September 7, 2015

I didn't really sleep in and I never got around to taking a nap under my desk. So my day was a bit of a fail in regard to sleep. I did manage to read a bunch. I finished all of my textbook reading for the week. I still need to read some articles and things but all the textbook stuff is done. I also watched the lecture for metadata that was over an hour long. I understood a lot of it but not all of it. It doesn't help that the videos tend to be more conversational and there are a lot of tangents that don't lead to anything and stumbling pauses to think about something. I need something with a script so everything that is said has a purpose. Maybe I'm just used to educational YouTube videos where everything is scripted and all the mistakes are edited out.

I took a break from school stuff to go out with my mom and buy more bags of rock for the back yard. Seeds from the bird feeders on the deck fall down on the grass and then start growing little plants. Not only do the dogs start scavenging the seeds and plants, the opossum also seems to be drawn to it. So my mom decided to do a little landscaping and put rock down.

I finished the textbook reading before dinner and after dinner I decided to take the rest of the night off. I watched YouTube videos and the first episode of The Man In The High Castle. It is a show on Amazon based on the novel by Philip K. Dick which imagines a world where the United States lost WWII and the Japanese have taken over the territory west of the Rockies and the Nazis have the territory to the East. I probably won't watch the rest of the show, whenever it actually comes out, but I do want to read the book. Yet another book added to the list. There are probably already enough books on my list to last me until the year 2100. Just a rough estimate.

While watching stuff, I jumped into Minecraft. It has been awhile since I played. It was sometime during the summer but I think it was fairly early on in the summer. Either way, it was fun to lose track of time for a little while. I cleaned up the basements in the house I was working on a little bit and added a couple staircases and railings. Just little things but it was fun. At some point when I have more time, maybe over winter break, I want to build a big library. I'm still trying to decide on a location, though. I have a few options. Maybe I'll just build multiple libraries.

In the middle of reading about metadata I randomly started thinking about the band Boysetsfire. I was a fan back in high school and college but probably haven't thought about them in years. I found them on Spotify (so I didn't have to dig out my CDs) and during my little breaks from reading I listened to one of their CDs. I'm still a fan. To keep the nostalgia train rolling, as I type this I'm listening to Jimmy Eat World. Another favorite from back in the day.

Tomorrow is picture day and I'm not sure what I'm going to wear. I think I've worn all of my regular shirts in previous years and I don't really want to repeat one of them so I might have to dig out one of my new shirts that I haven't gotten around to wearing because they're new and different and I don't like new and different. Or maybe go big for my last picture day (hopefully) and I'll wear a dress shirt and tie. I'll have to see if it still fits. And if I know where my ties are.

That idea got me thinking so I just went on the hunt and found my ties and tried my shirt on. It still pretty much fits, maybe a tad small but that is probably just in my head because the shirts I normally wear are looser. I also managed to tie my tie correctly the first time. I usually end up with the skinny part way below the big part. So I think I might go fancy tomorrow. But I will also take a regular shirt because I don't want to wear my dress shirt all day. It'll be too hot for that.

September 6, 2015

I woke up this morning, read some stuff, watched some stuff, replied to a discussion post, ran on the elliptical, took a shower, and then had lunch. After lunch, I went and picked up my friend who's in town, we got slushies, and then went back to her parent's house to watch Dexter. A show we started watching quite awhile ago but have only made it to season seven. We'll get there. Not today though because we hung out for five hours and only managed to watch one episode. We talked about all the random stuff for the first four hours and then watched one episode right before I had to go home for dinner. It was good to hang out with her. None of my friends live in town anymore so I really don't get to hang out with people very often. I should probably make some more friends.

Dinner was good. My sister made meat stuff so I had a couple fake hot dogs. She also made what I think was a brownie ice cream cake thing with chocolate chips and mint chocolate on top for dessert. It was good.

After dinner I helped her significant other carry bags of rocks from the garage out to the back yard for my mom. He did most of the work but I carried a couple bags. Then I watched YouTube videos and an Aziz Ansari comedy special on Nextflix.

It isn't even 10:30PM yet but I think I'm pretty close to going to bed. I'm tired. I'll probably hold out until eleven o'clock. Maybe. I would really like to say screw it and watch a movie but it would be nice to not completely screw up my sleep schedule. I would also like nothing more than to sleep through most of tomorrow and then wake up and take a nap under my desk. But my goal is to wake up and get some reading done for school tomorrow. And maybe take a nap under my desk. Sleep schedule be damned.

September 5, 2015

I don't have much to write about today. A lot of my day was spent reading. I read a couple articles and a few chapters from a couple different textbooks. I'm am all caught up for the reading this week except the law library article that I was struggling through yesterday. I still need to skim through the rest of it. I also posted more to the discussion threads. All I have left is to post a couple times tomorrow and watch the metadata lecture video for this week. Then I can start reading stuff for next week. Ideally I would get to the point where I binge read over the weekend for the coming week, not binge read over the weekend for the previous week. I don't have to work on Monday so that could be the opportunity I need to get on track.

When I wasn't doing school stuff, I watched YouTube videos. I also finished the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and started watching the second season. And tonight I did laundry. That was pretty much my day. Exciting.

My friend is in town this weekend and I am supposed to hang out with her for awhile tomorrow afternoon. So that will be something different. I will also hopefully do some reading and discussion post posting. I might also vacuum. My mom recently got me a vacuum and it looks pretty cool. It wasn't too long ago that I vacuumed but now that I have a vacuum of my own, I might as well use it. It could be a thing that happens tomorrow. Or on Monday. I don't want to have too much fun in one day.

September 4, 2015

I've been popping my knuckles a lot this past week. I need to figure out something else to do with my hands.

Things happened today. Classes came to the lab. This morning one of the second grade classes came and I spent a good chunk of time playing Bingo with the Spanish speaking kid. It would read the word in Spanish and he had to find it in English. I included animals, which I don't really know, so I had Google translator open on half of the screen so I could try and figure it out. He was able to get a few of them right on the first try and each time he got really excited about it. It was pretty cool. It was also nice to learn that I haven't forgotten all of my Spanish.

Also with second grade, before helping anyone else I got the Chinese girl logged in because the last time she didn't get logged into until the last five minutes or so of lab time. In that process I think I learned that finger crossing is a universal sign for luck or hoping or whatever. I had her typing in all her stuff by pointing at it, and saying it out loud even though she probably didn't understand any of it. After hitting 'Enter' I said “And now we do this and hope it works” as I crossed my fingers. I got a smile out of her so I'm taking that as understanding the symbol.

This afternoon I made several trips back and forth between the lab and the office because one of the office ladies was printing the school newsletter in the lab. She printed out 230 one-sided copies, and then I had to put small stacks at a time in the bypass tray so she could print a calendar on the other side. Both pages were in the same document so I'm not sure why she didn't just print them on both sides to begin with but whatever. I lost track of how many times I went back and forth trying to get the second half of the printing to pull from the bypass tray. It eventually worked, though. And then I gave the entire stack to the librarian because there was a small section for her Twitter account but they forgot the underscore and without it, the account wouldn't show up in a search. She decided to write in the underscore on all of them and was eventually helped by the office ladies.

When I was coming back from giving the newsletters to the librarian I ran into one of my old volunteer supervisors in the hall (because her daughter goes to the school) and we talked for awhile about school and life. Then the librarian came and got me to see if I could help one of the first grade teachers who was trying to translate her newsletter into Spanish and Chinese.

I learned from the teacher that Word (and possibly all Office programs) has the ability to translate whole documents. When you do that it opens up in a browser window and kind of looks like crap. Especially when you're going from a newsletter with a colorful border and pictures, to a poorly formatted, plain text document that doesn't print right. I messed with it for a bit and it seemed like the best solution for the time being is to translate the whole document and then copy and paste the translation back into the newsletter, getting rid of the original English text as you go. I have no idea how accurate the translation is though, seeing as how I don't know any Chinese and only a tiny bit of Spanish. Google seems fairly accurate but who knows about Microsoft. I guess this first newsletter will be a trial run and we'll see if the parents say anything.

Speaking of translating, earlier in the day the Spanish speaking first grader ended up biting a kid twice. The principal was using a translation app on her phone that lets her speak into it and then it either shows you or says the translation. Well, she asked the girl something along the lines of “Why were you mad?” The translation went in a different direction, however, and came up with “Why were you crazy?” So close.

Throughout the day I tried reading an article for one of my classes about the first amendment and law libraries. I couldn't do it. I couldn't get a sense of where it was going or why it was going there. I might try and skip past some of the dense stuff and see if there is anything that I can get through without falling asleep. That will come after I give the rest of the reading for this week a shot.

After work I went to Target and bought food and things before heading home. They didn't have the shower soap I usually get so I went with something new. It smells pretty good in the bottle so hopefully the same is true when it is out of the bottle. I'll find out in a month or so when I finally run out of my current soap, because I am awful at judging how much longer something is going to last.

I responded to a few discussion posts tonight but I didn't do any reading. Even though I took most of the week off from reading, I couldn't bring myself to read tonight. I plan on reading most of tomorrow and Sunday. It's a bit lofty in terms of a goal but why not.

September 3, 2015

 Stuff and things. My brain is fried at the moment so we'll see how much I remember from my day.

I made more Dolch word cards today, this time for the other second grade teacher. It involved some math to figure out the most efficient use of paper, and a little bit of cutting to divide up the straggling cards from each word list.

I finished scanning one of the new reading books and started scanning another one. After the current one there is one left but I don't know that it is being used by anyone so I might just wait for someone to ask me about it before I take the time to scan it.

There were several classes in the lab today, including both kindergarten classes. I couldn't be a kindergarten teacher. Even if it paid exceptionally well, which it never will. The most hectic class was one of the second grade classes, the one with a native Spanish speaker and a native Chinese speaker. It took awhile to get the Spanish kid logged in and then the ELL assignments in Compass Learning wouldn't work because of a Flash issue. I tried updating it and three different browsers but nothing worked. I finally got him into a Spanish/English game on ABCya.

Then I moved onto the Chinese girl and was even less successful. I eventually managed to find an animal matching game but it was either beyond her or she wasn't into it. Probably both. It showed the name of the animal in English and the possible answers were in Chinese. I opened up Google translator to figure out what the answer was, mostly for my own benefit, and then tried to draw the animal in Paint to give her a hint as to what the answer was. I'm not an artist, and I probably should have just Googled images of the animals, but it probably wouldn't have helped.

I didn't really have any downtime today so I feel like I'm probably forgetting something but it's late so I'm moving on.

Before dinner I finally finished the article I was reading for one of my classes. Other than one tiny article, that is all I have read this week. I am so behind. I'm not going to be tested over this stuff but I am genuinely interested in the information, even if it is a tad dry at times, so I want to catch up.

For dinner I had the leftover fake chicken fajitas that my sister made the other night. I still had the second half of my Chipotle burrito but I figured that would last longer than the fajitas.

I spent the rest of the night writing my two discussion posts for my classes. It was a struggle, which is why my brain is currently fried. For one of my articles I had to summarize and discuss the article I read. It is hard to summarize a twenty-page article that is organized more as a rambling essay than an academic study. I think I did a decent job but I think my summary also turned out a bit rambly. For the other discussion post I had to talk about metadata, mostly based on an article I quickly read more than half of and a couple chapters, which I read a couple paragraphs of (just enough to get a reference). I felt out of my depth on that one. And the first one if I'm being honest. I need to do better next week.

I've been listening to The Weeknd's new CD a lot this week and it gets better on every playthrough. Just a random thought I guess, because I'm listening to it as I write this.

Anyway, it's after midnight and I need to go to bed so I can wake up in the morning. Yay. I'm looking forward to watching more Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. because I am approaching the end of the first season and things are up in the air. People are good and then they're bad and then they're good and then they're bad and so on and so forth. I'm not looking forward to the elliptical, but it has been easier the past two days because I think the start button is completely broken so I haven't been able to turn the resistance on. Oh well. I'm still running.

September 2, 2015

 I found the Payday candy bar when I got to work. It was on the computer table near my desk where I had the folders that I was putting paper into before leaving work yesterday. That is kind of where I was thinking I had left the candy. Turns out I was right.

I did things at work today and the day went by pretty fast. I started by copying several packets for one of the second grade teachers. While setting up the copier I learned that it can three-hole punch. That saved me a ridiculous amount of time and effort. It can also offset as it collates, which is something else I didn't realize. This way I didn't have to keep track of when one packet was done and the next started because the copier shifted the output after each packet so it was obvious where each packet was. I don't know if my explanation makes sense but it was really convenient.

When I was done with that I worked on saving even more paper when copying the Dolch word cards. The last part of most of the lists didn't fill up a whole page, in some cases it was just one or two words on that last sheet. This meant that if I was making nine or eleven copies of that list, I was using nine or eleven sheets of paper to print out a single word or maybe a few. I went through if a list was like that, I would put as many of those words as there were copies of that list next to each other on the page. (This is surprisingly convoluted to describe and I think it is working against me that I'm tired). As an example, the first list fit perfectly so each page of words was completely filled. One of the other lists had one extra word and I needed to make a copy of the list for nine kids. Rather than making nine copies that included a page with a single word on it, I made nine copies of the words in the list that filled a full sheet. Than I repeated that last word nine times on a single piece of paper and printed it out once. That saved eight piece of card stock. Four out of the five lists had incomplete final pages that I was able to cram together and save paper. So I didn't have to eventually explain this somewhat involved thinking to whichever parent ends up cutting out all the card sets, I cut out these last pages and grouped these last cards with the rest of the word lists for each kid. (I had already divided the word lists by kid so each kid had their own stack, which were missing those last cards. One sheet of these last cards might contain the last cards for several kids so I couldn't put them with the kids and it would be confusing to leave the sheet separate, so I cut them up and divided them among the groups I had made). I'm going into way too much detail so I'm going to stop.

II had classes in the lab today. I also briefly went down to the library to help the librarian with a class of sixth graders getting on laptops. Going back to the copier, I continued scanning one of the new reading books. And at the end of the day I went back down to the library to help the librarian set up this laptop holder thing that you screw onto a camera tripod and has attachments for a microphone and a lens for the iPad. It was a bit of a process figuring out the tripods because the librarian has an interesting collection, but we got it set up. The only problem is that the cord for the microphone is coiled, for convenience I guess, but it also makes it a little short to connect to the iPad. It connects but it is a bit of a stretch and it goes across the corner of the iPad. Overall it is kind of a cool though and I'm interested to see how it ends up getting used.

I did a few other things during the day, and a few more that I have probably forgotten but oh well for now. After work I went and bought a new windshield visor for my car. My old one bit the dust awhile ago and my car has been hot as hell when I get into it after work. I couldn't take it anymore. Then I went and got Chipotle. I dodged a bullet because there was a new girl at the head of the line but she was taking a long time getting all the tortillas ready so while she was still getting the tortillas ready for the tacos another worker, who has been there for awhile, slid down and started my burrito. It was easily twice the size of my burrito last week. Probably even bigger.

After dinner I showed videos and then started reading an article for one of my classes about censorship and selection. It is so dense and used so many unnecessarily large words. I still have eight pages left but I'm going to bed. I have sucked at reading this week. And I'm going to continue to suck. Maybe I can make up for it tomorrow.

It is not quite 9:45PM but I'm going to bed. I'm a little afraid that I am going to slip back into my summer sleep schedule of nine hours a night. That isn't going to work for me with all the reading I need to do for school. Fingers crossed the last few days have just been a fluke.

September 1, 2015

 I went to bed a little before 9:30PM last night. I woke up some time later and was afraid to look at the clock because it felt like I had been asleep for a really long time and I was worried that it would say 5:00AM. It made me so happy when it was only 2:00AM. I had so much more sleep to look forward to.

I didn't get any schoolwork done at work today because my plate managed to fill up. I had several classes in the lab, spread out through the day so I didn't have too much free time. And that time was spent redesigning a layout for Dolch word cards. Last year I cut out hundreds (or thousands) of these cards after printing them all out on colored cardstock. It was a pain. I think after that I made a new layout where all the cards were touching, so in the future I would only have to make one cut in between the cards to separate them. The design I printed out had gaps, which required two cuts in between the cards. That's just more work. I was looking at that new design this year and figured if I made the cards slightly smaller I could get ten cards on a page instead of just eight. So that's what I did. That ended up saving me five sheets of paper. Not bad.

Also last year, near the end of the year, I scanned a couple books for the new reading program that we're using this year. I put the PDFs on the faculty drive so when teachers need the worksheets they can just open the PDFs and print them off, instead of having to go copy them. Turns out those books were for the younger grades and one of the fourth grade teachers asked me if I could scan the two books the older grades use. I got a brief start on that today.

I made another sign for the lab wall that says “Do NOT turn off the monitors”, which is set inside a clipart monitor and has an orange construction paper border. It looks pretty cool. I picked a good font. The only problem is that you can't look too closely because the border isn't entirely even. The paper cutter doesn't cut very straight and I'm pretty sure not much care is put in at the factory to make sure construction paper is cut at right-angles. Kind of frustrating. We'll see if anyone pays attention to the sign. I'm tired of coming in and having five monitors turned off instead of the computer itself. It is annoying but it also presents a problem over the weekend when sheets are put over the computers. If the sheet completely covers the tower of a computer that has been mistakenly left one it creates a pretty hot situation.

After school I added printers to the gifted teacher's laptop and tablet. They all stopped working after the reboot, like they did for everyone, so I showed her how to add them with the IP address. She paid me with a PayDay candy bar, even though I don't eat candy, but a lot of people don't know that and I don't want to be the dick who turns down a gift. So I took the candy bar. Later tonight I realized I had no idea where that candy bar ended up. I left work less than five minutes after receiving the candy bar and I have no idea what I did with it. I am assuming I set it down to put it down to put some papers back in a folder, and then promptly forgot about it. We'll see if it is still wherever I put it when I get to work tomorrow.

I stopped at Target on the way home to see if I could find a grill brush for my dad's birthday. I couldn't. There were other things I needed at Target but I was kind of annoyed by the brush thing so I left. I'll go back later.

For my dad's birthday I went over to his house for dinner, which my sister was making so he didn't have to cook. She made some chicken thing for everyone else and she made fake chicken fajitas for me. They were really good. I also had salad and watermelon. Desert was a little bit of strawberry ice cream. Chocolate is a classic but I think strawberry is my favorite. I need to stop eating so much ice cream though because I'm beginning to worry about my calcium intake. After dinner and birthday cards we spent a lot of time just sitting around and talking.

I had planned on getting a lot of reading done today to make up for last night but I didn't leave my dad's house until after 9:30PM and I have been tired since at least seven o'clock. So no reading today. Definitely tomorrow. I need to come up with my discussion post stuff for this week by Thursday and at the moment I've falling behind.

Tomorrow I will get things done at work, eat some Chipotle for dinner, and get a lot of reading done for school. I've got productive plans.