Exam tomorrow

I have the first of four exams tomorrow - Social Studies and Science curriculum, 8 short essays over three hours. It's my first exam since November 2001 and I'm fairly nervous about it. I think I'll do okay, but I'm still not happy.

Just writing notes this evening (to take into the exam) has made both my wrist and my elbow very sore, so I'm not looking forward to the exam experience one little bit. I'm going to be very sore tomorrow.

Anyway, wish me luck and I'll try to keep the updates coming over the next week-and-a-bit until exams are over.

Some Photos

This afternoon I went for a bit of a nature ramble around the half-bush village-suburb I live in (it was once a village in the bush outside Perth, now it's been somewhat suburbanised in the centre but it's still scruffy around the edges and it's still cut off from the neighbouring also-former-village-suburbs by tracts of bush).

The spot I went to is one that I visited many times as a child with my family. It's only a short distance on the map from the house where I grew up, but it's separated from that street by a steep gravel track that drops a significant distance (at a guess, 100m) down to the valley floor. The valley contains a winter creek (not running yet, we haven't had enough rain), an old granite quarry, and the remains of a tiny gravel-crushing plant (mostly just concrete and bits of old iron, and a small old reservoir and associated water channel). It’s a beautiful spot, rarely interfered with and with a sweet rustic charm to the interferences (half-rotted fence-posts etc) that are there.


Here's some photos for your enjoyment . . .


The upper paddock of someone's hobby farm, at the end of the road which becomes the track through the valley. You can't see my parents' house, but it's on the crest of the hill in the background. Behind where I was standing is the gravel track leading up to the home of my childhood.


A typical excerpt of the Perth Hills bush landscape: jarrah and marri trees, "blackboys" (aka the politically correct 'grass trees' . . . xanthorrhoea preissi anyway!) and various scrub and undergrowth plants. The track is the underlying red gravel, known technically as laterite pebbles, but coloquially as “rolly-stones” (they roll under your feet, you see). The white bits are chunks of natural quartz.


There aren't many wildflowers around at this time of year (ie the first days of winter) but you can always rely on Hibbertias for that glint of gold, no matter what season it is. The tree trunks around it are fire-blackened; bushfires are a regular occurence in the area. 


A hillside further up the creek - note (if you can see them) the massive granite boulders just emerging from the surface of the hillside. The hills are composed of granite and laterite, and they're high in iron - you can't rely on a compass up here!


I was rather pleased with this picture, artistically speaking, although the dead tree itself is a bit sad as it wasn't all that old when it died.


Here is the same tree reflected in the rainwater that has collected in the old gravel plant reservoir. My brother and I used to bring toy boats with us on walks and sail them here, wading in as far as we could in gumboots (usually when it was fuller!). We called it the "billabong", although it really isn't one. 



Here, also, is a little video (1 minute long) I took while standing next to the "billabong". There isn't much sound - just the roaring of the wind (it was windy) and the sound of small rocks being moved by my feet. But it does give you the 360° bush experience!

Very funny, universe . . .

I was right . . . I was coming down with a virus. 

I should have expected it really. As Tassiegirl astutely pointed out below (thanks for that Tassie *hugs*), I’ve been spending heaps of time with kids, both the prac kids and my own 11yo and 9yo siblings, who go to different schools, so that’s 3 schools’ worth of viruses I’ve been exposed to in the last 3 weeks; and then of course I’m on study break. So as soon as I stopped rushing around, my body went “right, there’s a gap, I can afford to be sick now”, and bam, here I am.

I’ve just taken two panadeine to try to knock out the all-encompassing headache and stomach cramps that are the hallmark of this particular virus, and they’ve made me feel awfully weird, kind of spaced out and dozy. Maybe I should just go to bed, but I can’t be bothered getting changed and I don’t think I can sleep in jeans. Wheeeeeeee . . . .

Two things

. . . two disgruntled, unhappy things.

Firstly, by and large I'm at peace with the fact that the unhappy parts of my childhood were largely due to undiagnosed Aspergers (which wasn't even recognised as a condition until I was 13 anyway) and that it's no one's fault that I had problems. But today when searching for my tax file number I came across all of my old reports from primary school and early high school. And I suddenly felt a surge of real anger over what I was reading. "Seems withdrawn" . . . "very quiet" . . . "seems to be happy sitting alone" . . . "sometimes seems tense" . . . "is prone to daydreaming" . . .

WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T ANYONE REALISE THAT SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH ME?!

Even though Aspergers wasn't recognised at the time, surely someone somewhere should have noticed that I wasn't normal! Between my parents (accepting me for who I was and not worrying about it) and my teachers (noticing that I was different and wanting me to be punished / bullied into acting normal), it never seems to have occurred to anyone that my differences might be real differences rather than misbehaviours or personality defects.

I have no idea whether there’s anything they could have done, if they’d known that I really wasn’t capable of just being normal. But it hurts to think that there might have been something.

Secondly, and on a less dramatic note, I’m currently a rather frustrated namesnerd. I want to get some reliable, sensible name suggestions, but I can’t go to the only sensible name site out there without getting dragged into personal stuff. I don’t want to be involved in all that, I just want names. But if I go back, I’ll get pounced on and bashed up for stuff that happened in the past, so I have to stay name-suggestion-less. Bah.

I think I'm coming down with a virus, too. Blech.

. . . Well.

So where to start? 

Prac was FANTASTIC. I thoroughly enjoyed it and didn't want my time there to end. I really miss the kids, now, too - I'd got to know them and I wish I was going back to that class again. I'd tell you all about them but it would probably get boring lol. I also wish I could share the interesting names with my namesnerd friends, but that would be unethical. Gah.

I taught five smashing Maths lessons, ran a very successful 5-lesson min-programme in English, taught a bit of SOSE, and otherwise just ran things here and there. Wonderful experience, and I'm feeling very confident about next year now.

*

Living with my parents is going fine. It's odd to be back in some ways, but normal in others. My bedroom is hilarious though - I'll have to take a picture sometime to show the delightful personality crisis it's having. The single bed (my baby pink pipeline one I had from when I was 11) is covered by my gold-embroidered, $179, very much adult queen bed quilt cover set. This dichotomy is set against a backdrop of two-toned blue walls (from which the dividing strip of wallpaper has mercifully been removed - it was a frieze of buses and cars). And at the window, behind the bed, hangs a set of Toy Story curtains. It looks ridiculous  It used to be my younger brother's room (he's now 9) before my other brother moved out and left his larger room vacant.

But I’m used to the room’s décor inconsistencies now, and otherwise it works very well and fits an astonishing amount of stuff.

*

I’m really looking forward to this afternoon – my 11-year-old sister has finally decided to get her ears pierced, and since Mum and James are too squeamish, I’m the lucky individual who gets to take her. So we’re going in to the city together later to get them done, and then we’re going shopping for some jewellery. The reason she wants them done now is that her Year 6 Social (a formal dance for the year sixes, in other words) is 6 weeks away, so if she gets them done now, the initial studs can come out just in time for her to wear dangly earrings to her social. So we’re going to find some earrings to match her dress, and something to go in her hair too. The dress is amazing – quite grown up but she’s now got a bit of a figure so she’s really old enough for it. It’s royal purple and she looks smashing. But oh, so grown up!

BtN people: I wish I could post a pic, as you guys have been watching my sister grow up for some time, but I feel too exposed on this blog and on the internet generally these days, especially as sis gets older. But if you’re one of my long-term BtN or real life friends and you’re really curious to see how she’s changed, email me and I’ll send you a pic after the social (the addy is on my blogger profile).

*

Jemima has mostly settled in to the new place, although she’s not entirely happy as my parents already had a cat, Mia, and she’s been bullying Jem a bit. She’s a big 10-year-old sook who doesn’t want to share her territory lol. But we’re sorting things out by keeping Mia outside during the day (Mia doesn’t hunt) so that Jem can have peace and quiet and access to the food, water and litter tray. Jem sleeps in my room at night, quite often creeping under the covers and snuggling up next to me. Awww!

*

I got a new job! And just as effortlessly as last time, too. The job at Subway was proving too far away from Mum’s place for me to keep working there, so I went around the local major shopping district with resumes and handed them in anywhere there were “help wanted” signs. That was Tuesday; by Friday I had a job. I’m going to be doing reception / retail sales for a branch of a major chain of optometrists / spectacle dispensers. Any more detail would give away my workplace lol. It’s MUCH better pay ($21/hour before tax compared to $13.50/hour – woohoo!) and far less mucky and annoying. Yay!

*

I think that’s all for now. I have a week off next, then two weeks in which I have 4 exams. After that, things start to get interesting!

All I can say . . .

. . . is that you know it's been a long week when you wake up on a Sunday morning to realise that you've been dreaming that a litter of 30 kittens - which have the names and faces of the kids from your prac class - have been harrassing you for answers to their maths problems.

That's what comes of having a cat sleep in your room after you've been teaching maths all week!

Full wrap-up coming, I promise. First, I have a science assignment to write. What possessed them to make it due the Monday after prac, I will never know!

LMFAO . . .

Those who know me online will know that I have little patience with people who ask questions before trying to look up the answers themselves . . . especially when they've been previously shown how. I'm not alone in this frustration, and it's become a not-uncommon internet snark to say "google is your friend" or some such, or to just direct the asker to a tongue-in-cheek fake website like golookitup.com.

So you can imagine my delight to discover this: www.justfuckinggoogleit.com

Go on, click it . . .