~The Hollydays So Far
2005-04-10 - 12:24 p.m.

It seems like people are hardly writing in their diaries right now (including me!).

My excuse is Carmen Sandiego.

I downloaded an old DOS version from Abandonia, although it's still a more current version than the one Dianne and I used to play. I loved that game, and I still do. Dianne and I worked out a fantastic and simple little system of writing down the clues and where they led to for each place, so that we didn't go back to where we just came from and we could go back and check the place if we knew we'd had a clue before. Of course, Dianne being Dianne, she then went and compiled it all in Word Perfect into a booklet where we could look up the countries and criminals and find all the information we wanted on them. It was a little cheating, but it helped us get better at the game. Even now, I remember things like Kathmandu/Nepal have a blue and red triangle flag. And now I know things like Dar-es-Saalam is in Tanzania and Nairobi is in Kenya.

It's been reeeally hot for two days, and will be all today as well, and I'm not happy. Even though, theoretically, it's the holdiays and I've got stacks of time and la-di-da, I've actually got a lot of things I want to get done and the hot weather really makes it hard. It's hard because it puts me off going out but also because it means I sleep less well - and I wake up with headaches from my neck often enough these days anyway!

See, on Wednesday I went to Landmark to get teaching books ($90 gone in a flash, but I've already used two of the three books extensively for planning) and on Thursday I went with Mum to the Flower and Garden Show. On Friday I went to see "To Miss With Love" at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, yesterday was hot, today is hot and I'm going to see another Comedy Festival show. Tomorrow I've got a doctor's appointmnt about my headaches in the morning and a physio appointment in the afternoon, Tuesday night I'm going to a Comedy Festival thing with Mum, Thursday my car's booked in for a service and suddenly it's the end of the second week of the holidays and I've got to prepare for going back to work!

Of course, I'm enjoying my time off a lot, but there are things I want to do because I don't get around to doing them during term time. I also wanted to at least go walking more, if not screw up my courage to go swimming, but EW HOT.

I've been very proud of myself because I've been working hard to do a lot of planning for next term. The thing is that I know, once I get back to work, I'll not plan as efficiently and so forth, so I'm trying to get ten weeks' worth of planning in now, so that I actually have the time and motivation and energy to do all the little extra planning things that I have to do and correction and so forth. Also, I actually want to get some really good teaching and learning done this term. (*gasp*)