Rosbif
Or, without the atrocious French accent, roast beef.
Until Saturday night, I did not like it in the slightest. I think this is because we basically never had it at home, so my few experiences with it have been at average buffets and worse wedding receptions.
But then there was Saturday.
Saturday, we had a party. It was a bit of a fizzer in the afternoon – only a couple of people came by because the weather was icky – but we ended up with 14 for dinner. And J had this brilliant idea that wouldn’t a roast be fun?
3.8kg of beef later, a kilo or more of beans, plus potato and carrot for the mob… I was impressed. And very full, of course. It was fantastic! And there were two pieces left… hello, lunch. So I’m a convert, at home anyway.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking, B1?
There’s a new Boeing just been released, the 787.
Airbus released the A380s not that long ago.
Is anyone else out there thinking “it’s time to play chicken!” ?
Corridor of Champions
I share a staffroom with about 20 people. Basically, a cube farm, but with less room than the average battery hen. I have a desk, on which I can just fit both my elbows (when I move everything off said desk), and a four-drawer filing cabinet. When I first looked at that filing cabinet, I thought: “ha! how can they think I will ever fill that up? I’m not going to be here that long!” to which I now say: “ha! young and naive me!”
But that’s not the story.
I am in a lane/corridor/section of eight – four to one side, four to the other, backing on to each other. Back your chair out too fast and you’re likely to collide with someone. In our corridor there are five English teachers, three history teachers, one geographer, one psych teacher, one science teacher, and one art teacher.* Someone at some stage called us the Corridor of Champions, and it stuck (with blu tack and a lot of hard work from us). We decided that, since reports are over and the end (of the semester) is nigh, we should have lunch together. So we did. Got a couple of little tables, turned the chairs around, massively over-catered… it was so much fun! And people were so jealous, which was at least part of the point, of course. We even had silly hats. It will now be a termly thing, we think.
It made today – a five-out-of-six-lesson-on day, with additional yard duty to make sure kids don’t get run over – bearable.
*Doesn’t add up to eight, does it? I’m both English and history, so figure it out from there….
My pasta strainer…
got “temporarily reassigned.”
I made something with pasta tonight. I wanted my fancy-pantsed pasta strainer doodad to get the pasta out of the water. Couldn’t find it. Accused J of having nicked it; he denied it, although he did admit to remembering using it as some time.
Fast forward 3 hours. J is tidying up a bit (amazing). He picks up his camelback – his water bag for cycling. Ta-dah! Pasta strainer doodad is inside the camelback… preventing it from getting mouldy, apparently.
Lucky pasta strainer doodad.
Grammar Nazi
I am one. Which begs the question, why am I an English teacher?
Anyway, thought I’d share a few gems.
Favourite spelling mistake: gorn. As in, “He was gorn!”
Favourite grammar mistake: learn’t. As in “I have learn’t a lot this term.”
Least favourite mistake: w/sh/could of. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Lots.
The End of the World as we know it. Again.
So a friend of mine was just showing me Facebook. I have received ‘invites’ to this before, and ignored them, because I figured it was just going to be like MySpace. I was, I admit, pleasantly surprised by how not-MySpace it is, and the fact that you can link up with people you know and write on their ‘walls’ is kind of cool and reminds me of college – writing on stick-it notes on people’s doors.
So I have, indeed, set one up for myself, and it is sort of cool. It’s a nice little ego-booster when someone adds you as a friend.
But. Two buts.
1. I can see that this could, potentially, take up a lot of time. Which reminds me very strongly of the day I downloaded by RSS reader for the sole purpose of reading the squister’s blog while she was overseas. And then I thought – I wonder if there are any good history blogs out there? Ha! I say. Ha!
2. It’s very… public. And the fact that other people can tag you in pictures is mildly disconcerting. It’s good that you can deny knowledge of it, but still… a bit weird. I guess if you were really, really worried about your privacy you wouldn’t join it anyway.
So… it will be interesting to see how long it keeps its appeal for me.
Wednesdays
I am ambivalent towards Wednesdays.
Wednesdays are usually quite nice at school – I have either three or four lessons on out of six, which is a good day. Every fortnight I have lunch yard duty, but with Marg and in a not very active (comparatively) area of the school, so it’s pretty painless. It’s also my second last day of school for the week, which is great.
But the next day is Thursday.
Thursday is good because it is my last day at work (this semester, anyway… don’t get me started on that). However, Thursday is bad because I have six on out of six, which is a very long day – for me, much longer than five out of six, quite disproportionately. On the other hand, it finishes with a double of Year 12, and while sometimes they are totally out of it and drive me nuts because they won’t do any work, their version of not doing work is much less painless and generally more fun than the year 8 version. Plus, if they really do no work, I feel bad but not too much: it’s their time, their scores, I’m busting my ass as much as I can and if they don’t put their bit in then they are adult enough (they’d/I’d like to think) that it’s not quite so much my problem. As you can tell from all my hedging, I haven’t entirely convinced myself of that last bit….
And because tomorrow is the last class we’re doing concentrating on Russia, I’ve made raspberry and white chocolate muffins. They were meant to be red but the colour has cooked out somewhat.
Did I mention NatCon? NatCon NatCon NatCon…
Two sleeps
NatCon NatCon NatCon.
Two sleeps to go!
NatCon NatCon NatCon…
woohoo!!
So, sooo excited. Yet, at the same time, slightly apprehensive….
New Ceres
Not a review of mine, but of me! Amazing.
Yes, I have forgotten to mention that I have, amazingly, been published. In a fictional way. You should definitely go and have a look at New Ceres anyway, not just because of me, but I could be an additional incentive…. Of course, you have to pay – but $5 is, like, less that fish and chips. About the same as a block of Lindt chocolate. Easy!
The idea behind New Ceres is that it is a world, set a few hundred years in the future, where the people (the government? the people in charge?) have decided to keep the planet in the eighteenth century. Permanently. So there’s the groovy 18th century stuff – coffee house, manners, clothes – but you’ve got the possibility of illicit technology as well. Nice little combination, as far as I’m concerned. I have to say, I am more fond of issue 1 (which was/is free) – Tansy Rayner Roberts’ story of La Duchesse and Dirk Flinthart’s George Gordon and Dorian Wilde are simply sublime. But the stories in issue 2 are also very cool, and show how the community is meant to work – authors taking up characters suggested by others, which is a beautiful thing.
Go there. Buy a subscription. It’s very much worth it.
Randomly Yours, Alex 