Given that Hugh last time mucked up the timezones for the last online chat, I thought I'd get on a bit earlier for this one....but at the moment, nobody else has turned up Might as well write an update......



Teaching rounds are now all finished up and I had an absolute blast. My unit on "time" went really well, I made a very basic computer game on powerpoint for the kiddies to use which they (and all the other teachers across the junior grades) thought was wondeful. I also lugged in my keyboard for a few days and kept the kids entertained with a few songs; "Toffee Apple" by Peter Coombe being their favourite. Fingers crossed that they will be advertising later for a full-time teaching position next year....

Last week was a bit of a blur with so much going on. Mossy is heading off to Germany with Uni and had another trivia night to raise some funds, so headed along to help out but mainly to catch up with him before he heads off. So, drove from after-school care in Parkdale over to his place, caught the train (yes - me on public transport again...) and met him there. Another good night and learnt a number of new things like "dreamt" is the only word in the English language that ends with "-amt". As I was working the next day at the Royal Melbourne Show, I thought rather that drive home and come back into the city tomorrow, I'd crash at Simon's place for the night and drive directly from his place to the showgrounds. That was all well and good until I realised that I had left my Melways (street directorymap) at home. So here I am driving around suburbs that I have no idea of trying to work out where I should be going...to cut a long story short, I ended up there an hour late...

So, arriving a little frazzled, I spent the next 6hrs at the Working With Wood acivity that the Education Faculty at Uni has run since 1976. To quote from the fact sheet, the idea behind the activity is to allow "chidren to explore their natural desire to contrust something." So I spent the day with little kids building things out of wood ranging from cars to houses to dinosaurs to theme parks to car washes (As an aside, last year, one kid built the World Trade Centre and an aeroplane to go with it). Given that the weather wasn't all the great and school holidays hadn't started yet, numbers were down from the other years that I had helped out.

From the showgrounds I then raced back home (not without getting lost again of course!) to Frankston to head off to Adam's farewell party at a winery in Mount Eliza. Adam's heading off to New York for a few months as a UN Youth Rep. for Australia. The function at the winery went till 7pm but as a few people didn't rock up till late (me included) we heading on to a cafe in Mornington to continue the party. We spent hours engaged in deep conversation that it was hard to believe it was well after midnight when we left.

...and now only 3 more weeks until I finish Uni forever...that of course doesn't include mid-semester break which will be spent at Uni building props and organising rehearsals for the musical which is only 2 weeks away. These rehearsals mid semester break will make or break the performance, so fingers crossed all goes well....


Till the next exciting installment....