Monthly Archives: July 2004

General

Summer time is here again (well, at least in terms of the holidays…)

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(Title reference – checkout the UK’s weather recently…)

Well, yesterday was the last day of school, which means that summer holidays have FINALLY arrived here. Amazingly, I am assured by colleagues that this is actually an EARLY breakup. I’m sorry, but having been born and raised in North America, I will always resent having to teach in July…

I haven’t posted in a while because, being the last few weeks of school, things have been incredibly busy. There’s been Sports Day (or rather Sports Afternoon, as it was only from lunch onwards…) on July 1 where we hoped that the heavens would not open and drown our release from class. And it didn’t although it was a very close thing at times…

There was also the Duke of Edinburgh award practise trip on the 10 and 11 July, where we DID get rained on whilst tramping about the English countryside with huge packs on our backs. For those of you who don’t know what the D0fE award is, find out more at their website. I had a vague idea of what was involved, but I now have a huge respect for people who can navigate around the countryside with just a compass and a map. (My offer of bringing along my GPS was recieved with a large amount of scorn and a long explanation of why they were inferior to map-and-compass navigation…) I felt sure on the Saturday that if I hadn’t been accompanied by people who knew what they were doing, I would have been stuck out there for days! I was also extremely nervous before the trip (having been warned before agreeing to go as a requisite staff member that there was at least 20 km of walking involved over the weekend) that I would be found huddled up on some forest trail having a huge asthma attack while the air ambulance was called in to rescue me. I was pleaseantly surprised to find that due to some (what I considered to be inferior) walking routes around our house and a concerted effort to lose some weight, I was in better shape than I thought and fared rather well on the weekend. The long trek on Sunday probably did my flabby muscles much good after the amazingly long trek on Saturday, and the only residual effects were a knot in my calf muscle that went away sometime on Wednesday… Oh – and it was more like 35 km of walking, due to a miscalculation of the length of the trails planned, and the fact that we got lost at least 3 times on Saturday…

This last week has been a bit strange in all. Being the last week of school, there’s a certain amount of the ‘goodbye factor’ mixed in with exhaustion and the excitement of the coming holiday. My friend Jo has had this ‘funny feeling’ on the last day of term for the last few years now, and it’s something I can identify with. No matter how much you’ve been looking forward to the last day of school and the summer holidays, you always feel a bit sad on the last day. There’s the favourite classes you won’t have again, the colleagues who are leaving the school for one reason or another, and a certain amount of uncertainty over what, exactly, you are going to do with all this free time on your hands for the next six weeks! For me, this is always mixed in with a bit of panic, thinking that maybe I haven’t done all the paperwork I was supposed to, etc… And this year, for the first time, I also suffered my first beesting! Seems a trivial thing to mention, but not having been stung in living memory, I was shocked by how much it hurt, as well as the after-effects. The insect in question got stuck under my watchband (it had been on my shirt, and got stuck when I brushed my hand down my shirt), and so I was stung on the inside of my left wrist, twice. And yes, it was a bee, rather than a wasp – I think it gor two stings in simply because it was stuck, and rather panicky itself… To top it all off, this happened in class, and so the last impression I gave my extremely good top set year 9 class was of me crying like a baby (that mother HURT!) and running off to the nurse. And coming back smelling like a chip shop, because the best way to treat it, apparently, is to put vinegar on the sting which takes out the venom. It works like a charm, but it still swelled up and STILL itches like crazy… SIGH. Still, I’ll be seeing them around again next year, and although I won’t be teaching any of them, hopefully I’ll be able to prove I’m not as crazy as I appeared to be this week…

Still, despite my reservations, roll on summer holidays!!

Church, Pictures

Church BBQ

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After the Family Service at church this morning we had the annual Church BBQ, and as seems to be becoming a bit of a habit this year, it rained! It wasn’t quite the monsoon conditions of earlier in the week, and I did manage to have some of my food sat outside before the heavens opened.

One thing that the BBQ does highlight is quite what a broad range of people are part of St James. Being after the family service there were a lot of young families there, but there were also people from the Matins and 8 o’clock congregations who came along. There were people from babes-in-arms right through to pensioners. Attached are four pictures, two pre-rain, and two of everybody crammed into the hall once it turned wet outside.

Church, Pictures

Cathy and Steve’s Birthday Party

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Last night we were both invited to a party thrown by Cathy and Steve, the other couple who run the Youth Group with us. The party was a joint 40th birthday celebration, as they’re another couple like Beth and myself whose birthdays fall pretty close together.

Beth wasn’t able to go, as she is currently somewhere in a field in West Berkshire with a group of kids from the school who are doing their Duke of Edinburgh Awards. I took along the digital camera, and below are a few of the pictures I took. I got a mix of nice shots and quite a few taken with the night mode on the digital camera. Basically the effect is similar to taking a multiple exposure on a traditional camera, in order to get a better night shot the camera takes multiple samples and merges the results. Of course the idea is that you take a static scene, but using the mode when people are dancing under disco lights produces some cool effects.

Church

Gospel of John

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Going through Amazon this morning I noticed that although there isn’t yet a UK version of the movie, Amazon are now listing The Gospel of John on their site. (Although it’s not coming from Amazon themselves.)

Gospel of John [3 Discs] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

As a number of people will know I’ve been interminably going on about how good this movie is, especially in relation to a certain other Jesus Movie, so I won’t go on about it again here, suffice to say that if you’ve got a suitable TV and DVD player it is well worth getting hold of a copy.

Cars, Focus Grumbling, MobLog

Space Saver Spare

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So there I was, driving to work, had headed along the A327, turned out onto the A30 and accelerated up to 70mph onto the dual carraigeway, then heading down the hill towards Hartley Wintney the steering on the car starts feeling a bit odd, somewhat like it does in a strong wind, then turning off the stereo the car sounds rather odd, so I slow down, and there is still a rather odd rumbling, and the handling seems wierd. I’ve always had worries about the running of the engine not being quite right, partly as a result of what happened to my old Fiesta, and being told by the mechanic that if he’d seen the car sooner it wouldn’t have been so bad, so I initially thought that the rumbling was the engine. However having pulled over into the layby in the centre of Hartley Wintney it was pretty obvious what the problem was, a flat tyre. For some reason between the top of the hill and the bottom the tyre had spontaneously deflated!

After fiddling around for a bit, I eventually decided that rather than get myself messed up and frustrated trying to change the wheel, and considering the amount of money I’ve paid to the AA over the years and not had to call them, I’d phone them and make use of the cover. The service was pretty impressive, at the height of the morning rush they had a van to me within 25 minutes. They even sent me a text message confirming the arrival time. The AA man of course had a much better jack than the weedy one that Ford includes, so the wheel was off and the spare on the car in no time, which was then that I remembered the slight problem – the spare wheel is one of those Space Saver Spare’s…

Space Saver Spare

My Focus has 15 inch wheels, a standard size, but the Focus has space for a 14 inch spare. The spare is also narrower, and inflated to a higher pressure. The AA man gave me the dire warning as to what would happen if I exceeded 50mph with the space saver spare on the car, and also wrote on the job sheet that he’d told me, I guess so that there is no chance of someone trying to get compensation if they break the wheel. Thankfully, as you can see the wheel is helpfully painted bright red so that when people get stuck behind you chugging along they know why you’re going so slow.

With regards to the flat tyre, there was no visible sign of a puncture, or anything in the tyre, the tread looked fine. The only noticable problem was that the outside bit where all the make, model and so on was written was decidedly worn.

Anyway, I was still about 50 minutes from work at normal speeds, so I decided to head straight for Micheldever Tyres to get the tyre replaced.

It took the best part of an hour to get there at a steady 40mph. Once there they took a look at the tyre, and decided it had to be replaced, which took about 20 minutes to do, and cost me £61. I eventually got to work about 2 hours late. Had the Focus been like my first car, or the Fiesta I could have made it to work and sorted the tyres out on my lunchbreak, as both of those had proper spare tyres. If the spare were full size, true I’d have less boot space, but then most of the time I don’t fill the boot anyway. Having the space saver spare just seems to generate more hassle. Having said that, on a Porsche there isn’t enough room for a full size tyre, so if you get a flat and have a passenger, the passenger ends up with the wheel on their lap for the journey!