So. Cold.

At the moment, south-western Western Australia, including Perth and Little Country Town, is experiencing an unprecedented cold snap. We usually don't get frosts until July, if at all, but we're having them in June this year. It's supposed to go down to 1 degree C overnight here. Brrr!

And if that wasn't cold enough, two weeks ago one of WA's major gas (that's natural gas, not gasoline: we call gasoline petrol) pipelines exploded in a fiery fireball thingy, cutting out one third of the state's gas supply. This has caused a very serious gas and energy shortage that has already caused a number of large industrial businesses to temporarily close or lay off staff that they can't afford to pay. WA is in the middle of a mining boom and the mining companies are some of the worst-hit, so it's hitting people hard. Especially as the people making big bucks out of the mining boom have, by and large, invested in big houses and plasma TVs not in savings. But that's a side issue.

So anyway, everyone has been asked to dramatically reduce their energy use - short showers, no unnecessary lights, as little heating as possible especially if it's gas heating. Not good.

I don't have gas, because there's no gas pipeline up here and the owners of my house were really considerate and decided not to foist bottled gas issues on their tenants. I have an electric stove for cooking and a wood heater for heating, plus a small electric heater. I'm trying to use the wood stove more and the electric heater as little as possible, but wood isn't exactly cheap either and it only heats the lounge which isn't really useful when I'm at the computer in the study. So I'm using my electric heater and feeling guilty, and I'm STILL cold regardless because one little bar heater in a big room with 14-foot ceilings does very little good.

So . . . yeah. I'm cold.

I miss S very much now that he's gone home - during the seven weeks I got used to having him around all the time, and the house just feels empty without him. We're not sure whether he can do his next prac up here in the country - he's keen, but money will be the deciding factor - so we might not get to live together again until the start of next year. We're back to talking on webcam in the evenings, which seems strange yet familiar, like a memory from a previous life. When he was here it was like he'd never not been. I want him back here :-( And yes, the 7-week make-or-break experience was definitely a 'make'. He is the one :-)

Reports are due on Monday so I'm acquiring a brand new set of grey hairs. Wish me luck!

I must be crazy

No, seriously. I must be.

In Week 10 of this term (we're currently at the end of Week 7), there are two important events for our class. One is our class assembly, for which we have to present an item; and the other is a regional music festival involving at least half a dozen schools.

For the music festival, I decided to avoid going the "just another song from the Sing! books" route and instead decided to teach my class of 10-12 year olds to play the recorder and do a recorder orchestra performance. Most of these kids have never even picked up a recorder before! But I chose a slow, fairly simple song (title and lyrics here), and arranged it for voice (2 kids), descant recorder (3), alto recorder (2), tenor recorder (2), guitar (2), xylophone (1), tambour (1), triangle (1) and tapping sticks (1). And I'm teaching them to play it, slowly but surely. It's starting to come together, too - they're still a bit squeaky and hesitant, but they are getting there and I think it's actually going to work. But what a project to be working on during report time!

The kids were asking me about assembly just before lunch today, and I told them honestly that I had no idea what we were doing, yet. We've been studying the book "The Secret Garden" in class, and one of the kids piped up with the suggestion that we do a short play version of "The Secret Garden". This was immediately leapt upon by the rest of the class as an awesome idea, so by 4pm this afternoon I'd written a vastly abbreviated play version of the novel. It relies heavily on narration but it has enough speaking parts for all of the students, captures the essence of the novel, and is short enough to do at assembly. And we're going to do it in full costume. The school has this shed full of accumulated costumes and there's some stuff in there that is just perfect. I'm going to dress them all up as people from the 1890s and they can't even complain about it. Heehee.

These two events are two days apart in just under three weeks' time. And reports are due just over a week from now. I must be INSANE.

But I'm having so much fun!

Sunday

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I'm having a relaxing sort of a weekend - lots of housework done, yummy food cooked, and not too much school work to do. It's been very pleasant, and so it should, because it's the last weekend before S goes home to Perth :-(

It's VERY cold in Little Country Town at the moment - 17 degrees C, which isn't all that cold, but the wind chill is bitter and it's all just dreary and chilly and unpleasant. And the nights are freezing. And it's only the beginning of winter . . .

Procrastination

Today (Monday, a public holiday in Western Australia) I got a fierce burst of energy, and cleared and spring-cleaned the bathroom, main bedroom, kitchen and dining areas. Why? Because I should have been working on assessments for school. Ahh, procrastination.

I got rid of my old car this weekend - I sold it to a wreckers' for $120 and have to hand the plates in. I'm glad that's sorted, and I'm still extremely happy with my new car.  It needed new windscreen wiper blades, and I discovered a hitherto unimagined fact - you can get wiper blades in many different colours! I did not know this. So my staid, sensible white family-sized sedan now has bright pink silicon wiper blades. Heehee! I want to get a particular set of seat covers for the car, as I don't really like the leather seats and they'll be uncomfortable in summer. The ones I want are black with pink frangipanis on them - trendy I know, but cute - but it's $50 for the set and I can't afford that right now, so it'll have to wait. But I'm looking forward to customising it a bit.

I'm feeling a lot better today than I have for a while. For the past few weeks I've been battling through the worst bout of depression I've had since before I met S. They do warn you that you will get sick and depressed during your first semester of teaching, but they usually expect the depression to happen earlier, so I thought I'd dodged it entirely. No such luck. So the past few weeks have been full of self-deprecation and self-loathing, and poor S has had to put up with a girlfriend who was prone to flipping out over little things and crying at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason. He has been wonderful and very patient and is beginning to understand the nature of depression a bit better (we had a couple of rows at first because he insisted on knowing what was wrong, and with depression there often isn't anything specific!). He has been a rock - mostly! - and I'm beginning to get through it.

It will be better once reports are over and done with - they're my major stress right now. I love teaching but I hate the paperworky-things, and reporting is the scariest of the lot. It's my first go at reporting and I'm not looking forward to it, especially as two or three of my students are failing in basic literacy and numeracy (I have a year 5 student who can't accurately write down any number over 100 - as in, she wrote one hundred and two as 201 . . .). They're not failing because of anything I've done / not done - one has learning difficulties and another two were not under my tutelage for the majority of last term - but it's still unpleasant. 

I have nothing much else to report . . . life has been pretty quiet apart from my depression and S's car accident. Otherwise, we trundle along nicely and have a fair bit of fun along the way.

Oh, and I'm teaching my class to play the recorder. I know, I'm a cruel woman!

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.

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:




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

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*