Well I've had the most indulgent few days. Last weekend was all about celebrating hubby's birthday, and also a few friends' special days (five in four days... who'd have thought February could be so crowded!) including our number one son's sixteenth birthday.
Obviously this has been a week of much reflection, wondering most of the time where the heck the time has gone! It has flown by since we brought home a little pink squirmy thing from the hospital. Now we have a six foot three inch hairy monster that communicates in grunts and plays hideous music too loudly because he just can't do the washing up without it!
And this past weekend has been a busy time for me, because being busy means that I didn't have the time to feel lonely. Hubby was working away from home at a jetsprint meeting, and although I never mind him going away, I constantly look forward to him returning.
So the garden has had a spruce up - not finished because it is such a major task in such a large area - and the house has had some parts cleaned that have not been done for longer than should be allowed, and I have spent some time yesterday painting for pleasure.
My to-do list is still horrendously long, but I have a real sense of achievement from this weekend, and I'm looking forward to moving into the business week today. A significant meeting should set our business onto a new path, and make our goal of hosting workshops a step closer to reality.
This week is indeed going to be good!
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Saturday, February 16, 2013
What a wonderful weekend
What a lovely weekend we're having at the moment. We celebrated hubby's birthday with friends on Friday night - they took us out to dinner, and then gave us a long weekend in Wanaka with spending money as a birthday gift for him - and on Saturday (his actual birthday) we spent a lovely day together adventuring in the car before having a lovely meal at another set of friends' house.
We were gifted a bread maker yesterday as well, and all in all are feeling very lucky and privileged to have such wonderful friends around us.
It really does show that what goes around comes around. Spread the love, people, and the love will come right on back to you.
We were gifted a bread maker yesterday as well, and all in all are feeling very lucky and privileged to have such wonderful friends around us.
It really does show that what goes around comes around. Spread the love, people, and the love will come right on back to you.
Friday, February 8, 2013
How lucky am I?
How lucky am I? Very lucky indeed.
I have been blessed with a fabulous family. My boys are the most wonderful young men and my gorgeous husband is also my best friend.
And although I haven't always seen eye-to-eye with my parents, I love them so very much. They provide an aspirational parenting role-model for me... not so much learning from their mistakes, but emulating their approach.
So many children I come across do not have the support of a fabulous family to help them achieve their potential. I'm so glad that I was never one of them!
I have been blessed with a fabulous family. My boys are the most wonderful young men and my gorgeous husband is also my best friend.
And although I haven't always seen eye-to-eye with my parents, I love them so very much. They provide an aspirational parenting role-model for me... not so much learning from their mistakes, but emulating their approach.
So many children I come across do not have the support of a fabulous family to help them achieve their potential. I'm so glad that I was never one of them!
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Leak free and lovely!
The storm seems to have passed us by now - although it was a total doozy while it lasted. I'm going to get up on the kitchen roof today and check where the water was coming in. Nothing much came through - not even enough to put a centimetre in an ice cream container - but I want to get that sorted out before the autumn and winter arrive. I suspect that some of the flashing has deteriorated, allowing water running off the original villa roof to get under the corrugated iron on the sloping kitchen roof. Once it's under, it just runs down the joists until it can go no further, and so comes through the ceiling into my kitchen floor. Looking on the bright side, I have a nice clean kitchen floor now!
I've got time to go up on the roof today because we have a public holiday from work. It is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is a pivotal document in the history of New Zealand. There are lots of mixed opinions on the Treaty, and whether or not it is a fair document.
For me, as a relatively recent import to the country, it is a meaningless bit of paper. Stephen Covey suggested that we should live from our imaginations not our past, and I think he has a point. We, as taxpayers, are paying out millions of dollars to fix wrongs (real or imagined - again depending on your point of view) that happened well over a hundred years ago. It is difficult to see how we are going to move forward while we have our eyes so firmly fixed on the past. In the UK we have been invaded and overrun so many times over the course of our history that it has become part of our rich tapestry rather than a bugbear to be "fixed". Should I hate my Norwegian secretary at school because the vikings once invaded our country, raping and pillaging as they went? I think not.
The biggest bugbear for me is that indigenous means "originating in a place". So how can you be indigenous when you freely celebrate arriving in a waka?
I've got time to go up on the roof today because we have a public holiday from work. It is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is a pivotal document in the history of New Zealand. There are lots of mixed opinions on the Treaty, and whether or not it is a fair document.
For me, as a relatively recent import to the country, it is a meaningless bit of paper. Stephen Covey suggested that we should live from our imaginations not our past, and I think he has a point. We, as taxpayers, are paying out millions of dollars to fix wrongs (real or imagined - again depending on your point of view) that happened well over a hundred years ago. It is difficult to see how we are going to move forward while we have our eyes so firmly fixed on the past. In the UK we have been invaded and overrun so many times over the course of our history that it has become part of our rich tapestry rather than a bugbear to be "fixed". Should I hate my Norwegian secretary at school because the vikings once invaded our country, raping and pillaging as they went? I think not.
The biggest bugbear for me is that indigenous means "originating in a place". So how can you be indigenous when you freely celebrate arriving in a waka?
Monday, February 4, 2013
Phew!
Phew indeed! What a storm we had last night.
I loved the awesome lightning display late in the evening (far more than my dog and cat did, anyway) and I never mind a good crack of thunder - the anticipation and counting seconds between one and the other is always a good game to play and reminds me of nighttime storms of my childhood. If I couldn't sleep because of thunder my dad would sit up with me and count the seconds and this was a masterpiece of distraction, turning something that was unsettling into a fun game.
The thing that I was less impressed about was the small leak that developed in my kitchen ceiling at about midnight. However, the bottom of the bowl that I left to catch the drips was barely covered by 5.30 this morning, and the drips had definitely stopped, so I am not too worried. I'm certainly not going up on the roof until the wind stops, so that will just have to wait!
I'm back in school today, after my usual Monday working on my own business. We had a great meeting with a local Principal, and this might just be the start of a wonderful Professional Learning Partnership! Can't say more yet, because the Board of Trustees has to give us the go-ahead, but if it works out as we all hoped at the meeting then it will be a symbiotic win-win situation. Excellent! And I am so very excited about the whole thing. It has a good feeling about it and could well be the way forward for us.
School will be fun today as well - a little haphazard as we are busy up to the eyeballs already and it's only the second week of term - but I get to meet with my MST facilitator and discuss the programme I'm going to run, including the paper I'm taking through Massey university. I can't wait to get my teeth into this as I find learning new things tremendously exciting. I'm going to focus on our parent community as a way of raising their children's achievement.
If anybody is actually reading this, that last statement and the fact I'm getting so excited about it must seem pretty sad. That's what makes me a good teacher I guess - the ability to be enthused by my job in all its aspects.
And this year might just be a bit about blowing my own trumpet a bit more too - nothing too arrogant, but acknowledging my skills and value instead of blushing modestly and muttering "oh no, it's nothing". I'm not nothing... I'm a damn good teacher and proud of it. I'm also working on being a good mother, a great wife, a good business partner and an interesting writer... when I've had 20 years practise at each of these I hope I'm as good as I am at teaching!
I loved the awesome lightning display late in the evening (far more than my dog and cat did, anyway) and I never mind a good crack of thunder - the anticipation and counting seconds between one and the other is always a good game to play and reminds me of nighttime storms of my childhood. If I couldn't sleep because of thunder my dad would sit up with me and count the seconds and this was a masterpiece of distraction, turning something that was unsettling into a fun game.
The thing that I was less impressed about was the small leak that developed in my kitchen ceiling at about midnight. However, the bottom of the bowl that I left to catch the drips was barely covered by 5.30 this morning, and the drips had definitely stopped, so I am not too worried. I'm certainly not going up on the roof until the wind stops, so that will just have to wait!
I'm back in school today, after my usual Monday working on my own business. We had a great meeting with a local Principal, and this might just be the start of a wonderful Professional Learning Partnership! Can't say more yet, because the Board of Trustees has to give us the go-ahead, but if it works out as we all hoped at the meeting then it will be a symbiotic win-win situation. Excellent! And I am so very excited about the whole thing. It has a good feeling about it and could well be the way forward for us.
School will be fun today as well - a little haphazard as we are busy up to the eyeballs already and it's only the second week of term - but I get to meet with my MST facilitator and discuss the programme I'm going to run, including the paper I'm taking through Massey university. I can't wait to get my teeth into this as I find learning new things tremendously exciting. I'm going to focus on our parent community as a way of raising their children's achievement.
If anybody is actually reading this, that last statement and the fact I'm getting so excited about it must seem pretty sad. That's what makes me a good teacher I guess - the ability to be enthused by my job in all its aspects.
And this year might just be a bit about blowing my own trumpet a bit more too - nothing too arrogant, but acknowledging my skills and value instead of blushing modestly and muttering "oh no, it's nothing". I'm not nothing... I'm a damn good teacher and proud of it. I'm also working on being a good mother, a great wife, a good business partner and an interesting writer... when I've had 20 years practise at each of these I hope I'm as good as I am at teaching!
Saturday, February 2, 2013
To screen or not to screen...
In 2007 I was lucky enough to go to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London and watch a performance of Othello. It was the most amazing experience (and I've watched a lot of Shakespeare in a lot of different venues and genre in my time!!) and even my non-Shakespeare-enjoying husband actually enjoyed the play immensely, aided in no small measure by the atmosphere and intensity of the setting.
The little town in NZ that I'm proud to call "home" has just embarked on a short series of Shakespeare plays on screen - film versions of productions at the Globe in London. I was torn... I loved the Globe, and I love Shakespeare, but I was a little worried that on screen it would lose some of its integrity and atmosphere.
My very good friend thought that this was an opportunity not to be missed - she had visited the Globe in London but had not been able to get tickets for a performance - and so we trotted off yesterday to our local museum/lecture theatre for a 3 hour performance of Much Ado about Nothing.
I needn't have worried - the screening was superb, and did full justice to a joyous rendition of this play. The cast were brilliant, the costumes elegant and appropriate (I loved the subtle use of colour to show allegiances and character) and even the uncomfortable seats in the lecture theatre helped to add to the atmosphere in a very authentic way! And the wonders of modern technology made it all possible - I felt transported not only back into Shakespeare's time, but also half way round the world!
Next week is another screening (Alls Well that ends well I believe) and I can't wait. At only $10 a ticket it's a treat not to be missed.
The little town in NZ that I'm proud to call "home" has just embarked on a short series of Shakespeare plays on screen - film versions of productions at the Globe in London. I was torn... I loved the Globe, and I love Shakespeare, but I was a little worried that on screen it would lose some of its integrity and atmosphere.
My very good friend thought that this was an opportunity not to be missed - she had visited the Globe in London but had not been able to get tickets for a performance - and so we trotted off yesterday to our local museum/lecture theatre for a 3 hour performance of Much Ado about Nothing.
I needn't have worried - the screening was superb, and did full justice to a joyous rendition of this play. The cast were brilliant, the costumes elegant and appropriate (I loved the subtle use of colour to show allegiances and character) and even the uncomfortable seats in the lecture theatre helped to add to the atmosphere in a very authentic way! And the wonders of modern technology made it all possible - I felt transported not only back into Shakespeare's time, but also half way round the world!
Next week is another screening (Alls Well that ends well I believe) and I can't wait. At only $10 a ticket it's a treat not to be missed.
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