Tuesday, June 30, 2009
A visit to the boy
Monday, June 29, 2009
Tennis and work and such like
First day of the holidays and I was at work till 2.45 pm. Didn't quite get finished last week.
However, cards like this one are a great compensation. How nice - not only that he felt like that but that he bothered to say so. (I don't get messages like this every week; hence my great appreciation when they do come.)
Can't stay around; Andy Murray isn't doing as well as he might against Stanislaw Wawrinka and though I can't bear to watch, I can't bear to stop watching either.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Pensive
I walked to and from work today – a total of 6 miles, which isn’t very far but which made it seem a good idea to go out into the garden and collapse on the grass for a while when I got home. And I started my usual round of worrying, about:
My mother being 87 and what the future might bring for her
Daughter 1 being about to start the dissertation for her second Master’s degree rather than being at the stage I was at when I was her age (not that this was particularly impressive either)
Climate change
Interest rates and banking and so on
Getting old, fat and wrinkly
World peace or the lack of it
Daughter 2 going out with a mostly-unemployed actor
Son being overworked as a junior doctor
My very small projected pension because of my having been an at-home mummy for nine years
Son having left home so that we hardly see him (because he's a very overworked junior doctor and has very little spare time)
What to do with the cats when we go away on holiday in the future
What we'll do without the cats because they won't live forever
The ivy on the back walls of the garden, which probably will live forever, getting bigger and bigger, alas
Whether I'll get done everything that I need to, by the end of my holiday from work
Whether I'll ever get the photos organised even if I live to 100
Possibly living to 100, when I would be a burden on my children
And so on
And then along came Sirius. He rubbed his warm, solid, fluffy tummy against my cheek as I lay on the grass and then he leaned companionably against me for a while, purring. He wandered round my recumbent form, looking at me curiously. Then he sat on my head: the very best kind of furry hat.
That’s why I like cats. They don’t worry. They just make the best of things.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Crieff again
Or any of it, in fact. We kept waiting for the Red Queen or the White Rabbit to pop out from behind a tree.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Dancing daughter
This morning I was singing away to myself: a choral bit of the St Matthew Passion. Daughter 2 wandered past. She’d been painting the inside of her bedroom cupboard, since we’ve recently had painters doing up her room but they didn’t go inside the cupboard. She was wearing her father’s dungarees. He’s 6’1 and a half and she’s 5’5. They were more than a little baggy on her.
“Do a dance,” I suggested. I began to sing my bit of the St Matthew Passion. She immediately put her hands in the dungaree pockets, pushing them out to accentuate the bagginess, and did a little clown dance, gravely hopping from one foot to the other and sticking the spare leg out to the side. I finished singing. She bowed. Then she proceeded on her way.
And I thought: 1) how wonderful to have a child who knows exactly how to react to such a ridiculous request, and 2) presumably all families have their own eccentricities which they understand perfectly but which no one else ever sees.
I love her so much.
Bach might have thought it a bit odd.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Totally irrelevant picture of Sirius and a box
Below is the agenda sent to me today for a meeting next week. The names have all been changed but you might be able to detect a touch of blarney. Which item do you think I'm looking forward to most?
Good Practice seminar
Agenda
1. John Bloggs – welcome and rationale for Good Practice events
2. Sheila Smiggs – ‘Synergy in action (core skills)’
3. Harry Higgs – 'The College YouTube site’
4. Barry O’Potts – ‘Using communication delivery to prepare students for external exams in their vocational subjects or why I like to re-invent the wheel every time I get a new class and how that ages me prematurely’ *
5. General Good Practice discussion
6. Agenda for future meetings
7. AOB
* Let me assure you, I know exactly how he feels.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Father's Day is coming up
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
All done
Monday, June 08, 2009
Getting there
Concentrating fiercely*, I might be able to do them in about 5 hours. I'm going to try to mark 9 more tonight. On Thursday, normal life should resume. Thank you for your kind comments. I have actually been sneaking peeks at your blogs at work and shall be back commenting myself once I've dealt with the remainder of the exams.
A lot of the students can't spell "opportunity", a word which quite a few of them use to answer one question. I've seen it written wrongly so much in the last week and a half that I'm beginning to doubt my own spelling of it.
* You might gather from my doodles that the concentration occasionally wanders.