Smoothies!

I might be addicted to the Internet, but D is addicted to fruit smoothies. In order to be practical and save on packaging, I got him a blender for his birthday. I took a relatively attractive photo of the prep for one of our smoothiefests, and since I haven't posted a photo in a while, I thought I'd throw it up there. Healthy-looking eh? We once made a citrusy one that tasted just like sweet tarts. Goodbye, scurvy!!

Rain, rain, go away

But don't bother coming again another day. Miserable weather here in Oxford. I wore gloves and a scarf cycling into work this morning and it didn't warm up too much... Had to wear them again to go to aerobics at 6pm. I wish I could curse on this blog, but my gramma is reading, so I'd better watch my mouth.

NOT TO MENTION the fact that it's been raining for nearly two weeks straight. We splurged and paid £60 to get to Brighton this past weekend, to visit our friends Jon and Natasha (I forgot to bring my camera, so no dramatic photos of us huddling in the rain by the sea). It poured the entire weekend, and the wind was fantastic... In a not-so-enjoyable way. In the way where it blows in your face, and you have trouble inhaling, so it feels like you're having an asthma attack. A lovely weekend by the shore... How invigorating.

One thing we did do this weekend was watch the Eurovision song contest, which was highly entertaining in a very very cheesy way. All the acts were predictably terrible, which I'm told is the norm. However, the highlight of the evening was the fact that Finland walked away with the prize!! Not only that, but they earned the most points ever out of any contest in the past. Very impressive showing from my dark cousins from the north. It was a Laplander group called Lordi, and they sang a pseudo-heavy metal song called "Hard Rock Hallellujia" while dressed as orcs from the _Lord_of_the_Rings_, pretty much. It was absolutely awful, but you can't help being proud of your kin.

But now it's back to work... Teaching again, only in the mornings now, as I'm going to try to rustle up some private business in the afternoons, as well as trying to help my school achieve British Council accreditation after an inspection in August. There's a lot of prep work to be done for it, an our academic manager has asked me to help with that a few hours a week. So that's a good thing. I like organising other people's messes. Again, if only I could do that for a living...

Off for the weekend

Well, it's been a tough week... But the Filipino group is leaving at last on Friday, and D and I are headed to Brighton for the weekend to visit some friends who we haven't seen in almost a year. They've got a lovely new flat in Hove, and we're hoping that the weather is sunny and warm. Not going to wear my rose-colored glasses and bring my bathing suit (I'm not COMPLETELY delusional), but maybe we can at least wear sandals?

The dog is staying here with our friend Jeremy, who watched him while we were in the States in March and April. It's really great that we've found someone who likes watching him and does it just for the ease of staying at a place in town for the duration. Not a bad deal for everyone involved.

So wish us luck and warm weather... I'll be offline all weekend, so if you need me, you can try my mobile number (hope you've got it?). Enjoy your weekend...!

Easy Street

An easy day today, especialy compared with all the hecticness at the beginning of this Filipino group's visit. I taught an hour and a half of poetry, on symbols and metaphor, winding up with the students drawing a tarot card and brainstorming about it, then writing a poem inspired by it.

After the break, we looked at "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which was really nice. Then a bit of jabbering about that, and a dash over to the Ashmolean museum... Which was closed, asit is every Monday, apparently. But no worries--the Eagle and Child is right up the street, so we popped in there for a quick absorption of the CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien "Inklings" atmosphere as well as a cup of coffee. The kids munched down on lunch, and I headed back to school.

The afternoon session was a brief bit on _Julius_Caesar_, which they saw over the weekend, and then writing a film review on _Intolerable_Cruelty_, which we'd watched as a class on Friday afternoon.

Then a couple of hours of looking for conferences for D (who needs a personal assistant for that sort of thing) and some work on the school's British Council accreditation--we're being inspected in August. A nice relaxed day.

Arrived home to the news that D's supervision went well, which was good to hear. This is his second reader, and his first reader is a little hesitant and defensive about D's topic, but apparently this guy is more open to his ideas.

HOWEVER, we're now half an hour late for our Spanish session, so I'd better skeedaddle.

Signing off once again from the handheld (which a friend who will go unnamed has pointed out doesn't have a spell checker--apparently, I wrote "realy" yesterday--oops--to be expected--sorry)...

Gramma says I have to write a journal entry

OK, so here's the deal. My name is K, and I'm an Internet addict. If I get online to write my journal entry, I'll be online for hours. With me, there's no such thing as going online really quickly and then signing off again. I'm sure that some of you out there know what I mean. I'm an information junkie, and I wander, and wander, and wander... And five hours later, after the sun's gone down, and the dog hasn't had his walk yet, I feel terrible. I feel like I've just watched half a day of TV, like a big couch potato.

I don't know why I'm like this... I think part of it is that I don't have any real friends here, like I did in the States. There's no Lissa to go to the dog park with, there's no Mona to go tromping around the desert with, there's no Carl to crack open a lovely Guinness with. There's just Dave, and he's busily pounding away on his thesis, and he has seminars in the evenings, and that leaves me at home a lot at night, surfing the Internet. Which can get pretty depressing.

And then it starts to take over my weekends. I'll find myself saving big jobs (updating my website, or answering a chunk of emails or something) for the weekends, and once I get online, it's difficult to get me off.

SO... The long and short of it is that I'm going to try and minimize my Internet use. I've got a PDA (handheld little organiser thingie), and I can type emails into it, and read emails off of it. I hope to sync up my emails at least once a day, maybe twice... I've got to make it part of my routine, which hasn't happened just yet. I'm going to try for syncing up at breakfast and then again when I get home from work. And I'm going to try to make time in the day to read and answer emails, maybe at a bookshop after work or something (or since the weather's nice these days, I can go to a park!).

So that's the reason I've been so behind on posting. That and the fact that I'm working two jobs... One at my regular school, where I'm teaching 3 to 5 hours a day for this large group from the Phillippines, and then a night job twice a week at Oxford Brookes University. That's a bigger group, and all adults, so it's a lot more enjoyable. I'm not a fan of teenagers in general.

Apart from that, it's mostly good news. The weather has been fantastic, warm and sunny, almost too good to be true. It was rainy and grey again this weekend, but I can hardly complain after the beautiful streak we had last week. The garden is coming along... Bean plants several inches high, rocket/arugula sprouting up everywhere, parsley going nuts, cucumbers going strong, even the muskmelon coming up, along with a few carrots, tomatoes, and peppers. I just found out the other day that they call cilantro "coriander" here, so now there's the possibility of fresh homemade salsa in my future once again!

Talked to gramma today and ma yesterday for Mother's Day. It was good to catch up. I heard that my uncle Ted and Aunt Karen are coming to Florida this summer, and then heading out into the wild blue yonder again (the Pacific Islands and Australia) for a few years, so if we don't catch them this summer in the States, we'll have to try to catch them on the other side of the globe. Not sure which I'd rather. :-)

I'm typing this on the handheld, by the way. I've got a nifty portable keyboard that folds up and fits into my bag. Very sleek.

OK, sorry again about the lack of posts... I'll try very hard to maintain the pace! Hope everyone is well...

Testing from PDA

Hi there. I'm sorry abgut the lag in posting. This message is being sent from my handheld, so if it works, we're in business again... I'll explain later!

..k