Shout out

This is a big birthday shout out to Chloe to make up for general crapness in sending birthday cards, etc!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Cake!

It's official. I'm a domestic goddess.

Finding myself at something of a loose end this weekend, I decided to entertain myself with a bit of domestic magic. I make cake. It's very yummy. Then I made Roast Beef with all the trimmings. It was also very yummy! Although neither helped my waistline in any way...c'est la vie.

Woohoo!

Happy days are here again...

I got a phone call today from a very nice chappy from Sky who'll be coming to install my Sky dish & box - instead of waiting until the 19th of December, would I like it installed on the 2nd? Yes. Yes I would!

So...hurrah...I'm getting Sky over two weeks earlier than expected, and as a result will only have to put up with one more episode's worth of goading from the obnoxious PE teacher who has Sky+ but not a VCR and so can't record Lost for me, but who takes great pleasure in mocking me. Bastard.

I'm an idiot

Today it was confirmed, if there was every any doubt, that I am, in fact, a total and utter idiot. I've spent a large portion of the past week driving myself absolutely demented trying to find two DVDs I bought a while ago. I need them for my S3 class that I'm doing Dracula with - the DVDs are the 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula, and a box set of Van Helsing, Bram Stoker's Dracula (the Gary Oldman one with Keanu Reeve's incredible-colour-changing-hair), and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.

Now, I knew that the DVDs had arrived from Amazon. I knew I'd last seen them sitting on the arm chair in the living room. I knew I'd put them somewhere 'safe' when doing a rapid tidy-up prior to my departure south for the October break. (My landlady was going to be round painting the ceiling in the spare room so I figured I should leave the place tidy.) And then the trail went cold. The DVDs were no longer on the arm chair. They weren't in the large Sainsbury's bag in which my to-do ironing gets shoved (when it's not living on afore-mentioned arm chair). They weren't in the DVD rack - obviously. Nor were they to be found in any of the other six million places I've looked over the past seven days.

So where were they, I hear you ask. They were in the living room, as I'd always suspected. Turns out, in my wisdom, that although I'd opened the Amazon package to see what was inside, I'd never actually removed the DVDs from it. So in the October tidying frenzy, I'd shoved the entire thing away behind the clothes horse, between the bookcase and the wall. And there they've been until 6.45ish this evening when I spotted said Amazon package (having looked at it a million times before and assumed it was empty...) and thought "maybe...just maybe..."

Needless to say, a happy-dance-of-joy around the living room ensued, rapidly followed by the realisation that I'm an Idiot. No other words for it.

My name's Nyssa Anderson, and I'm an idiot.

Saturday night in Lerwick

Tonight I witnessed the true levels of excitement that Shetland has to offer.

I had decided on a sensible, quiet, peaceful weekend in this weekend, largely because I haven't been able to catch up on the tiredness that comes from thinking that getting the boat up one night and going straight in to school the next day really is a good idea. I'd even designated today to be a 'pyjama day'. That cunning plan was somewhat scuppered by the realisation that I had very little food in the house, and none that I could combine into something I actually wanted to eat. And it's a bit nippy up here to pop to the supermarket in your jammies. So I had to get to dressed. Nevermind. There's always tomorrow.

Anyway, so I'm in my living room, in a semi-coma of TV overdose brought on by Strictly Come Dancing (come on Smillie - it's national pride at stake now!), bits of X Factor (am I only one who just doesn't care who wins this series?), NCIS (Michael Weatherly is just lush - don't you agree?) and assorted bits of other channel hopping. Half-way through Special Victims Unit, possibly the most anti-climactic piece of potential excitement occurred. What began as a bad joke (how many attempts does it take ot land a helicopter?) turned into potential excitement as it became clear that said copter was, in fact, engaged in a search of the loch. Six times the copter slowly flew the length of the loch, circling Lerwick to come back and look again. Helicopters, as I'm sure you're aware, are a bit on the noisy side, so pretty much everyone who lives around the loch, and a fairly large number of passers by, had come out to watch the drama unfold - in very cold weather I might add. And then the helicopter just went away.

I have no idea whatever it was they were looking for, but they didn't seem to find it. I'm assuming it was a training exercise, but quite why they had to disturb/wake up half of Lerwick at 11.30 on a Saturday night, I'm not sure...

Surely they lie?

It is an incredibly sorry state of affairs when your third year boys class informs you of the sexual preferences of your current 'embarrassing, but I'm going with it' celebrity crush. Apparently John Barrowman (aka the rather lush Captain Jack) is, in one boy's words, "so bent he could suck his own knob". Delightful.

Anyone who may have information to the contrary, please let me know! To be fair....the clues were there, but I'm just not ready to resign him to batting for the other team just yet... And third year boys do lie...often...(see previous post for 'I lost the ability to sit')

Teachers laugh more often than any other profession...

And I believe it. To be honest, I really think it's because often you're in a laugh-or-cry situation. For example, when someone pipes up from the back of the class "So what page are we on?" when you've just finished saying "page 43" for the 23rd time in 2 minutes. Or when the reason given for non-attempted (never mind completed) homework is that "I lost the ability to sit. Honestly, it's tragic - I spent the entire night staring at the chair trying desperately to remember what to do..." At least it's more original that 'the dog ate it'!

Today was one of those giggle-inducing days.

Having spent almost the entire day finally marking the huge pile of essays that I've been studiously ignoring, I came upon an absolute corker. The only problem is that I can't decide if it's an accidentally hilarious example of why you shouldn't automaticaly click 'change' on the spellcheck, or if this pupil is actually a cheeky little shite staging a clever form of passive protest against my choice of class text. Maybe you can decide. The opening sentence of this young man's essay read...

"I have reticently been reading..."

That's right, "reticently". So, was he aiming for 'recently' but did something funny that sparked spell-check, or is he a bit clever, a bit funny, and a bit on his way to detention?

Who knows? You decide.

On a completely unrelated note, today I finally cracked and ordered Sky Digital. The Variety and Music mixes, if you're interested. It was a combination of factors that did it. There was the flyer offering 'half price subscription for three months' lying on the floor when I got home. There was the trailer for Lost series 3 that was on tv, mocking me with channel 4's shiteness. There was the obnoxious PE teacher at school who's been mocking my lack of sky (and hence lack of Lost) since the announcement of channel 4's shiteness. And then there was the prospect of the Shetland winter stretching before me...

So I cracked. I did have a mini-tantrum when I discovered that I couldn't order it online because I don't live on the UK mainland, but that was averted when the nice chappy on the end of the phone said that I could still have the £10 'book on-line' credit. And then I discovered that no-one will be around to install it until the 19th of December! Bastards!

PS: The 'I forgot how to sit down' excuse - I genuinely heard that on Tuesday. You have to admire the dedication to avoiding homework.

Visions of the Future...

11 weeks and 5 days. That's how long I lasted on this accursed island before turning.

Tuesday 7th Novenber, period 6, S3 English. I'm giving out books to be read (we're doing a play based on Dracula so I'm getting the kids to read a vampire novel of some ort for their personal reading this term). Anyway, I'm giving out books, deciding who gets what one, and I try to convince one boy to take Cirque du Freak because it's a short, easy read, and he's not a big reader.

So how do I describe this book to said chap? I tell him...oh the horror...I tell him...

"Don't worry, it's only a peerie wee book" (*gulp*)

"Peerie". Now, not only was it somewhat redundant as 'peerie' is the Shetlan' version of 'wee', it was my first unconscious use of dialect. Needless to say the boys (oh yeah, this was my all-boy S3 class) found this all very amusing. I see it as a worrying sign of assimilation.

Still, at least I'm getting off the island to do my Christmas shopping in Edinburgh this weekend... The Shetland influence is obviously much more pernicious than first suspected!

Little Buggers

There are those moments as a teacher when you genuinely wonder what the point is. These were fairly common as a student when I would frequently find myself wondering if it really was all worth it, and was office work really all that bad? I did, eventually, come to the decision that yes, it was worth it, and yes, office work most definitely was that bad. It had seemed that those 'what am I doing?' moments were at least mostly behind me now that I'm a fully fledged (well...mostly fledged) teacher. Turns out that it just means that the little buggers have longer to get under your skin - it's more of a long term project to try and break you down, as opposed to on placement when there's a definite end in sight.

Yes, the honeymoon is most definitely over as I found myself today in with the mentalist third years wondering what on earth the point was - when someone so clearly doesn't want to be in your class as P, there's only so much you can do to try and get them involved. And today that was barely even approaching crowd-control, never mind anything approaching education. Of ocurse, this has an effect on everyone n the classroom as even those few who actually want to learn and do well are skuppered by all the time and energy going in to keeping a lid on it. And today that lid pretty much boiled over. Tomorrow is another day, but it was undoubtedly compounded by the fact that I didn't get much sleep last night - tired and cranky does not a good teaher make. And so I'm now on the sofa in my tracksuit bottoms planning a bath and an early night.

Oh, and it turns out that it is INCREDIBLY cathartic to come home from a shitty day, put on comfy clothes, go out into your garden and spell out "***** [insert name of shitty pupil here] smells" with a sparkler!

Shetland's premier nightclub establishment

Last night I had an interesting experience revolving around Shetland's premier nightclub establishment (like there's so much competition up here...), the oh-so aptly named "Posers". This was only the third time I'd been to Posers, but what made this particularly special was that I was stome cold sober! Honestly. I know...it's unusual...but my back's been playing me up so I'd been taking painkillers all day and I didn't really think that mixing vodka and high-dosage ibuprofen is a recipe for success. And so I found myself in Posers, in the always-comic scenario of being the only sober person in the group.

Being sober in Posers also meant that I realised exactly what a shit-hole it really is! I always knew it was a shit-hole, just not how much of a shit-hole. On the plus side, I'm guessing they've had the cleaners in recently because it was definietly smelling better than usual. (Am I the only one who's noticed that since the smoking ban the assorted icky smells of stale drink and sweat have become a lot more noticable in many bars and clubs?)

Even more exciting...it turns out that there are actually good looking men in Shetland! Granted, I didn't get any numbers or anything, but the evening was definietly enlivened by the aesthetically pleasing nature of some of the Posers patrons. Things might just be looking up...