Five For Friday

Hey guys and gals! I'm back and today I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for the Five for Friday Linky Party.

Here's a look at five things that I've been up to recently:

1. Pencil Sharpening! No, seriously! My old pencil sharpener bit the dust a few weeks ago and I liked it SO much that I knew I wanted to get the same one to replace it. So last night I re-ordered it from Staples using a $30 coupon and my Rewards bucks (combined, they made it FREE!) and it arrived at my doorstep early this afternoon. Talk about fast delivery! When it arrived, I opened it up and put it right to work. (I had also ordered new pencils but those won't be arriving until next week so I settled for sharpening some of my leftovers from this past year.) Upon using it, I was reminded instantly why I LOVE this sharpener. Number one, it can sharpen a variety of different pencil sizes. What's more is that it's really fast and I like that it has an auto-stop to let you know when the pencils are ready. Not only is this time-efficient but it also minimizes any potential chance of wasting lead while the pencil is inside the sharpener. Yay!

Regarding the pencils I ordered: Can I just say that I absolutely LOVE these jumbo Try Rex pencils?! My former school required us to use them and I am SO glad that they did. They are triangular so they help my little first graders to develop a proper pencil grip (and they also don't roll onto the floor as easily as the standard yellow #2's) but best of all, they rarely need sharpening because their lead lasts FOREVER. I can honestly go weeks without sharpening and when I do sharpen them, it's rarely because a pencil tip has broken. Sometimes they just get a little dull and need some freshening up. They are truly the best! I like to invest in a few dozen packs at the beginning of the year and they legit last me all school year long! If you struggle with incessant pencil-sharpening-agonies in your classroom, I seriously cannot recommend these enough.

 2. Orange is the New Black. Anyone who knows me knows that I am obsessed with television shows about prison, jail, crime, etc... I have no idea why this subject fascinates me, but for whatever reason, it does; and happily there are many shows around to appease my interests. Like many of you have already admitted on your blogs, I too waited desperately for season 2 of Orange Is the New Black to be released on Netflix. Once it did, I literally binge-watched the entire season in less than 48 hours. It is just THAT good. I'll admit that since I watched it so quickly, I'm a little sad that there are now no more episodes to watch until season 3 comes out. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the second season immensely and will just have to wait impatiently until another season becomes available. So what does all this have to do with my Friday? Well, for my birthday this past year, my sister bought me the novel that the show is based upon. I don't often have time for much pleasure reading during the school year (plus I really wanted to take the time to truly enjoy this book) so I decided to hold off on reading this one until the summer. So as of this week, I have finally begun reading the book. So far, I can tell that it IS different from the show (not surprisingly), but it is still very GOOD! I won't give anything away, but I think I like the text just as much as the show.

 3. Developing new art for my teaching products! I've begun working on some new art sets that I will be using in some new products really soon! This photo gives a sneak peak at some of the sketches in the works. From the photo you may be able to tell that a dog set and monster set are currently in production. I have a few other ones too but I'm not going to share all of them with you just yet. I will say that I'm super excited about them though!!! :) Be sure to stay tuned to see what happens with these guys!

 4. Font Management. This has been a big issue for me this past year and as such it is something that I've had on my To-Do List for quite some time. As a former graphic design student and children's illustrative designer, I have accumulated thousands of fonts on my computer over the past ten years. No seriously. I literally have thousands of fonts and many of them are just taking up valuable space. Now I know that one extra font or two really isn't a big deal, but thousands of extra fonts really gets in the way of my productivity. Ultimately, it just means more to sort through when looking for fonts for a project and this often just slows things down. (For me it was also affecting my application loading times.) I figured that since I wasn't using many of my fonts that it was high-time for me to clean them up. Trust me, if you have a lot of fonts and you have never done this, it is a really good process. After saving all of the fonts on a backup disk (just in case), I then went through and removed all of the fonts on my computer that I know that I no longer use. This was also helpful in terms of allowing me to get a closer look at what I had and even helped me to rediscover some of the great fonts that I have been neglecting. I'll admit that it took me a while to sort through everything but I could tell it really made a difference when I went into one of my applications afterwards and noticed it running a LOT faster.
Big win for me!!!

5. Thinking about journeying to VEGAS... Well, over the last few days, my husband and I have been seriously discussing me going to Vegas for the upcoming SDE and TPT Teacher conferences. I have not registered for anything yet but I have been thinking about it a lot. Of course I'm dying to go and meet all of you fabulous bloggers out there but I also want to make sure that I am in a good place financially to be able to journey out there too. So far, we are still in the discussion process, but are leaning towards...YES! (Even if it's only for a few days and not the entire week). I'm notably jazzed at the prospects of going and will certainly keep you posted on this one. :)

Alright, that's all I have for now. Have an awesome weekend everyone!
~Theresa