Today is cold again. Got up before my Zoom classes and went and ran up and down the garden with my dogs to get warm and do some exercise. I might go do it again just now. The sun briefly came out as I sat and wrote up my records of work on the verandah step but it has gone again and it is gloomy now. Not all my students were online for class. This has happened when we are reviewing the week's work too and they consequently don't know what they are doing. Frustrating! I had my two Chinese five year olds for French today too and I asked them about their Dragon Boat Festival yesterday. They seemed to eat fish and special noodles and then go watch a boat race. Elsie my dog made a guest appearance in the lesson and we talked about her coloration and I got my students to greet her in French. She momentarily looked up from her warm spot in the empty flower bed.
We have a problem with paying our gardner. He was getting forex from when my mum was teaching students from HIS but they have gone back to the US with lock down and we can't keep doing so. Now having to pay in Ecocash but the trouble is it devalues so quickly. We are paying quite a bit above the minimum wage (the minimum wage here is pathetic) but it still isn't great. Our gardner has to pay his rent in Epworth in forex and for tutoring of his children since government schools are still closed. My salary hasn't gone up this month but inflation sure has. I am now thinking of also marking scripts for Allied Arts to help top up. There is a limit though to how much extra work I can take on. If it carries on at this rate I won't be able to afford to live here any more.
It's Friday - hoorah! Am seeing a friend tomorrow, skyping some friends in Germany and then on Sunday will have to go back into school again as two of my students didn't hand in their work on time and I have to go back into school to mark it so they can get it back on Monday and the system doesn't grind to a holt with a backlog of books. Irritating, but one of those things. Waiting to hear when school might close so we have a holiday before we then re-open again on the 28th of July for who knows how long a term. I probably won't get a complete holiday as I will not only be giving extra lessons to subsidise my income, but will also probably have to keep going with my grade 7's in preparing them for their high school entrance exam in early August.
A little boy living in Monavale is doing as his school project a survey of what snakes we've had in our gardens. The list below is what has come up. He's also looking up the types of venom and the anti-venom that can be used. A lot of the residents have lost Jack Russels to snakes.
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