Tie a Day- It's a Wrap!

On September 16, 2009, I decided that I would wear a different tie every day of school for the entire school year.

I know, 116 ties does not sound like a lot of ties when the school year consists of 182 days, but here is how it breaks down; Every Friday is jeans day. There are roughly 36 Fridays in the school year, so that leaves 146 days. I missed maybe 10 days this school year between personal sick days, family sick days, and professional leave days, so that knocks down the number to 136. One day a month we have an optional jeans day that you can participate in if you donate $2 to the Relay for Life team we have at school. There are 10 months in the school year, so the number now drops to 126 possible tie days. For the last 10 days that I did not wear a tie that I could have, I have to say that maybe I didn’t because it was a half day of school (3 days), I had a ton of cleanup work to do and didn’t want a tie to get in the way (4 days), or I just got plain ornery and decided I was not wearing a tie just because I didn’t want to that day (3 Days). This is how I justified wearing only 116 ties in 182 days of school.

I created a video so show most of the ties that I wore. I left out some ties because you may notice from the first tie post that I decided to record the ties after the school year had begun. I tried to catch up quickly and take pictures of the ties I had already worn, but of course I took the pictures of the first ties differently from all the rest, and it created problems for me when I decided to make the video below.

If you are interested, here is how I made the video; I used Paint Shop pro to cut out all of the extra stuff in each picture and just leave the tie. Then I converted the file to a transparent png file. I had my oldest son, Calvin, take a picture of me wearing a shirt all buttoned up without a tie. Next, I opened up PowerPoint 2007 and clicked on create a photo album. By selecting all of the plain tie pictures I inserted them all into PowerPoint at once. Then I went into the slideshow and inserted the picture of my buttoned up shirt as the background on all slides. I had to make minor adjustments to align the ties on each slide onto the shirt correctly. I have a Camtasia add on in my PowerPoint, so I recorded the slideshow playing. I saved the file as an AVI and then opened it in Movie Maker and added a Soundzabound’s file as background music. It sounds like a lot of jumping around from program to program, but it was a rather fast and smooth process.

Highlights of the year in ties
I invented the words- tie-cation and tieja vu , or at least I believe I invented them.

I created a new World Record- Most Neckties Worn By A Computer Resource Specialist, sort of a bogus record because of the limitations of the record I created.

Lowlight of the year in ties
I still have 30 or so ties still waiting for their chance to be worn.