Sunday 27 March - Monday 4 April

didn't have a chance to update the blog for just over a week, so here's a brief update:

Sun 27/3
Essay, essay, essay.  Finished.  Hooray

Mon 28/3
Intake, print off essay - last minute proofread, post £5.50, home, sleep.

Tue 29/3
lunch uptown with Dutch friends who've moved to London from jakarta.  Excellent meal at Cadogan Arms in the King's Road with a 50% voucher makes it a reasonable price.  bought sunglasses for little Dulcie in Peter Jones

Wed 30/3
ryanair to reus.  disappointingly everything went very smoothly!  After all the horror stories, nothing actually went wrong and our flight was 30 minutes early.  To be fair though, there is the potential for masses of problems - charge of £40 if you don't print off your own boarding card, fascist implementation of size and weight limits, but we were very good and did everything we were told.  Actually had 3 seats between the 2 of us, so plenty of room.  Ange met us at the airport and we zoomed back to her farmhouse on top of a mountain.  Met the 5 dogs, 2 cats and of course Emma and Dulcie.

Thu 31/3
Birthday!  Spoilt rotten, lazy day and then out for dinner.  First restaurant closed but motored on and found another one.  Had pink cava, pate, salt cod and leche frita (fried milk)  could never recommend my pud - it was awful, but luckily came with vanilla ice cream so that was ok.

Fri 1/4
Off to Miravets to see the 12thC Knights Templar castle, beautiful river, lunch on the town square, Selecta beer (mm), bocadillos (sandwiches) and cortado (small milky coffees).  Him Indoors cooked a curry.  Lovely day.

Sat 2/4
Remembered to send my nephew a text wishing him happy birthday.  Lazy day in the sun, around 30C.

Sun 3/4
Market at Hospitalet, then lunch at the restaurant that was closed on the 31st.  Buffet of seafood, kebabs, paella, hams, cheese, desserts and freeflow muscatel.  Yum.

Mon 4/4
Drove over to Emma's house, then beers and tapas on the town square, home, showers, bite to eat, pack, to airport.  Flight arrived early again (that must be how they have the best on-time statistics in Europe).  Boarded at the back again and got 3 seats for the 2 of us.  On arrival went through the automated passport control for the first time ever - took longer than the IOs doing it personally.  Blackwall Tunnel was closed so we had a magical mystery tour through bits of north London before managing to cross the river at London Bridge.  Home by midnight.  Lovely holiday.

Saturday 26 March

Not so sunny today and a spot of rain but Him Indoors had a go at the garden.  There's a bit in the far left corner that's not had a prune for a while, if ever, so it was time to cut back.  I like our garden: it's very low maintenance and despite what others say (you know who you are!), once a garden's laid out and planted with shrubs, you only need to spend about an hour a month on it - as well as cutting the grass from time to time.  We feed the birds too and it's soothing to see them hopping around and hear them singing their little hearts out.

Cracked on (again) with the essay and just need final proofing.  What a time for the printer ink to run out.  My beloved has promised to rush out early in the morning to get a new one.

Friday 25 March

A quiet day: school where half of them are sick with flu, home, essaying, dinner, a bit of TV and then bed. Watched the film 'Ghost' for the first time - think we were overseas when it first came out and it's taken 20 years for it to come on the telly for us to watch.  It was actually better than I expected - Demi Moore isn't everybody's first choice and certainly not mine, but she performed pretty well and I thought Whoopi Goldberg was brilliant as usual.

Thursday 24 March

There's lots of colds and flu going round school at the moment - I'm being very positive about not catching it and staying well away from students.  We're just about to have spring break so not the time to be feeling low when you have a few days off.

Today felt very brief  - essay, school, home, essay, dinner, bed.   Night, night.

Wednesday 23 March

It feels like summer's here with temps of 18C today.  People were out in flipflops and T-shirts making the most of it.  My beloved was out to lunch today so after work I was on my own in the living room reading with the door open when our neighbour's cats came wandering in.  We don't know exactly where the two of them live but they often come into our garden.  They had a good nose round but as soon as I moved they scarpered.  I told them I like cats but they weren't having any of it and stayed firmly out of reach in the garden.

Students had to write a summary of something we read in class on the ISS.  One of them had completely misunderstood it and wrote that the astronauts 'live in a 3 bedroom house in the space'.  Mmm.  and I thought we'd been doing so well.

Spent 4 hours on the essay.  Just another section to do and then hopefully post it on Monday.  I'd hoped to send it off on Friday but having the weekend as well should make sure it's well proofread.  Just feel so knackered and mustn't rush or it'll all go wrong.

Tuesday 22 March

Am trying to find out exactly what the government is going to do about student visas after their debate today in parliament.  If our lower level ones can't get visas to study in UK, it may close the school down.

I had a routine mammogram this morning.  My first appointment was a few weeks ago but it was a Thursday afternoon when I'm teaching so I changed it online.  The date of birth drop down menu rather cheerfully started at the year 1900, so after lots of scrolling forward got to my personal year (unusual for me these days for date of birth, they often start at about about 1980 and I have to scroll backwards).  When the date to book a new appointment also started at the year 1900, I got slightly irritated - what is going on with their programmers?  Then in the post on Saturday I got 2 letters from the Health Authority, one telling me off for not keeping the original appointment and the second one giving me an appointment for today.

Previous years my appointment's been at the Bromley site which is about a mile and a half outside Bromley centre, so needing 2 buses to get to as there's no parking, free or otherwise. This appointment was at the trailer in the Sainsbury car park with lots of free parking so much more convenient and also on a bus route.  While I waited, my beloved went and bought a few bits in the supermarket.

Then home to another 4.5 hours essaying.  Finally found the reference but annoyingly it didn't say what I thought it said!  Have had to change things slightly to be more precise.

Monday 21 March

Jemima observed my intake talk today in the lecture room.  She's from the company that provides the online learning site that school signed up to in January.  Apparently student usage from our school is way higher than any other school and they want to know what we're doing to encourage our students.  I gave her feedback too particularly re the new log-in screen which you can only access once.  Depending on numbers, there are different rooms that we do the intake in.  Our computer room can only take up to 15 so when we're in there, each student can have their own computer and sign in, create their own user name and password.  But when there's more, the lecture room is used and I can only show them online via the IWB.  The difficulty is you can't access that first time log-in screen (unless we create a new fake student every week, but that would be time-consuming and I think our number crunchers would have a fit at statistics being skewed).  She promised to ask her 'people' if they could do something.  We'd also like teacher-only areas so that we can talk to each other, send staff meeting minutes, reports, etc.  I'd like to be able to use it at home on Safari too but that probably won't happen and I have to remember to use Firefox instead.

Students dribbled in throughout the morning.  There were 3 starts to the test because they came in at various times and then one guy didn't arrive until midday - 3 hours late - apparently he'd got on the wrong bus, didn't know where he was and it'd taken him that long to find out and get back to us.

More writing.  I lost a reference and spent ages looking for it.  My beloved helped too but it's not turned up yet.  Am annoyed with myself - why didn't I write it down!