Christine, Wondering

Random Musings of a Human Becoming

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Prayers of thankfulness

I am shaking so hard right now I can barely type. It's a mixture of relief and shock, and a little bit of low blood sugar, but I'm trying to fix that. What a week I've had!

On Monday at about 4pm, S phoned me in hysterics to say that he'd had a car accident on the way home from his prac school and needed picking up. He didn't say how bad it was, and all the way there I was murmuring half-formed prayers that everything was okay.

I nearly had a heart attack when I got there and saw the car upside down in a paddock! A flock of cockatoos had flown in front of the car, and S had lost control on the gravel (it's an unsealed road), hit a wire fence and rolled into the paddock. He managed to get his seatbelt undone, and crawled out of the smashed rear window. He was VERY shaken up and devastated about the damage to the car (it's almost certainly a write-off) but otherwise seemed fine apart from a bloodied hand. I took him straight to hospital, and apart from a headache, a very sore shoulder where the seatbelt was holding him, and a set of superficial glass cuts on his hand, he was completely alright. He has been extremely sore for the past few days, but alright nonetheless. He is incredibly lucky, people die in that sort of accident, and I'm unbelievably thankful.

On Tuesday and Wednesday he got lifts to and from his school, but today I leant him my car because he had to be at school really early for an excursion (he was taking his prac class to the Perth Zoo). He was supposed to come straight to my school after school, and pick me up between 4 and 4:30 because we wanted to go shopping. So, 4:30 came and went, and I began to get worried. I tried calling him, calling home in case he'd forgotten to pick me up, and calling his school . . . no answer anywhere. By 5:30 I was deeply distressed, and decided to walk home (school is about a 10 minute walk from my house), to check there before going in to panic mode. The whole time I was praying that he was alright but geting more and more afraid that he wasn't. I got home and he wasn't here, spoke to his mother who phoned to speak to him and also hadn't heard from him, and was about to call his supervising teacher to find out what time he left his school, before getting a friend to drive me along the road to his school in search of him, when he FINALLY phoned me.

The car he was a passenger in coming back from the Zoo had broken down in an area where there was no mobile phone reception, so he'd been stranded for several hours and hadn't even been able to text to let anyone know he was alright. He is on his way home now having finally got back to his school where my car was.

Now I'm just praying that he's okay on the drive home - the same road that the first accident happened on, but in the dark and in the rain. Please God just let him get home safe!

But I am desperately relieved that he wasn't unconscious or worse in my car somewhere along that road. Thankyou, Lord.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Cute

Thanks for the kind comments to my last post. I am mostly over that bout of depression now (I took three days off school for a "head cold", which did exist, but which wouldn't have been enough to stop me from working if I had been up to it emotionally) and I'm starting to regain my balance. Still a bit fragile and prone to crying at the drop of a hat, but getting there.

I just wanted to share a site I've found, GraphJam. It's a bit like I Can Has Cheezburger in that it's a site full of funny stuff that people have made. The idea of GraphJam is that people make graphs that reflect popular culture. It can't be explained, it has to be seen, so go check it out.

There were heaps that had me in stitches, but this one in particular caught my fancy:

song chart memes


It's a pretty straightforward reference to the song "Blowing in the Wind", right? Yes, but see if you can catch the secondary pop culture reference. Hint: look at what number on the chart the 'blowing in the wind' level is at. Enjoy :-D

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Feeling down

I'm sick again (S gave me tonsilitis, woot) and off school today, tomorrow and possibly Friday as well. Oh joy.

I'm finding some aspects of life really difficult at the moment. I can teach, where teaching equals standing in front of the class and engaging them in learning. But there's other aspects to teaching too . . . managing parents, managing other staff members, managing tricky bits of paper, and managing to remember to do a million different beaurocratic hoop-jumps every day.

Aspergers Christine doesn't deal so well with those things, and it's making me feel very stressed and negative and self-hating. I want to be good at it but my brain just doesn't seem to want to co-operate and I don't know how to train it to do these things better.

*bawls*

Friday, May 16, 2008

Erm . . . hi :-)

I'm not quite as sick as I was when I last posted, but I've been headachey on and off, and today is one of those nights. Blech.

School is normal (one part annoying, one part rewarding, thoroughly stirred). I'm still really enjoying having S here and I'm dreading the day when he has to go home in four weeks' time. We've settled into a lovely routine and the relationship continues to be strong. It's just lovely :-) We're about to head out to Little Country Town's sole cafe to get cheeseburgers and chips for dinner . . . our little Friday night treat. Yummy!

I haven't got much other news to report, except that the new car is still awesome. Oh, and that I won't be in Little Country Town next year (or rather, I will be exchanging this Little Country Town for another Country Town, probably a bigger one!). S and I have made the decision that the Midlands region where I currently live is not part of our 5-year plan, so he is going to apply for somewhere in the Mid West, which is a large area north of Perth, going from the edge of the Perth metro area right up to Exmouth, some 1250km from Perth, and east for quite a way too. Map:




We're planning to try for one of the larger towns, such as Geraldton or Carnarvon, so that I will be able to get a job there too. Geraldton has six public primary schools and six private schools so there's a pretty good chance I'll snag a position if S is posted there. So there'll be another January house move for me and another new place, but it'll be with S and that makes it 100% worthwhile. I'm looking forward to it, too - the Mid West has a spectacular landscape in parts, all gorges and red rocks and turquoise sea (google-image Kalbarri, you'll see what I mean! We'd love to live in Kalbarri but it's not exactly hard to staff, being so gorgeous lol).

So that's me at the moment. I'm teaching my class to play the recorder at the moment and have finally, after craving it since I was about 9, managed to get my hands on an alto recorder and a tenor recorder (much bigger and lower than the usual descant recorders that are taught in school!). I'm ecstatic and I'm going to bring some home from school to play with :-D I'm trying to get the kids to play in a little recorder orchestra. Good fun!

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

I'm sick :-(

For the last few days I've been exhausted and have had aching limbs and a splitting headache of the "oh my god my head is going to fall off" variety. Not happy!

We have an open night at school tomorrow and I don't want to do it - parents are scary :-(

S is now 1.5 weeks into his prac and is finding it very stressful and tiring and negative (just like I did!) but is keeping his chin up and powering on regardless for the most part. He's sick too with the same thing so we're just trying to love and support each other and keep it together. Co-habitation has had its rocky moments but on average we're doing fine and it feels just right.

I'm really loving the new car, it makes a world of difference to how I feel about myself. I hadn't realised how much my crappy old car reflected on my self-image, but I'm having a much nicer self-image with the nicer car! Naughty to place value on such things but nevermind.

Off to cook dinner and try to keep my head from thudding to the ground . . .