Catching Up

It's been a long and foggy week somehow (for a week with only four working days!) and I'm just now catching up and figuring out where my head is.

First up, the video below is so beautiful it made me cry. It's an animated version of the picture book "Blueberry Girl" by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess. I desperately want to own this book if I ever have a daughter, and I shall attempt to give it to any friends that have daughters. It's just lovely.



Next, this is a wonderful, wonderful thing. It's the uniform jacket for the concert band I've just joined. The band is awesome, and they do high-profile events in Perth like the ANZAC Day marches and the Christmas Pageant. I joined last week and got this to take home. Squee! We also get caps :) And lookit the shiny buttons and the City of Perth badges!

Third in my show-and-tell is the ring I bought for myself a few weeks ago:



The fourth item is a bit of news. Last weekend I stripped my laptop and old PC of everything important to me and loaded it all onto Mum's mini-laptop, which I'm now using while attached to my PC monitor and keyboard. The reason for this is that the EdDept laptop needed to go back (and is now gone) and the PC had become hideously slow and noisy, to the point of being unusable. Mum is lending me her mini-laptop until I can get my own replacement laptop, which I'm buying with the $900 "economic stimulus" money that the government is paying out to anyone under a certain income in April.

I mentioned this state of affairs to my friend M, who promptly pulled some partner-of-his-accounting-firm-fu and is getting me a Dell laptop that is much more expensive than one I'd be able to buy retail, through their company Dell account. It'll be here in two or three weeks and then I can just pay them back when the money comes in. And I'll be on their corporate repairs account so they'll get it fixed for me if it has problems. I have no words for how awesome this friend and this arrangement are. And the laptop is going to be PURPLE. *SQUEE*

BROADBAND!

Thank goodness!

School is still going well - I'm not quite getting my food and water right though so I'm coming home very hungry and often dehydrated. Need to figure that out.

I'm finding some contrasts between Montessori and state schools amusing, in a must-laugh-not-cry way. State schools, by and large, have as sterile and controlled an environment as possible, and a long list of "don'ts" aimed at avoiding any possible source of injury or dirt (don't run, don't climb, don't throw, don't play with sticks . . .). And then the classes devote considerable time to activities that develop children's gross motor skills - the running, skipping, hopping, jumping, turning, stopping, throwing, catching stuff. At the Montessori school there's as few "don'ts" as possible. The kids run on the bitumen, climb trees, pick fruit from them and eat it, play in the dirt, climb all over things . . . they even have a flying fox (not one of these tame playground ones, but one you sit on!) which they can use at lunchtime. They do everything kids have traditionally done for fun.

And the school doesn't need to run gross motor skills programmes. The kids don't need classes in it because they get that just by being kids in the playground. Funny that. Typical of the state system to ban everything that develops gross motor skills then insist on classes to develop them in a controlled environment!

Too headachey to blog properly, but all is well :)

Watching History

I know it's old news, but I haven't really had a chance this week to stop and revel in the fact that the United States has elected an African-American president.

The fact that they have done this with a history like theirs gives me hope that we can do the same despite a history like ours.