to stay at a place long enough to build up a retirement account. The plan anyway was for him to make the retirement money. But then he became an ex-husband. She also helped her kids pay for school even though she really didn't have the money. And now she is forced to continue working. She likes her work but it is still pretty sad.

Tonight I watched the Garfield Halloween special and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. After writing a couple more responses on the discussion thread for this week. Then I played a little bit of Minecraft, finishing the heart pattern I started the other day. While I was writing this I went back to watching Bob Ross. It reminds me of my childhood and I like it.

Tomorrow I have to get up kind of early because I am going to pick my Navy friend up at the airport. I have never seen an F-18 in person so hopefully I'll get to see him land but I've never been to this airport before so I don't know what the layout is like and if I'll be able to see the runway. The positive thing is that the airport is only an hour away. The last time I picked him up from an airport it was two hours away.

Now I'm going to go to bed because I'm tired. That is reason enough for me.

October 29, 2015

 Yesterday I watched the livestream of the spacewalk. Two astronauts, Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren, went for a seven hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. It was fairly dull viewing but I found it fascinating. I watched a guy using a grease gun for an hour. But it was in space so it was interesting. After the spacewalk they came back into the space station and had to stay in a small chamber, still in there suits, for quite awhile so they could decompress. Or something like that. After that they were pulled into the station one at a time by one of the other astronauts. Several pictures were taken, mostly of their gloves, and then their suits were taken off. It kind of looked like they were being born, slowly pulled from the small chamber into the station and then the suit being slowly taken away, one piece at a time to reveal the person inside. It was pretty cool and only made more so by the fact that the guy doing the work (and the other astronauts taking pictures) were all floating around the two in the big bulky spacesuits.

I had my dentist appointment this morning. I learned when I got there that my new insurance through the school district has separate health and dental insurance. I learned after school when I went to the HR department that vision is also separate. It was my fault for assuming that everything was combined because that is how my insurance has always been. It was the districts fault for not making that separation more clear. Apparently there was a box to check somewhere. A box that was not mentioned when I went to sign up for insurance. It is also too late to sign up for dental and vision. Fantastic. After school I went back to the dentist and paid $150 for my cleaning. A cleaning that was kind of pointless because my teeth are great, as confirmed by both the hygienist and the dentist.

Today at work I had a clever bit of troubleshooting. The projector in the small ELL room in the back of the computer lab wasn't showing red. All the other colors seemed to work fine but red always showed up as black or blue, if it showed up at all. This is kind of an issue when you're trying to teach kids English and you want them to find the red object on the screen. We tried various setting on the projector itself and reset everything just in case it was a setting that got mixed up. That didn't fix it. Then I decided it was either the cable or something inside the projector. To narrow it down I went down to the library and borrowed a VGA cable and a VHS/DVD player. I plugged the VHS/DVD player in, crossed my fingers that a black and white VHS wasn't in there, and hit 'Play'. It was an old VHS (obviously) but there were clearly red objects in the scene, so that eliminated the problem being inside the projector. Then I swapped out the VGA cables and the color red could be seen. Success. It probably took less than ten minutes to get it sorted out and the teacher was impressed with my troubleshooting skills. I'm right there with her.

I sent out another email reminder to everyone about sending me pictures for the yearbook. It was well crafted, if I do say so myself. And it worked because I got several pictures from several different teachers. I'll have to continue sending them out every couple months but we're getting there.

After lunch I went up to the office to wait for the librarian to get out of a meeting because she wanted help with a projector issue. The meeting went about fifteen minutes long but I had a magazine and nothing else to do so I was fine. But everyone who walked by asked me if I was in trouble. It was all in jest but I began to wonder if I give off some sort of vibe if everyone's first thought is that I'm in trouble. Then my mom walked by and asked if I was in trouble and everyone started laughing.

My group member sent out a spreadsheet that had all of our book lists compiled and asked for feedback. Tonight I did a little formatting on it, tweaking the color, some border heights, and froze the heading rows, but everything else looked pretty good to me. I ended up with way more books that everyone else because they were able to include some reference materials that were pretty expensive. I probably should have looked for that kind of stuff. I also made a couple posts on this weeks discussion thread.

I didn't do much with the rest of my night because I had a headache that was only getting worse. In the past few minutes it seems to have gotten a little bit better and I don't know if it was because I was rubbing my temples and neck or if the Ibuprofen I took a few hours ago finally kicked in. I'm not complaining either way.

I'm going to go to bed now, though. I want sleep.

October 28, 2015

 It is going to be eleven o'clock in ten minutes and I have a dentist appointment before work tomorrow. I should be in bed already. Anyway.

We had a fire drill today, continuing with our safety week. It was a bit on the chilly side outside and the wind was greatly to blame. Then we had to stand outside for a considerably longer time than normal. When the principal finally came out she said that it was due to a new plan where instead of going through the building to check that all the kids were out of the building, she goes out front and talks to the firefighters. We found out later that this was a lie. Earlier in the day someone signed in but never signed out, so it was assumed they were still around somewhere. This left the principal and possibly the firefighters going around the building looking for this person. And the person was never found, which means they left at some point without signing out. How nice. We stood out in the cold wind for some asshat

Things I did today. I fixed one of the kindergarten teachers' computers by deleting a bunch of stuff off of it. I brought in my display port cable so one of the fifth grade teachers could use it because it is the only way she can connect her computer to her projector. She was being evaluated today and needed to project stuff I guess. I installed a printer on a loaner laptop for one of the fourth grade teachers. I had several classes and small groups in the lab throughout the day. And when I wasn't doing that stuff, I read some articles. I think I found one or two more for my research paper but then I got sidetracked by one that was a survey of people on hiring committees at libraries that gave insight for new library school graduates. Which led to reading a couple things about interview questions. I feel like there may have been a couple other things mixed in there but nothing else is coming to mind at the moment.

After work I got Chipotle and my Powerball ticket before heading home. After dinner we watched videos and they went over really well. Can't go wrong with a cat video or videos with a drunk on wine guy ranting about stuff.

When I was done with the videos I came down and wrote a response on the discussion thread. Goal accomplished for the night, I switched over to Minecraft because I wanted to zone out for awhile. I'm still doing the cross stitch pattern thing and tonight I made the phrase “Oh Fuck” in the shape of a Christmas ornament and I got started on a very elaborate heart. That turned out to be a little ambitious and I wasn't able to finish it because when I looked up it was after 10:30PM. I ended up streaming all of this and I got my first follower. They never showed up in chat but I heard the new follower sound. I didn't see the pop-up but I also wasn't watching the stream at the time so hopefully it did actually work. I made it so long ago that I'm don't really remember how it works. I need to look into it. That will probably be my only follower ever but it's still pretty cool.

It is now after eleven o'clock so I am going to go to bed. So I can wake up and hopefully remember that I need to leave the house quite a bit earlier for my dentist appointment.