Word

Well, alrighty. I am now officially 33 (and a couple of days). All good and it gave us an excuse to try out the new restaurant on the corner which is actually quite something for this little part of town. They had customised the menu with my name which was actually pretty cool. Among other things, C got a me a book, Punk Rock Dad by Pennywise's lead singer, Jim Lindberg. Read into that what you will but the book is actually pretty good so far and I've been chuckling my way through it.

Today we had a clean out of the office area, rearranging and getting rid of the big desk which has outlived its use here. We ended up by taking down a wall as well, though to be honest the wall was pretty makeshift and came down without much impact on the surrounding area. Whoever built it did a really crap job and for that
we are thankful. The lounge now looks huge and gets a lot more sun. It is also nice to be able to work on the computer and still be able to talk to people. I can also admit it was good fun destroying something for a change.

With the weather getting nicer we have been able to get out into the garden and clean things up a bit. We need to get in a little more dirt this year as the composts haven't quite produced enough for the vege gardens, partly because in the recent move all the raised beds lost a bit of dirt. Once that's in we'll be getting into planting. We have a good plan for producing a decent amount of potatoes this year as we didn't quite last through winter. We're getting there.

Two weeks left in the term and quite frankly I need a break. My brain has given up on creativity for now and seems to be sheltering in the back of my head somewhere being a bit of a wuss.

Holidays are gone and back into school. I feel completely fucked. Man, this job is hard work. If you're not being hammered by students, it's colleagues. If it's not colleages it's marking, planning, thinking and trying to remember all the shit that is expected of a teacher. If it's not that...well, shit....you're asleep. I love this job....but shit it's hard work. It's hard to switch off to the students' lives sometimes. Most are great people but have some shit World's to live in and it's hard to hear some if it, work with it and not burst into tears. If I have a whisky after work you can damn well bet I've heard at least one thing that has rocked my world...beatings, drugs, alcohol, frustration, pain, anger, violence, aggression. I hate watching kids deal with this stuff and am only able to help in small ways. I'm not their friend but I always feel like I have to be stable at school. Sounds pretty twee and all Florence Nightingale but if you worked with some of these kids you'd feel it too.

It's been a tough few weeks and I have fallen back on punk music. I was thinking about my second year at university this week. It was a truly unpleasant time of my life and things were pretty bleak. I still remember the day that I popped a tape that my brother had left into a car stereo and heard... "aaaaah fuck, fuck , fuck, fuck" followed by Session. I worked my way from there. Punk music still seems to make things work for me. New Zealand is a great place to live but it's a frustrated and insecure place which tends to wind up the locals. I hope we figure it out sometime soon.

I have started doing cross stitch again. Inspired by the Transformers movie I have started sorting out an image of the original Bumblebee for a cross stitch. It'll be about 200mm x 200mm and 8 colours. It's the pose off the original box and makes him look tough but still ... Bumblebee. Hopefully it takes ages and looks as good as I think it will. Beats thinking.

One more week of this term left and then two weeks holiday. The last few weeks have gone by very quickly which is a little disturbing but it's all good. We've moved back into the bedroom now. It's a lot more comfortable and looking good.

I'm enjoying school at the moment. I get to give students a hard time and pass on my thoughts and opinions to what is effectively a captive audience. Sucks to be a student in my class I tells ya. Hell, being a co-worker probably isn't all that good. I think it's time to tone back on the extra bits I do at school and get back into the teaching side more heavily. I am keen to start tidying up some of the projects just completed for next year. It's an ongoing thing I guess.

I see the cost of a season pass on our ski fields has gone up somewhat amazingly since I last went up. Luckily for me I stopped being able to afford skiing in NZ quite a few years ago. It's cheaper and more fun to go to Norway. Better skiing as well. Actually as a country we'd better be a little careful about our pricing. We are starting to alienate the locals in favour of tourists which seems like a slippery slope to me. Piss of the locals at your peril. We might just decide to mess with your kids or loosen that nut on the ski lift. Lovely stuff.

Winter in NZ...but it seems much the same in the UK. Global warming is a bitch eh? At least it's just cold here at the moment. We haven't had a tornado or tsunami or anything....yet.

I have the doors back on the closets in our bedroom. All the wood has now been stripped back to the rimu and varnished. The window looks excellent and the doors have come up really well. The skirting really sucked to do but it looks pretty good as well. It all has a restored look, not new but not shoddy either. I like it. We are now on to cleaning the walls, getting up wallpaper and painting. Then I'm having a little drink and a lie down for a few months. It looks good though.

I am beginning to think some of the folks at work aren't coping particularly well. There seems to be a lot of snappy behaviour in the oldies which is starting to get tiring. Certainly won't be asking any of them for help on anything, they seem to have enough troubles already.

My scooter's batteries seem to be on their last legs. I did some quick acceleration this morning and it felt like one of the batteries dropped dead. Luckily I was almost at school and with the help of friendly grounds staff I plugged in and had enough juice to get home. It did the same thing when I was almost home so I'm thinking I need to get under the hood and see what's going on ... I'll look at least.

Ubuntu Feisty rocks.

Here endeth the holidays. Back to school on Monday, for two days and then we have another holiday. Life is tough.

We have had success with the window and it is now stripped and in the process of being varnished. It looks good and the hard work of stripping every little bit of crappy white paint has been worth it. We managed to do it on a pretty good budget as well which is great as we have a few more to do. The next steps are: varnishing the other wooden bits, getting the cupboard doors back in and then getting on to wallpaper and paint. Actually a lot of fun and nice knowing it's all going into our own place.

I managed to upgrade Ubuntu to version 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) last night. Actually it happened this morning but took most of the night to download. I guess the servers
were fairly packed for a while there. Compared to the last upgrade this was phenomenal. Even a dufus like me can click an upgrade button and then sit back. It is really impressive how simple it has become and considering all my past Windows upgrades have required a complete rebuild it was simply wonderful to not have to set everything back up once it was ready to go. The desktop didn't even really blink actually though looks a little slicker in places. New tools and lots of cleaning
up and my web cam works again. I knew if I waited someone clever would fix the problem. There's something just right about open source.

Tomorrow I put the finishing touches on my new trousers and get another coat of varnish on the window. I think I'm ready for another term of school.

This week was a bit short with two days at workshops and conferences and an onset of sickness today. It was nice to get a break from the classroom but workshops usually ramp me up with things to try out so I usually do too much at once and get burned out. I might actually learn that lesson one day.

Over the last two days I have had the displeasure of driving a car more often than I have in the last six months. Things have changed a bit and too be honest with the speeding, swerving and general dangerous and angry driving I can't understand why we are so surprised that people are getting seriously hurt. It's kind of a no brainer I would've thought. I'd love to know why we feel the need to drive so dangerously because it's happening on all fronts and with all kinds of people. I frustrated someone yesterday by driving 50km/h in a 50km/h zone (which is most of
the city actually). I could see them getting all wound up behind me before they roared passed at what I'd estimate was 70. What was odd is that a stream of traffic then went passed at the same speed. I felt the odd one out for driving at the speed limit. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, we have decided it is okay to be dangerous and as such we should accept that a certain number of people (and, yes that includes kids) will be killed. "My right to speed means you give up your right to live" seems perfectly okay these days. I guess the turning point will be when we start to decide that there is now intent and it becomes murder instead of manslaughter...and yes, to all those lovely, "law abiding" white middle class folks you are a major part of
the problem. At least I can see (and hear) the boys coming. They tend to have a loud muffler and even louder sound system blaring out Britney Spears (way cool by the way boys...not at all weak or insecure). Those angry white suburbanites fire off repressed violence in their car without warning and are much harder to dodge. Freaks.

That said, I now have a weekend to enjoy and an electric scooter and bike to use with no need to drive anywhere for a while yet. I've even managed to top up my metro card so will give the bus another go now that we're on a decent route.

We have lots of peaches starting to ripen up. 'tis a marvelous thing.

The last few days have seen the disappearance of intelligent people in my life and the arrival of the obtuse. Either people are getting tired or a hardcore hit of stupid just hit the water supplies. Maybe the stress of a new year has finally got to people. May the smarts return soon.

I have a higher load of teaching this year which is starting to leave its mark on me. It's all good fun but I can see why good teachers stop and bad teachers
get crabby. It's one of those systems that just barely works. I find myself fighting the same sorts of battles I did as a web designer as people try to astound me with their technical prowess through their newfound ability to email. Email you say....wow. Try introducing that to the concept of an intranet...or in fact any sort of decentralised content management. I can see why teachers go mad and kill all their students and colleagues...they do don't they?...it's not just me right?

If you still drive a car to work every day you have your head wedged firmly up your ass. It has become the equivalent of blowing smoke into a baby's face.

I'm sure something great happened today...