Ninety Years

This is the way our local town's urban knitters chose to celebrate remembrance this year - with a lovely "90" in poppies, to mark the 90th anniversary of the Royal British Legion and also the poppy appeal. It makes, I hope, a fitting blip for the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year.

Today has been one of those "drizzle and fog" sort of days - it didn't seem to get any less foggy as the day went on, and the persistent drizzle, blown by a very cold breeze, was covering my glasses even as I took this picture.

This morning we were out early (as usual) and I got to college with plenty of time for handout and overhead making, and was all ready and sorted by the time the tutor arrived - this was mainly because I stayed up until midnight last night getting it all ready - seemed like a crazy thing to do, but the preparation paid off because it made life easier this morning.

One of the other language teachers in the college was off sick today, so we had an influx of students into our class - so much so that we even ran out of chairs and one of my colleagues, who was observing, stood for much of the lesson. It did make things more fun and lively though, and I still managed to do everything I'd planned, even though I had to do things slightly differently because there were so many students!

After college I came home to find cats hurtling around downstairs (only Felix had gone out this morning - everyone else found the weather not to their liking and stayed in) and rodents peacefully sleeping upstairs. I now keep an eye on the temperature in my study - if it gets too cold then Laura will hibernate, which is not generally recommended - her breed originates from Syria, where it isn't particularly cold! The ratties are, of course, quite a bit bigger than her, and they have each other to snuggle up to! I've provided all of them with lots of bedding though!

After a moderately substantial lunch of leftover pizza, natural yogurt and rich tea biscuits, I set Octonauts to record and then came upstairs where I did an hour or so of viola practice - the impending performance in December is spurring me into action. Furthermore, now I have my viola tattooed on my arm, I really feel I SHOULD play it! So I did quite a lot of work on some Bach unaccompanied on the acoustic, then started to do the arranging work on a Satie Gnossienne on the electric. I now need to learn how to work all the tech so I can record the bass and guitar tracks and then practice playing with them. All very interesting.

Now it's almost time to meet the Wonderspouse, get a little shopping, and then have a Friday night at home. I feel a zillion times better than I did last Friday, that's for sure, and my tattoo is now almost completely healed so I'm getting more relaxed about baths and so on.

There is real potential for some relaxation this weekend.

The only things that will prevent it are a gig in Oxford that the Wonderspouse is organizing, a language analysis assignment for the CELTA course, which is due in on Monday, and my desire to make a serious start on my Welsh course because I have a tutorial next weekend!

I'm STILL not certain how I get so busy. I think it may be an occupational hazard of simply being INTERESTED in a lot of things: music, maths, languages, small pets, cats, and so on!