thank you notes 3/17

i'm thankful that when i went by her office yesterday to get her to play disc golf, i jumped dramatically into the office through the open door to surprise her and instead surprised s, whose desk is across from hers and who shrieked and said, when she had recovered her composure, that i was like a "ghost buster." i'm thankful that i think she meant ghost, but that this morning, i photoshopped a picture of t's face (i'm thankful that i have a jpeg of t's face on a transparent background saved from earlier office hijinks) onto dan akroyd's face from a still from ghostbusters and sent it to s in an interoffice mail envelope with a fake return address. i'm thankful they called me over and i played dumb about it and then s insisted that i write her name on a separate piece of paper so she could compare it to the name written on the envelope. i'm thankful that i asked her if she had seen the jinx and she said, "no, but i watch forensic files, so i know what i'm doing." i'm thankful that i could not disguise my horrible handwriting and that she triumphantly said, "you're caught!"

i'm thankful to have finished my "spring break" project of migrating required work experience records for 800+ students from oncourse, the learning management system my school used to use, to canvas, the system it uses now, before we lose access to oncourse. i'm thankful that in the lead-up to the system transition, emails and articles and knowledge base features highlighted how automatic and easy the process of migration would be through the use of a specially created tool for this purpose and i'm thankful for most people this was true. i'm thankful that exporting the records from oncourse was easy enough, but that when i tried to import them into canvas, even though i used the same kind of formatting in my .csv that the knowledge base articles recommended, instead of automatically importing, canvas requested that i associate each name in my spreadsheet with a name in the canvas site using a drop down box with hundreds of names in it. i'm thankful that inexplicably, to make this even worse than it already would be, the names in this drop down box with hundreds of names in it were not in alphabetical (or any kind of logical) order, so that i had to hunt through to find each name. i'm thankful that i tried to go through the process of associating the names several times but each time one quarter to halfway through i would accidentally hit the backspace key by reflex, which sent the browser away from the page, losing my work. 

i'm thankful that to stop myself from doing this, i pried the backspace key off my keyboard (i'm thankful for an opportunity, only to find out when i tried to try to start over again that my last desperate failed attempt to resubmit the form data had broken the canvas site's import feature and i couldn't access it anymore. i'm thankful that thanks to help from an IT person, that issue was resolved i finally figured out that if i exported the empty gradebook from the canvas site, then manually pasted the columns of data from the oncourse export (which, again, was formatted the same, as far as i could tell) into that .csv, it would import correctly and automatically, without drop down boxes (i'm thankful that eventually i figured out that the issue had to do with canvas expecting student ids and (different) id numbers in imports, whereas oncourse only exported the ids). i'm thankful to have figured out how to do this and thankful for the new system, which, now that it's set up, will speed up my future entry and retrieval of records significantly. i'm thankful if you sat through this description of my boring accomplishment.

i'm thankful that after finishing that hard and important task, i wrote a novelty rap verse in the voice of a hippie professor here who studies conservation and food systems as my participation in an office email chain about the kids in massachusetts who drove up and asked people to spit bars,:

"Yeah, I eat local, makes me broker than a yokel

i'm thankful for the chance to be macklemore-core. i'm thankful that one of the visiting lecturers came out to lunch with the faculty member and my coworker and that we all had a nice time. i'm thankful that we had not thought about it being st. patrick's day, but thankful that the drunken craziness downtown had not yet begun (i'm thankful to remember st. patrick's day of my senior year of college, when i wore tight green polyester goodwill pants and a green paisley faux-silk dress shirt from the gap to the hellscape of a st. patrick's day party that several local bars held in a giant parking lot). i'm thankful for our fun conversations at lunch about fraternities and local restaurants and rollerblading and what my coworker's parents were doing in las vegas. i'm thankful for the mediocre chorizo and potato tacos i had, even though they were underseasoned and underfilled and only composed of single corn tortillas rather than double or triple-wrapped, which meant that their soggy bottoms dissolved and broke almost immediately, spilling the filling. i'm thankful for the well seasoned black beans and the inexplicably bland coleslaw.