Friday 30 January 2009

I survived!

The maths lessons are now over: thank goodness for that.

The first one did not go well - the exercise sheet I prepared was not well-prepared and had difficult exercises at the beginning and easy ones at the end. I kind of lost the class, and ended up babbling and losing the ability to add up and to write on the board. This was about 20 minutes after I finally lost the attention of the class, but fortunately the lesson did not last long after that. I am not convinced that many of them will have learned anything. I think that the Oxford English Dictionary may now be in the process of re-defining the word "crap" to include my lesson.

Before the second lesson I re-jigged the exercise sheet so that it was in the right order; that lesson went a lot better. We nearly got through the whole lesson, and it went along at what I considered to be a good pace, with plenty of time to talk to individual students and also quite a few comparatively fun bits. This very nearly made up for the profoundly unimpressive performance I produced in the morning, and made me feel a lot better. The class behaved less well (like teenagers in their own clothes (as opposed to school uniform) away from school on a Friday afternoon, in fact), though. It was a pity that the unruly class got the good lesson while the well-behaved class had to put up with a shambles.

Now I have to start to concentrate on the business of moving house. Mother says that she and Father, along with Anne and maybe Robert will come on 27th Feb and help to clean the new house, then help me to move on 28th, then help to clean the old house on 1st March. This will be very useful; cleaning is a nightmare! Also, as HWSNBN's dad is no longer alive, we will not have his help with the moving of things - he helped a lot last time and also drove the van.

Tomorrow we will paint HWSNBN's garage floor to seal it (so that it stops shedding concrete), and we will then be able to use the garage to store our boxes for a few weeks. That will help a large amount: the thing I hate the very most about packing is that one fills loads of boxes, but then has no space to fill additional boxes because the place is already filled with boxes. This way we will be able to look as though we are organised, and stuff.

HWSNBN still doesn't know about the hammocks. Mother thinks that perhaps they were a bad idea, but that I might be able to put hooks in my walls from which to hang them. I think that the landlord may not be impressed. We then discussed my wrought iron candelabra and my desire to have it up in my new kitchen. Mother says that it will make the ceiling black, and that I should use it in my back yard. Given that I acquired this about 5 years ago, and that I have to cart it about with me, it really would be useful if I were to get to use it.

I am looking forward to the space in the new house, and am feeling less anxious with the (mostly) successful completion of the maths lessons (nobody died nor ran riot, nor was the projector hit with an exercise ball) and the doing of an unbloggable thing today. I am .looking forward to jettisoning some Things and moving...

2 comments:

Lisa Moon said...

Oh, GOOD. I did wonder about the potentiality of said exercise ball causing some damage.
Pity about the classes seeming mixed up in terms of student interest and such, but one always does better with a warm up, right?

And now, on to the moving! So sorry, am still finishing mine from (ahem, cough) 1st December! I like to excuse that with: well, we (mostly I mean they) spent the first week trying to clean the outgoing suite, then it SNOWED here, heavily, deeply and unusually sub-zero-ly! And it didn't leave for a couple of difficult weeks! Oh, also, I'm sorta of disabled a bit these days, so have had to learn to force myself not to overdo it, lest I be stuck doing nothing whilst I recuperate.

Do you notice that I try to hard to make my writing sound much more proper and English-y when writing to someone who is, well, English?! Also, I know that you'll understand my correct spellings which Americans tend to fuss over; the u added to colour, favour, etc. Using the s again in specialising, not a z. We even say zee, not zed!

Ahh, we do get mocked as Canadians for our attempts to hold onto our British heritage in these small, linguistic ways... or something like that. ;)

Ooh! I also live in a city called Victoria, and we have double decker buses and Victorian-style lamp posts in our downtown which hold flowering baskets in the summertime... and our buildings are very reminiscent of Britain, so they say... babbling, sorry!

Optistatic said...

Yeah - there was a projector hanging from the ceiling in the room. If I do it again, I'm not using the exercise ball. They were trying to hurt each other with it.

Your not having finished moving yet sounds a bit nightmarish. I get twitchy when there are too many boxes around, which is why using HWSNBN's mum's garage to store boxes is a Godsend. Now if I could only get some more packed...

I am hoping that the moving will be quite a quick process once we get in there. Usually I invite the parents to come and stay shortly after the move so that I am forced to empty the boxes, but this time they will be helping with the move, and so will see it at the height of its crap-ness. I think that I shall just have to have a housewarming party shortly after moving in. Perhaps I can review the situation on the Monday, and plan to have the party on the Friday or Saturday...

Unfortunately, with so many rooms, there is the possibility that we can just hide stuff away in the spare room.

Oh, and the kitchen. Yes. That may take more than a week to get passable. I'm certainly not fitting a new kitchen in my first week there!

I must confess that I hadn't noticed your writing get more English-y when commenting here, but now that you mention it I can see what you mean. We say "zed", though. Sorry. Americans say "zee", as does the occasional German who has learned too much American English.

Your description of Victoria is funny insofar as I don't have any real concept of what cities outside Europe really look like. I know England, France and bits of Germany and Italy, but have naver made it as far as, say, Canada (although Anne has. I think the parents love her more than they loved us. Or perhaps it's cheaper now that the cost of flights has gone down and they only have one child living at home. It's one or the other). Double-decker buses sound perfectly reasonable!

I must visit Victoria some time. Perhaps when my organ building career has taken off and Victoria are in need of an excellent British organbuilding firm... I'll let you know when that happens! (Please don't hold your breath. Obviously.)