/a/muse(d)

So, Ben showed me this thing to do on the Internet which makes pretty collages. You answer questions, search the answer in Flickr, find the picture on the first search page which best suits your answer, add the URL to a list on a different website, and press a mysterious button and…hey presto! A mosaic which supposedly represents your personality. Here’s mine:

The questions are (from left to right):

1. Your name
2. Your favourite food
3. The high school you went to
4. Your favourite colour
5. Your celebrity crush (or, what it would be if I could bring myself to have a celebrity crush)
6. Your favourite drink
7. Your dream holiday destination
8. Your favourite dessert
9. What you want to be when you grow up
10. The most important thing in life
11. One word/phrase to describe yourself
12. Your Flickr name (if you were to have one)

Try it sometime (using my detailed instructions)…it’s a fun way to procrastinate and you have a pretty set of pictures at the end!

This week has felt long and crazy and I have that horrible tired feeling that goes deeper than muscle and bones and just settles into the deepest place inside you, ready to warp your view of the world and make you fantastically antisocial. The disturbing part of this is that the next two days (the ‘restful’ weekend) will be absolutely FULL of people and rushing around and organising things and trying in vain to get time to sit down in order to write reports, polish programs and collate assessments.
Sometimes it feels like the crazy ball just won’t stop rolling.

Saturday, although busy, proves an exciting challange. I’m helping to put on a dinner for over 100 women from church and beyond, and am mainly responsible for turning the greenish interior of our church building into a sparkling winter christmas wonderland, and actually fitting in enough tables and chairs for that many people to comfortably eat dinner. It’s awesome that we have so many women coming…I’m praying that God uses the night for his glory and that everything runs smoothly.::deep breath::

Here we go….

I haven’t blogged for so long that I had forgotten the web address of this blog and had no idea what my login details were. Funny…2 years of blognantation (stangnation of the blog) will do that to your memory.

I’m not making any promises, but I might be tempted to start blogging again. Maybe. We’ll see. I had fun changing the template, so who knows what might happen…
If you’ve been watching this site with baited breath, hoping for it to spring to life, today is your lucky day - breathe again. Also, might I recommend getting a life.

So the last four months have flown past and I have not had time to blog. This says something important about my life. I am now one day away from having survived a whole school year at Crawford and I can tell you honestly and vehmently that I am quite ready for a holiday. It has been an eventful school year and I’m just really tired now. Tomorrow morning the staff are having brekkie together, exchanging secret santa presents and then dealing with the final day of child minding (which is what it has become this close to term’s end) before we can breathe a sigh of relief and forget about teaching for a little while. As much as I like teaching, kids can be exhausting, and I will not miss having to say the same thing nine times for the next six weeks.

On a happier note, Ben and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary last monday (11th Dec.). When I say celebrated, I mean of course, that I went to a friend’s hen’s night and Ben stayed home. Ah well…we’re going away to celebrate later in January when all the Christmas halaballoo is over and done with. I’m looking forward to Christmas in the same way that people look forward to a mug of hot chocolate and a long long sleep after a busy day. It seems to have been creeping up for so long that when it happens it will be nice, and then it will be over and we will be free to think of things other than assorted non-essential to life or salvation X-mas parephanalia. Christmas this year will be spent in three places seeing as much family as possible. It will feel a bit different to past Christmases because there is the very real possibility that it will be the last one spent with two of my beloved grandparents - which makes me sad. I’m looking forward to hanging out with family, because I am blessed with a lovely family (two actually…in-laws are also great!). I am always reminded of how much of a blessing this is around this time of year when I hear people complaining about horrific family politics or broken relationships. God has been so kind to me in this way.

There is so much I could write about this year past. I think it can wait till another time though…

My blog slept through July. A sweet winter hibernation.

(That, and I have truly not had time or energy to post since about June.)

A few highlights include:

1. Getting a lovely new sister in law who was so shiny and beautiful and smiley on the day of her marriage that I was so happy I cried.

2. MK camp. Always good.

3. Reachout. If you can, go. So awesome.

4. Hitting the 1 1/2 years of marriage mark. 18 months in and better than ever.
5. Doing fun and random things with friends.

6. Thinking about re-tripping to Bangladesh in ‘07.

7. Talking to my family.
8. Having a (small) amount of time to lose myself with pencils and paper.

9. Going to the glow worm tunnel in Lithgow

10. My school kids making tiny and big leaps of progress.

Some lowlights include

1. Stress at work, because my little cherubs are not really.

2. Worrying slightly about my brave and caring husband and the twistedness of the world he works in.

3. Having too much to do and not knowing when to do it.

Apart from being the anniversary of my dramatic and slightly messy entrance into this world, tomorrow holds a prac student in my classroom who I’m happy to say is related to me), a visit from the author Jackie French (who wrote an excellent children’s book called ‘Diary of a wombat’ amongst other things), some excitable children, some birthday hype, some pancakes in North Rocks and some family gathering.
And now I am but hours away from becomming a year older, a little wiser, and slightly ridiculed at work for being the approximate age of my friends’ children.

23 awaits with bated breath.

My life continues in much the same way as it has been going since February this year. Some highlights and lowlight of the past months follow, for those who thirst for information and updates about the life of Lorien:

- School holidays were absolutely lovely. A few days spent in Caves Beach, an overnight stay in Blackheath, a trip to the city with my sister, time to hang out with my brother and sister-in-law to be, time to sleep in, draw, clean and relax were much needed diversions from the routine that school has become.

- I graduated! Now I’m a Bachelorette or something. Goodbye sweet and sour days of uni and holidays without end. Goodbye concrete walls, green carpet and pink hand rails. Graduation is fun because you get to wear pretentious clothing and pretend to be all medieval and academic.
- Term 2 has started with a bluster of wind, and consequently most of my kids have been off their proverbial rockers.  I’ve had to use my cranky voice far too much and my throat is beginning to protest.

- However, a few of my students have made noticable progress in some areas since the beginning of the year, and I am proud to have had something to do with that…it makes teaching feel more worthwhile. I had my one day in power today, having been left in charge of the unit, while my supervisor was away, but I didn’t let it go to my head.

- Last Friday Ben and I and a couple from church went up to Wentworth falls to sit on a freezing cold rock for several hours, look at the amazing stars, roast marshmallows over a butane stove, and try to stay wam. We spent the night in Blackheath and drove home on Saturday morning. It was a great mini-holiday to celebrate the end of week one at school!

- I’ve been exercising, which is part of my new and improved ‘healthy lifestyle’ which hopefully will lead to painless and remarkable weight loss. I’ve been doing cheezy American aerobics videos coupled with my Bollywood workout video religiously for the past three weeks, but so far I can’t see much change in my appearance. Perhaps watching ‘The Biggest Loser’ has given me unrealistic expectations of how quickly one can lose weight. I’ll keep trying.

- I’m tired. Thank goodness this is only a nine week term.

So I’ve managed to get through five entire weeks of being a teacher.

I seem to be doing fine judging by reports I have had from my supervisor and other people who have wandered into my classroom over the past few weeks, and I maintain some degree of sanity, which has to be a positive thing. I still make organisational blunders such as getting the day when I have to be at an in-service wrong by an entire week and stuffing up the arrangements that had been made for a casual to replace me that day…I felt pretty stoopid about that one. I’ve missed my playground duty once because I didn’t know that they’d changed the roster, and I’m semi-regularly confised about the timing of things such as assemblies, integration, RFF etc, but I’m managing to hold it together, and I just pray that my brain would become programmed enough in time to be able to juggle the bazillion things I am just supposed to know instinctively, without dropping anything. There are lots of those instinctive things which I am supposed to just know…like how to legally keep a class roll, (no, not bread storage…), what the red card that suddenly turned up in my pidgeon hole was for, why I have to contribute hard earned money to something called the ’social club’, and what to tell a child when they ask if they can go somewhere that I’ve never heard of. I still giggle to myself when small, lost looking children approach me in the playground and ask me if i have seen their friend, Herbert, or Janice or something, whom I have never met, seen or heard of in my life, but such is the way a child’s mind works. Teachers know everything. A dangerous, but flattering misconception.

The whole experience makes me tired if nothing else, and people who say teaching is an easy job with short hours and long holidays should be shot on sight. I work longer days than some lawyers I know. They say it gets easier. Bring it on.

Thanks to Ben I can now waste my time a little more publicly.

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
- Mural painter/ pre-school teacher (Bahrain)
- Clown/ face painter at children’s parties/ shopping centres
- OOSH childcare worker with Wesley Mission
- Special Ed. teacher at Crawford PPS

Four movies I can watch over and over again:
- Anne of Green Gables
- Amelie
- The Lord of the Rings trilogy
- Patch Adams

Four places I have lived:
- Karachi, Pakistan
- Bahrain
- Quakers Hill, Sydney
- Pendle Hill, Sydney

Four TV shows I love (and/or derive some mindless pleasure from)to watch:
- Supernanny
- Spicks and Specks
- The Amazing Race
- SBS Dateline

Four places I have been on holiday:
- Cypress
- Sri-Lanka
- Oman
- Wagstaffe

Four websites I visit daily:
- My webmail site
- Ben’s blog
- Google
- ?? A variety of teaching ideas sites.

Four of my favourite foods:
- Chocolate/ chocolate ice cream
- Mango Chicken Curry
- Boti and Kebabs with Paratha
- Guacamole

Four places I would rather be right now:
- Travelling through Asia, making long stops in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal
- In some wintery and culture-laden European country
- With Ben at a surf beach
- Visiting my family

Four people I am tagging:
- Lucy
- Jess
- Frank
- Merryn
(I think the general purpose of tagging is to keep track of animals and their movements in the wild…so consider yourselves tagged. And if you ever come up on the beach to lay eggs, know that I will be there!)

Yes folks, the children came today.

And I’m still standing up.

Yay.