Are You Being Served?

We're EVIDENTLY NOT being served. Let me explain. At our school we have used a database program designed for schools. It lets us store all kinds of data about our staff and students. It also lets us schedule classes and take attendance. It keeps a grade book that does all the calculations and comes out with a grade. It's WONDERFUL... when it works. When it doesn't. . . it's less than NOT wonderful.
Our state has begun implementing a new SIS (Student Information System) for state reports. We could just export our data to them or we could purchase the district verson of their program and the exports would happen "automatically." Since our old system was being phased out at the end of this year, our district decided to go with the same system the state uses so we could "synchronize" with their server and automatically export our data for state reports. It sounds great on paper. But when we finally got converted to the new system, they converted us to a version of the program newer than the version the state uses. Newer is better, right? NO it's not better, it's worse. The newer version won't synchronize with the older version and we had no way to assign state ID numbers to our new students. Bummer!
Well, after a couple of days of panic to get the new students enrolled, scheduled, graded and attendended, we got a "walk around" to fix it temporarily until we could sync. We spent Friday in a marathon work session entering in new data. Whew!!

Then Friday afternoon, somewhere in Minnesota. . . a server crashed. Guess whose server it was? Good guess. It was our server and we're back to where we were a week ago. I hope it's not longer than a week ago. I can't contact anyone until Monday to know for sure. I'm just hoping that we've already had our share of bad luck for the year.

If you're wondering why I should care about any of this it's because as of last spring I'm the head "data monkey."

Lucky, lucky me.

New chairs for old!

I remember blogging a looooooong time ago about wanting a new sofa. Well a few weeks ago, after a delay or two, it finally got delivered. When they delivered this they took away our old sofa and an old recliner chair that was looking a little worse for the wear and tear. Now we have a much less cluttered living room. We don't have a sleeper sofa any more, but we've plenty of room for one of those inflatable beds.



That's my new philosophy, if I'm replacing something then I have to get rid of the old something I'm replacing or I really don't need the new someting after all. That goes for sofas, shoes, books, and tires, but never people. You can't replace old friends or family for new. You can never have enough of either.

DATA MONKEY

From the Urban Dictionary

2.data monkey
22 up, 1 down
An employee whos job it is to take data from one source (eg SQL Server) and stick it in another source. A bit like a DBA (Database Administrator) but without the job prospects.
"Hey Jim, do you have that Excel spreadsheet yet?" "No Ann, the Data Monkey has only had the jobsheet for 6 days, I'll have it for Christmas...I think."

I thought I had invented the name Data Monkey to describe my new job. But when I Googled it to make sure it didn't mean something different, I found my job description. Who knew? I must have seen it somewhere and it just stuck in the back of my head until it leaped out one day when some student asked my what I did if I wasn't the librarian anymore. "I'm a Data Monkey!"

Belle Weather

As I was driving home after work I saw the most beautiful clouds ahead of me. The closer I got to home the more of the lower clouds I could see. About 30 minutes after I got home we had some hail, later measured at approx. 1" in diameter. So of course I had to take some pictures.

Christmas in July

Hubby got a new camera last weekend and has been taking pictures of our local flora and fauna(fauna to follow). This reminds me of Christmas because of the bright red berries. I've never seen so many berries on the bushes, but we've never had such a mild, rainy spring before either. It's called a Skunk Bush, also a Fragrant Sumac, Lemon Sumac, Polecat Bush, Rhus trilobata, take your pick. You'll probably be seeing the picture again in late December along with wishes for a Merry Christmas.

It Works Again

I changed a setting in our browser's security setting and it works now. Not sure if it was something I did or a coincidence. Thanks.

Now I can't think of anything to write.

This coming Friday is the last day of my online summer school class. It's getting harder and harder to complete the assignments. The assignments are harder, my attention is wandering to stuff at my new job and because it's summer and I'm usually doing some heavy duty housecleaning this time of year and it's not getting done and there are video games not being played and books not being read.

Anyhoo, I'm sure glad I aced the easy stuff cause I ain't acing anything now. Just counting down the days 'til "School's OUT for SUMMER!"

Top 100 Books

Stole this right off of Philipa's blog.

What books have you read? Bold the ones you have read, italicize the ones you are planning on reading and underline the ones you loved: Some of the children's books I read over the summer when I worked with the Missoula Library Summer Bookmobile program. The quality of the books is part of why I became a chilren's librarian. Other of the children's books I read to my son when he was little. I think he enjoyed most of them or at least knew that a good book would delay bedtime!

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen –
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Read 1 1/2 of the books. Does that count?
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Read many, many times.
6. The Bible -Bits and pieces, but not the whole thing.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell-
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -Loved the first two of the series. I was reading these when everyone else was reading Harry Potter.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Of course!
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller- Don't remember too much. Read it in college.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare – Most of them anyway.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier – I think so. Read some of her books, probably read this one.
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – Read aloud to my young son. Probably to delay bedtime.
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks –
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger –
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot –
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Hated the movie!
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Read recently to teach to high school students. Yuck, didn't waste their time.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens- Read in college. Remember that at the end of one chapter the heroine was blinded and the next time we read about her, a few chapters later, she was sighted and no mention was made of her blindness. I figured that it was a serialized novel and he just forgot because he had to make a deadline.
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy- I remember being confused by all the names. Everyone had 4 or 5 names. Yesh!
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – LOL
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy-.
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen Probably. I never cared for Austen, but my English teacher assured me the author was great so a read a bunch of them to see if I could figure out why. Never did.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini-
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres –
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden-
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne-
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - Terrific Victorian Mystery
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding-
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen-
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley-
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez-
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck-
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Tried to read several times. Never could.
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath-
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt -
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker-
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - REad the complete collection while in junior high.
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute-
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
99. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain - I taught this to 8th graders.

Sailing in a sea of grass

So at the beginning of spring, late Friday afternoon, a guy drives down our road towing a boat. He parks it in the field across from our house and leaves it. The next weekend it's the same thing and the following weekend it's an old truck. It seems a guy who lives in Billings owns the lot and just figured it would be a good place to park his junk. I'm guessing it's junk because he's never been out to get the boats to take them to a lake or resevoir. Of course he's not allowed to park junk on the streets of Billings. They have laws against doing things like that. But those of us out here in the country don't mind at all, do we? Just bring your old dogs, cats, kids , trucks, anything that doesn't fit in a city will look better and act better in the country, right? Of course if he'd take care of his property and mow the grass to keep it from drying out and becoming a fire hazard, it wouldn't look like they were floating in a sea of grass. Isn't that nice?

Week End Visit

I had a great visit in Billings this weekend. I arrived just in time to get to visit with cousins who were also visiting dad and bro and then spent a relaxing day that ended in a father / daughter dinner. Sunday morning I got the pleasure of going to church with dad and bro and getting to hear a sermon delivered by said dad. I remember being a little kid and seeing my dad in the pulpit. It made me feel kinda special. It still does. After church I finished up some shopping and enjoyed a grilled salmon steak and some homemade pasta salad and yummy salsa.


The Wimbleton tennis finals were on TV and was called to a halt because of rain. I jokingly said I'd better hit the road before I ran into a storm myself. I shoulda left sooner. I drove into a horrible storm complete with hail and blinding sheets of rain. The hill on the way home was a stream of red water as it poured down and washed the dirt away. I made it home safely and it continued to rain for 2 more hours. 2 inches of rain in less than 3 hours. Anywhere else and we'd have a flood, but in SE Montana, where 2 inches of rain in a season is a lot, it just soaked up the water and the next day was bright and green again.

If it means anything to you at all, you know who won the tennis match. If it doesn't, why should I tell you?

Happy 4th of July

Click on the title and answer some of the questions from the new "Citizenship Test."

Rise & Shine!

It has been a weird weather spring. It has rained almost every day since May. Not all day and not buckets and buckets, but rain in SE Montana used to be rare. So it wasn't a big surprise when we had a thunder & lightning storm at bedtime last night. It rained and we went to sleep to the steady sound of rain on our tin roof. The surprise was this morning when we woke to the unmistakable sound of hail on our roof at 5:00 in the morning. What next? Raining toads?

To All You Fathers Out There

. . . and fathers to be. . .
Be Careful What You Preach.

The Power of the Greystache

So we stopped at Pizza Hut on the way home since we figure it will be a long while before we get to go anywhere what with work, price of gas and price of everything and I go to pay the bill of $17.35. I give the guy a $20.00 and he gives me $6.00 +change back. What????? I'm not any good at math but I realize the guy is givng me back too much change. "I think you've given me too much change back," I say. "I gave you the senior citizen discount," he said. I was almost insulted by being taken for a senior citizen until I realized he must have been taking into account my husband's grey beard and mustache. I know I would NEVER be mistaken for a senior citizen:)

Get out and VOTE!

Ooops! I guess it's not election day for everyone. Those of us in Montana are in the spotlight today with our primaries making the news since they are the end of a very long, much too long primary season. Voting was a pleasant endeavor. After handing my driver's license to my neighbor down the road to identify myself so I could sign in, I voted on a paper ballot and listened to all the other neighbors catching up on news they haven't heard until the last election, wedding or funeral that put them all in the same room together. Then home to cook a fast dinner and join my first online chatroom for my online class.

Spring's Back

I realize it has been a while since my last post, but I still can't think of much to write about. Spring appears to have returned as I sit here beside the open window watching the neighbors out in the yard whilst I sit inside tied to the computer. I'm actually taking a study break or you'd probably never hear from me again.

School's out and I'm almost finished being a librarian for a while. I just have to run off an inventory and I'll be through. I got moved into my new office on Saturday morning and got my email set up; my first email was from our new program vendor sending be a bunch of spread sheets which I'm suppose to use to export our student / school data so they can do what they need to do to import it into our new program. By a startling coincidence, my assignment this week is "How to import data from a spreadsheet into a database." Couldn't have come a moment too soon. Maybe I can get extra credit from my teacher for doing my job?? I feel like I'm surrounded by databases, maybe drowning in spreadsheets.

My new motto: WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, MANIPULATE THE DATA

TAG I'M IT!

Got tagged by dad on this one.

4 Jobs I've Held:
Dishwasher
Laundress at Motel
Librarian
Stage Manager

4 Places I've lived:
Davenport, Iowa
Woodville, MA
Jersey City, NJ
Bilings, MT

4 Movies I've Watched Over and Over Again:
5th Element
Stardust
Star Trek
Groundhog's Day

4 Places I've Been:
Chicago
Los Altos,CA
Newport, OR

4 TV Shows I watch regularly:
Bones
Burn Notice
Keen Eddie
Blackadder

4 Radio Shows I Listen to:
NPR MOrning Edition
Car Talk

4 Things to look forward to:
Being a Great Aunt
A New JOb
Fridays
End of Summer School
One more family reunion

4 People I email regularly:
Dad
Son
Family
Friends from Colstrip/Medicine Lake (HINT)

Weakend

It's been a busy yet somehow serene week. We've had several events planned for the students and not one of them went off as planned. Not unusual at all, yet the main topic in the teachers' lounge is about how things should be planned better. They were planned just fine, it's just that everyone wasn't given the same plan. Somedays I feel as if I'm living out a novel by Vonengut, was he part Native American? It was a beautiful day, we were outside walking around, the kids were happy, we all got back to school in time for lunch and only had two schedule changes when we got back. Where's the problem?

I had a lot of "lasts" this week since I'll be moving out of the classroom next month and into the nether regions of "administration." One of my colleagues jokingly called me a defector, and he wasn't entirely joking. I had my last "clean up the rez day," my last "march against meth day," last class of graduating seniors, and last time to start my inventory and nine days to finish. I'm not nostalgic or gloomy about any of it so I guess I made the right decision. Just think of all the "firsts" I'll be experiencing.

I started a new online class on Access databases. It looks to be a lot more comprehensive(harder) than the class on Excel but so far I think I'm holding my own. My strategy is to work hard on the easy stuff and get a high grade so when the hard stuff comes at the end of the quarter I won't flunk. Hey it's worked for one of my seniors who got a B 3rd quarter and an F 4th quarter, he squeaked by with a passing grade, so can I.

To all the other students out there, I have a new respect for you! Just be sure to Ace the easy stuff.

Happy Mother's Day

Aftermath

So after being called at 4:30 to be told that school was called off for the day the sun came out and it was a beautiful day to stay home and nap, read, play FFX, do a few household chores and read blogs. Now I'm ready for the weekend.

Dos de Mayo

At 4:30 this morning the telephone rang. A telephone ringing at 4:30 in the morning usually doesn't bode well. It probably didn't bode well for someone, but for me it was good news. SChool was called OFF due to a storm system hitting us last night. I'd much rather be awakened at 4:30 in the morning than head out to work and then find out that the roads are closed. Anyway, I intend to be a sloth today and just read, nap, play video games, and catch up on my blog reading until the power goes off and then snack on Vanilla Wafers and milk.