At the end of today's lesson with my Chinese student I was given a moon cake to eat as this weekend is the Chinese Moon Festival. Definitely more of a pleasant and less embarrassing experience eating the moon cake compared to the black chicken episode. I think I should just say I am vegetarian. My student's birthday is coming up in October. I got the day wrong as I thought it was the 10th. His mum explained that they are very relieved it is not the tenth of October as this is the National Day of the Republic of China, when Taiwan broke away from mainland China in the Wuchang Uprising in 1911. For the Chinese this is apparently not a good day and not one to have a celebration on - oops.
This morning with my home schoolers I had them doodle in time to music. I got them to do one doodle to City of Stars from La La Land and then second to Another Day of Sun. The difference in tempo produced some great results and the two seemed to really enjoy it.
Went into the supermarket today and rice krispies are $6!! Also noticed that you are not able to buy more than one packet of sour worms and other sweets at a time - so that's what people were panic bulk buying?
Have booked flights to be in Cape Town in December (7th - 19th) for a wedding. Looking forward to it.
Have I left that time behind or do I still carry it with me?
What's done is done, what was said is said
and yet ...
I go back to it, analyse it, scrutinise my mistakes.
But for the time that lies ahead,
the hope I cling to, must not let go,
dare I dream, live, forget?
Or will I just have more to regret?
Well after being in bed with a gastric bug at the end of last week, I discovered that we were apparently experiencing fuel shortages. People then panicked and started stockpiling commodities in supermarkets and some prices went shooting up. The economy is not in good form but this was all possibly slightly preemptive. Today things seem to be back to normal and there are no more petrol queues for now - phew.
Life continued otherwise though and I had my home schoolers, my Chinese four year old and form three. With the form three we have been brainstorming on essays on Macbeth. I need to catch up with reading Spies as they have now finished that as well. My student astounded me by getting 85% for his geo test. I asked if he had studied it in a different way, really hoping he would say he had and we could use this but he said he hadn't - boo. I also had two new students from Mozambique who go to the International School today.
I have been building up to where I was before I went on holiday in personal training. Today was definitely the hardest one since I got back. At one point I thought my trainer said I had to do 60 mountain climbers - I had mild heart failure. It was tough though nonetheless with crunches, reverse crunches, bicycles, mountain climbers and skipping. But the endorphin rush after is definitely worth it.
Went for my second art session with Sarah Fynn yesterday morning. It is a lovely morning tackling painting projects and being guided with interesting suggestions of techniques and use of paint. This week's was completely different to last week's challenge.
Hoping to go to Starlight Dancing this weekend and doing more photo editing. I am finding Picasa fairly useful, although the resolution after is not that great. Might go to a friend's writing group meet up on Saturday morning. Have to be up early on Saturday to teach my form three.
I went for my first oil painting class with Sarah Fynn today which was very cathartic and I learnt all sorts of things. We tried our hand at screen printing using rollers and oil paint and etching onto these. I then worked into mine (still trying to decide if I have finished or not). The other ladies were very sweet. One was visiting home and is a jewellery designer in Cape Town.
Well yesterday I had my most challenging Chinese delicacy to date for tea after my lesson with my four year old. I was presented with what I thought was a chicken wing (I was correct, but it was completely black and the outside was fairly gelatinous). My student's granny served it to me and I got the feeling she thought this was a real treat. I am not a huge fan of chicken wings at the best of times but I felt I had to try. My four year old tucked into his with gusto. His mum who is back from China came in and saw what I was eating and she laughed loudly, saying she couldn't believe her mum had given me that. I still felt I had to eat it. It actually didn't taste too bad once I got past the colour and texture. The outside was a bit like chicken jelly and the inner meat was almost like biltong. I ate as much as I could and then took a large swig of what I thought was milk that I had been given but it turned out to be lacto!
Well Saturday and Sunday went by really quickly. I got the dates wrong for the Garden Show - it's next weekend - oops. Managed to start some photo editing of the wedding I photographed in Picasa. It's giving me a feel for playing with light, highlights and contrast but the resolution isn't great. Will have a go with Darktable and another called GIMP before I try Lightroom again - yes am a little overwhelmed by LR still - it's going to take time and confidence.
Today I trekked out to Helensvale to go and paint the phone box I had been asked to do. It wasn't the greatest of neighbourhoods and I was very glad to have my friend Lucy with me. Was also nice to have someone paint it with me as it was a massive surface to cover. Lucy arrived with coffee (amazing) and my friend Nikki who commissioned me came with the enamel gloss paint which proved to be extremely sticky (I am still covered in yellow after showering and scrubbing). There was a lot of rubbish around the phone box and what looked like human poo - which was rather gross. A drunk dude came and relieved himself against the wall opposite me. There were quite a few Sunday drinkers loitering around and we had commentary from onlookers throughout - almost entirely male. The last guy to come over was very critical and I don't think his last comment in Shona was flattering. Oh well, we did it and managed to avoid the police on the way home - at one point a policeman passed on his motorbike and we worried he might come over and say we were vandalising even though we did have municipal permission to be doing it. Luckily he went away and didn't hassle us.
My painting on the left, Lucy's on the right
Tomorrow I start teaching my Chinese four year old again and I will meet his little baby brother for the first time. I also see my psychiatrist again for a check up. Apart from the usual nausea after I take my lithium I've been fine and managed on my own in France for a week OK. Looks like I will be house sitting for someone else after this for a couple of weeks. They have a swimming pool, which will be amazing as it is starting to get incredibly warm as we head towards the suicide month of October.
Well it wasn't too strenuous a week, as I only started with the home schoolers on Wednesday and haven't got going with afternoon tutoring yet. I have lost one of my students for tutoring from last term but I had an interview to teach two teenagers from the French School, English language and literature. I have a trial lesson with them next Tuesday - will have to do some prep for that this weekend, read the syllabi and get organised. Planning to go past Textbooks for Africa on Churchill Road just now (just hope I don't encounter the police along there - am having to get my mind into gear on that front and plan my routes around town to avoid the police wherever possible).
With my four year old that I home school we've decided to maybe give Jolly Phonics a break for the moment. My friend who has done educational therapy following the US National Institute for Learning Development reckons phonics should only be introduced when you're six or seven as your brain only really grasps phonetics then. My four year old is a lot happier not doing phonics for now. Maybe can try again a bit later. He is crazy about dinosaurs now too and really enjoyed the book Gigantosaurus by Jonny Duddle that I got in England. We'll see how my other Chinese four year old likes it next week, when I start with him again.
Had my first personal training session today since I got back. I had forgotten I was in credit for one class which was nice. My trainer was very kind and did stretch today and we'll ease back to things - I had pictured having to do weights and cardio at the level I was at before I left on my first day, so it was a big relief. She was delighted that I had managed to lug a 25 kg suitcase up stairs in the Paris metro while I was away. I don't think I would have managed at my previous fitness level. I did have a really kind stranger come alongside me though at the Strasbourg Saint-Denis station, who hoisted my bag up two flights of steps and onto the metro - chivalry is alive and well in Paris.
Apart from work this weekend I have my depression support group meeting at a new coffee shop in Avondale tomorrow morning. There's a party at Reps Theatre that I've been invited to and then there's the Garden Show at Parklands. I have also got to try and paint a telephone box in Greystone Park. A friend has been given permission and has the paint. I have been given it as a blank canvas to brighten up - thinking of doing a larger version of my sunflower painting from last year. So I guess it's going to be quite a busy weekend.
Today it was back to teaching my grade two and four year old in home schooling. For the grade two we have switched from the government correspondence course to following the Cambridge syllabus. So far, so good. I face a challenge though with the four year old, as he is really not enjoying Jolly Phonics. I think I need to make it more hands-on, as he likes making things, so maybe need to make snake S shapes and the like. Am going to meet up with a friend who has a nursery school on Monday to borrow her nursery school syllabus book and brainstorm on the Jolly Phonics conundrum.
After teaching I went to a friend's as she has the photo editing program Lightroom on her mac and she said we could try work our way through it together. I had watched a couple of youtube tutorials. One seemed fairly straightforward but a second one became very technical very quickly and I was left feeling even more intimidated. I'm afraid we didn't get very far today, as when we started off trying to upload a photo to edit from my SD card Lightroom seemed to have uploaded my entire 32 gigs of photos onto my friend's laptop and it started saying it had run out of memory space and the hard drive was full. As we both don't really know Lightroom we didn't know where it had stored the photos and where to go to delete them - we searched in all the main folders and programs on the laptop. Am now trying to google where it might be. Oh dear!
This tutorial left me feeling fairly confident.
This left me feeling overwhelmed.
I did learn though that I can practice basic photo editing using Picasa and a friend in Switzerland has also suggested an open source software called Darktable that I might try out. Watching the tutorials though you realise, a) you needed a good photo to start off with (although a few that looked too dark were amazingly rectified) and b) you can go extreme and totally change what was originally there. I have til now been happy with what I capture as it is but guess it's a new skill I should try learn and it is a bit like art and painting a picture with a bit of science and computer geekness thrown in.
My other little bit of research is that I have been asked to collect sphagnum moss samples and post them to Switzerland to see if they contain testate amoeba. I need to find out if I'm allowed to send moss in the post and also check with the people doing the study if I have to keep the moss fresh. In addition, will need to think of places in Zim to go off sampling. I might ask someone at the UZ for some help.
Since my last post I have arrived back home in Zim. In between then and now though I visited Exeter with my sister for the day as my brother-in-law was working in Tiverton. Beth and I went on a tour of the underground passages of Exeter which were built in the Middle Ages to bring clean water into the city. I'm afraid I chickened out of the last tunnel that was less than a meter high - I don't think I would have fitted through, my sister did it though. We managed to catch a free tour of Exeter cathedral which was interesting and then unintentionally joined a tour group seeing the entrance to the university dean's residence - we saw the door open and thought it was open to the public - oops (it was an interesting door). The next day I caught the bus to Oxford to see friends. Went to lunch on the same road as the language school where I was supposed to teach. Then went to a well put together exhibition of artefacts and information on Jane Austen at the Bodleian Library. I ended up spending an extra night in Oxford as I was going to Milton Keynes on the Saturday to see other friends and it made sense to not go all the way back to Swindon. Visited a friend's lovely cottage in Moulsoe, just outside of Milton Keynes and I managed to bring some sun. I travelled back to Swindon and then on the Sunday, we went to cousins in Reading and had quite a gathering. My cousin's eldest daughter is about to start junior school and she enthusiastically brought down her entire school wardrobe and modelled her various outfits for us.
My last week was mostly in Swindon. Met up with another cousin who drove through from Crowborough to see my sister and I. I wandered around the Outlet Center in Swindon and tried not to spend too much. I could have gone to the Steam Museum, as Swindon is famous for its railways. On Friday my sister and I went to Marlborough which is not far from Swindon, to see a family friend from Zimbabwe. We were treated to tea at Polly's Tea Rooms. On Saturday, the day I flew home, my sister organised for us to meet up with my cousin Carly and her boyfriend and my friend Suba came too. We went to Cliveden House in Maidenhead. When we drove up we were all ready to pay when the attendant said there was one day a year when entry was free of charge and it just so happened that that was today - score! The gardens were lovely and we had fun getting lost in the maze and walking along the Thames.
We were lucky with the weather at Cliveden as when I got to Heathrow thunderclouds prevented us from taking off for an hour and a half. The guy who sat next to me got on the plane and promptly fell asleep but in the most awkward position - he must really have had neck ache when he woke up. He maintained this position until we had taken off, whereupon when he could, he put the tray table down and doubled up over it, with his hoody pulled over and with his face apparently plastered into the plastic bag of his blanket which he was using as a cushion unopened. I did at the time wonder if he was asphyxiating himself. He did seem to still be breathing though. To make him wake up the air hostess seemed to purposefully say breakfast instead of dinner to him when she asked if he wanted any. He briefly lifted his head, grunted and then went back to sleep. In the morning when we were served breakfast before landing he was still in the same position and the air hostess asked me if he had moved during the night. When I said yes, she said she was relieved as she wondered if we had a corpse. The thought of being squashed in by the window by a dead body had crossed my mind too, but he had moved and did get off the plane when we landed.
