/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!

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.

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.

I’m here, not dead etc etc and so forth. Happy 2006 to anyone who still lingers hopefully around this seemingly abandoned blogspace! May it be a year of growing, of learning, of laughter and fewer large scale global disasters than 2005.

2006 looks to be a busy year for me, and I am currently enjoying the more relaxing calm before the storm that will inevitably break with the sound of the school bell on the 31st Janurary. Last night I had my first ‘first day of school’ disaster dream, and I’m not talking about thinking I was back in kindy wearing pigtails and a bag that was almost the size of me. I’m talking about the first day of shcool as the teacher, losing most of my children, constructing spelling lists in the most haphazard and non-professional manner, having other staff remark that my toenails were too long to comply with OH&S regulations, and feeling generally that I may explode with the overwhelming stress of it all. As you may imagine, this was disturbingly similar to my waking fears (minus the tonenails bit…that was totally complements of my twisted subconsience), and i woke up feeling that I should ring up and resign before I even start. I think my psyche is trying to tell me that I’m a neurotic mess.

But thankfully, I’m not. Although nervous, and disgruntled that I can’t be more prepared before the beginning of term, I am excited about putting my skills into practice and seeing if I can really swim in the big pool of public education. In moments of self doubt, I rest on others confidence in me, and think about happy things like flowers on my desk at school, art work hanging from the roof of my classroom, and actually impacting the development of a child’s life. When I start to freak out about the fact that my class will span Kindy to year five, I calm myself by thinking that it could be good practise for the day when I potentially teach at a tiny international school in the foothills of the Himalayas, and will be glad of the cross age-group experiece.

Anyway, God knows how it will turn out, so I should really settle down and concentrate on the more immediate tasks in my life, like tidying my desk so I can use it, planning kids church for the next term, making graven images of the bride and groom for a friend’s wedding cake, and seeing some long-neglected friends.

God was wonderfully faithful through all that 2005 threw at us, and I am convinced that he will continue to be so into this new year. As the old hymn so nicely puts it:

I hate to keep happy news to myself, so I’ll say this now:

I got targetted!!

Not in a ‘with a shotgun/arrow’ kind of way, but in a ‘the DET has offered me a permanent full time teaching position in an IO class in a large mainstream primary school in West Blacktown, to start in January 2006′ kind of way.

Woo Hoo!!

Many thanks must go to God - who knows exactly where he wants me to be and when, even when I do not. The cool thing about having to wait to be randomly rung up and told of your appointment to a particular place, is that I can trust that God will put me where he wants me and I have much less chance of potentially making an unwise decision! Mainly because I really don’t have much of a decision to make. I can’t really reject the offer, because I would ultimately be cast to the depths of the waiting list for teaching positions, never to see the flourescent light of my own classroom again; left forever to wander in the purgatory of casual teaching.

Knowing where I’ll be, and a little about what I’ll be doing next year makes me feel more secure, and means we can get on with planning next year a little more thoroughly. More details anon.

I’m excited.