Weber 'lucky to be in one piece'

Was watching the European Grand Prix in bed last night on iplayer.  Very tired and fairly late and wondering how long I would stay awake.  Then this happened which I thought at the time surely had to be in the top 5 worst looking crashes I have seen in races - in light of day am now thinking maybe top 10.  BBC F1 article Weber 'lucky to be in one piece'.  So glad Weber so quickly moved in the car.  Such an awful flip.  That sure woke up for a bit then I fell asleep later, for 10 or so laps, then watched the remainder this morning. 

Photos of the Year - week 20

Monday 21st June

Started the week fairly ill :-(  west wing was good company for me.

Tuesday 22d June

 Final evening writing/checking reports with Wimbledon for company.

Wednesday 23rd June

 Watching the final England Group match in Mr K's classroom - complete with football cheese snacks and hat! We lost in the Round of 16 :-(

Thursday 24th May

 On my happinness day, cycling along the canal, wondering on my likelihood of cycling into the canal as I check my phone to read a text!

Friday 25th June

 Tea at the Trout with Chickbeans.

Saturday 26th June

 My first official drive across Central London on the way back from a lovely BBQ Birthday party in Beckenham.  7 hours of the day spent driving - very hot and no air con.  Fortunately I had friends to keep me sane!

Sunday 27th June

 Surprise birthday picnic (not for me!) in the Botanical Gardens.  Lovely indeed!

Blog Design

A few weeks ago blogger started showing that it had a new template design option.  I had been avoiding looking at it for a while but finally ventured there and have spent some time looking at various ones. Here are some screen shots I took of my blog in some potential designs.

I really liked this one - the sky and clouds most especially.  The thing that put me off was the way the trees stay put on the screen when you scroll down - minor quibble but... 

Quite funky water and bubbleness but just a little on the dark side for me.

Quite nice.  Quite like my old one before I started messing around.

Not actually the one I'd one, but quite fun having a library.  And these books moved down (or up) as you scrolled,

Quite nice, but I would want to change the screen background of the text to blue, which might be possible.

One of the final ones I came to try and the winner for now!

None of these blog designs seem to be stretch ones which forces me back to the fixed width thing.  Which is kinda what I was wanting to do with the thought that other people might look at the blog and it would not make sense to them if they didn't stretch their screens the same as me.  But I was reluctant to, because it was right for my screen (my primary audience!) and now all my previous posts are going to look oddly formatted!  Oh well!

Do you have any favourites on the designs?  Let me know which one you like.

The next thing I'd like to fathom is pages.  Ideally I'd like to have links to pages at the top of my blog linking to things I blog about more often, like Musicals, F1, Photos of the Year etc.

Insufferable Happiness

For some reason (and I honestly can't say why) I have been in a really good mood today!

I woke up in the night from a very realistic dream.  And it left me feeling very strange.  The situation was rather nice, but the specifics were somewhat unpleasant leaving me very confused!  I then woke in the morning 15 minutes before my alarm.  I checked my phone and had emails from school friends that I was really excited about so I switched on the computer and replied to them lying in bed.  It was sunny out the window and despite thinking I should be feeling groggy, I didn't really.  My alarm went off and after a bit I got up and carried on my happy mood.  Even tied my hair up and put earrings in - must have been thinking positive!

Driving by the station, I realised I was in a happy mood and I was really smiley looking at the pedestrians and cyclists walking past; I was just interested and feeling generous towards them and they were making me happy.

I also had made my best of Glee so far CD which I was looking forward to listening to.  Picked up colleague and eventually realised our moods were somewhat opposite!  It didn't bring me down though, I put Glee on and bopped my way along to school.  School was ok, I had some NQT time in the morning.  I think I was still quite often rather short fused and tired with the children, but by the end of the day, and an awesome Scottish Country Dancing club where they impressed me no end with their memory of the dances, I was flying high in the sky again.

Home, I realised I should go for a cycle and went up the canal to drop off our tenancy agreement and some round about routes cross country back home - was out over an hour in the end so I impressed myself!

Little maths homework planning and here I am.  Also, probably a good mood as I'm teaching nada tomorrow!  Gotta enjoy this NQTness while it lasts!

Wonder if I'll be this happy again???

Defoe Defies Defeat

This song (Vuvuzela Song) is the highlight for me of the World Cup so far (apart from the banners of course!).  I totally was laughing out loud first time I heard it and have listened to it so many times since - sometimes even on repeat!

(I originally found the song with lyrics (having been the song by a friend) on this website, but the embed code there didn't seem to work, so I found it on youtube instead)

So... we made it through the group - woop!  I got confirmation from SLT at lunchtime that the staff meeting was on after school - doom!  There was some earlier excitement in the day when we discovered the classes we would be having the following year - I'm Year 2 again phewff!

So, i headed to the staff meeting, somewhat late having been talking to a parent.  Our staff meetings rotate around each classroom, which I really like, otherwise I don't think I would have been in many classrooms!  So the teacher's classroom we were in yesterday, one of my friends, had got a live text loading up on the IWB behind the head.  That's a tense way to watch a match!  When I got there, it was already 1-0 to England!!!!  Go Defoe.  Have just changed the post title from the rather boring: World Cup 2010 end of Group Stage! - to this great newspaper headline from today.  I wonder if there are always so many fouls committed by England or if that is just the sort of thing that gets written in minute by minute reports...  certainly stressful each time one came up and it said free kick conceded and wondering where on the pitch the free kick was!

Meeting finished about half term.  I went to get my home things and finished watching the match live on iplayer in his classroom - complete with the cheesy football snacks and flashing hat - thoughtfully sweated in by a boy in my class who I'd let wear it at lunchtime!  Tense stuff but good result!  And amazing peculiar heading dive from Terry.

Match over, we went for an epic report reading session, checking for errors before handing them in.  Think we left about 7.30 in the end.  I had fairly lost it by that point and was in a serious giggle fest state.  Seemingly every other comment on the reports was sending me into hysterics.  For one of the only times in my life, I was really fancying a drink - an alcoholic one!  So back home we went to the pub for food and watched the Germany v Ghana match. 

Walking back from the pub it seemed a good idea to try copy the jogger in front of us and try climb onto the bridge!!

So we play Germany on Sunday...  Not sure what that'll be like, but for this day at least it was Good Times all round for me :-)

Photos of the year - week 19

Monday 14th June

 The bent flag!  Having had it trapped in the car the wrong way round over the weekend, it was at a bit of a sad angle for the journey to school!

Tuesday 15th June

 Trying to feed the ducks with my gone off bread but only this seagull-esque thing swooped over the water.

Wednesday 16th June

 A cycle along the canal.  First spot of the male ducks plucking their feathers to start looking like female ducks. Wow - turns out they're also flightless during the moult!

Thursday 17th June

 Wasn't this a nice sight at the end of my road on the way to the station.

Friday 18th June

My turn to wear the hat for the second England match.  Very excited beforehand.  But actually took it off part way through to ascertain if it was the reason for the poor performance.  The performance did not improve... hat lives.

Saturday 19th June

Piñata at the party.  Great eve at friend's Midsummer Night's Party.

Sunday 20th June

Lovely sunny day for Scottish Dancing punting.  After my latest night the night before, I was delighted to be relaxing along without a thing to do.  We wedged ourselves into this inlet and picnicked on the field.

Grease - the School Musical

I'm realising I'm kinda in love with a show I've found on Sky 3 - didn't even know we had Sky3???

I saw a bit of it sometime last week where it appeared a secondary school was performing Hairspray in a West End theatre. And then I happened across it again this week and was surprised and have seen a few odd bits where they have been auditioning for a Grease version. I haven't seen a whole episode yet, so I don't really get the whole thing, but it seems to be so me!! And Duncan James is hosting it so that's a nice sight!

Well that's it really!  Was just feeling bursting with affection and computer was next to me!

Musical - Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Just back from a super night, last minute ticket buy (though not my record, this one was with half an hour to go!) to see Joseph and I'm on such a high!

I wrote some notes at half time (hehe, must have world cup on the brain) thinking about the blog, but it was just quite minor little quibbles and so all you'll get from that is this photo.

The important thing to be said is wow - what a finale!!!!!!!  One of the things I do remember from my 8th Birthday trip is that it had a good finale.  But just why it was good, all that I can really think about now is that it was colourful and maybe Philip Schofield took his wig off... and maybe he went on a raised platform, but that could just be from the Lee Mead one a few years ago!  Whatever it was like, the impression was a goodun and it was up there with Saturday Night Fever (when I remember everyone up off their seats clapping and boogeying away).

Anyway - tonight they totally outdid themselves!  There was a very slow rendition of Any Dream Will Do, then they went into a really quick version which was great.  But then there must have been about 4 encore numbers - what a megamix!!  For the last one (or was it two) I even found myself doing my own personal circle standing ovation!  They were showing energy, there was colour, movement, funkiness - just loved it!!!!  I found myself mouthing 'strange as it seems...' with all my might!  I was dead gutted not to have been in the stalls when the brothers ran down the aisles there!  Those 10, 15? minutes totally made the evening for me.

Go Go Go Joseph!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NQT - the smiley and drunk way

Well, what a bizarre day at the NQT conference! Well, actually only a bizarre afternoon. The morning was pretty good. Sue Cowley led it and there were some fairly standard yet good tips about teaching. And we also got to play with plasticine. Can't take the credit for the one on the left, but the simple snail is mine, on top of the free highlighters we acquired. Oh and there was a crime scene.

But the afternoon... was it meant to be a joke, was he drunk??? Was there a punch line. Who knows what it was really on about. The only potentially positive things I really took from it were: www.commoncraft.com and wordle.net

The best bit of the afternoon was definitely our tables representation of making a sponge cake as an audio clip. Pure entertainment and genius. My iphone came into it's own - how brave of me to suggest it!

Well that's been 24 hours of investigating how to get an audio file onto a blog!  So I have finally gone with drop.io having seen it on another blog I follow.   Here's some information I read about drop.io.  It wasn't mentioned in the blogger information on how to post audio files, so I was a little hesitant, but I searched for reviews and nothing bad came up initially.  Hope I shouldn't have looked further.  Am still wondering how to actually embed it in my post, rather than just being a link.  Will carry on investigating.

Has this worked? 

   

  Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io 

 

Well, would you believe that??????????????????  It did work! So that was courtesy of this friendly video on the drop.io website, where I discovered it's pronounced 'eo' kinda radio rather than 'I oh' that I was going for.  I had to 'embed' which took me a little while to find and then I had to copy and paste a whole load of stuff - is that called html stuff?  Anyway, feeling dead chuffed now!

6/11/10 drop.io on it's way out :-(  hopefully this will last a little longer.
17 06 2010 14 58 1


Feeling a little guilty for being so harsh on the guy of the afternoon.  He was generous enough to give us each an electronic copy of his book and his software.  He also had hard copies of his book for sale for £10 with half proceeds going to Haiti.  Hike up my guilt feeling at having no intention of buying it.  I hate feeling bad for people when I think they've tried and have been generous and are passionate about something.  I remember Mrs Yates who ran middle school arts club on a Friday lunchtime.  Just the thought of it would bring me to tears.

World Cup 2010

I do love big sporting events.  Apart from Formula 1 I can take or leave regular season long following, but when Wimbledon or the Olympics comes round - I love being in that all consuming zone!

I think Euro 2000 was the first time I used a wall chart and filled it in - love that :-)  Am sad that I wasn't aware enough of Euro 96 in England.  And I definitely don't remember Italia 90 as some my age claim.  Owen's wonder goal and Beckham's sending off at France '98 are probably my clearest first memories.  You can read some of my 2002 recollections on the Les Mis post?!  Also that year for the quarter final against Brazil it was my AS year.  School opened early (Japan/South Korea) on that Friday morning and set up TVs for different parts of the school to watch in. It was awesome, though smaller crowd than was expecting initially, until of course Ronaldihno!  That year it was close/on top of the Queen's jubilee so the whole country was going pretty flag crazy.  I was really happy Mum was happy/keen to go along with it and we had to keep changing from Union Jack to St George's on the car!  By Germany 2006 I had got my large St George's flag and was very happy to be draped in it after my last second year exam and watch England's first match in the JCR coated in it!  Getting it out for this year I discovered the champagne (or cava) stains on it!  And of course the heart ache sticks in the mind.  I felt flat and physically kinda ill after going out on penalties in... how mighty strange, I can't work out if it was 2004 or 2006?  Have just looked it up on Wikipedia and it appears we went out in the quarter finals on penalties to portugal in both of them... so maybe not quite so strange I can't remember!  Anway, we watched in our friends' garage round the corner.  It was mighty strange lying down to bed after and feeling empty.  I can still hear the tube trains going past while my windows were open and | was listening to 606.

And so... onto this year!  car flag was bought at Easter.  Lizzie and I somewhat embarrassedly but also kinda excitedly bought a two pack at Halfords and split it.  After a lot of deliberation about when to put it on the car, I somewhat failed and shut it in the car door all weekend and after Lizzie explained (through laughter) my mistake, I turned it round but was so afraid it was going to snap off going down the A34 that I took it off when I got to school!!!

Watched the first match at a friends on Friday night.  Good times and we made our World Cup predictions.  I decided I didn't want to miss out on the family fun for England's first match the next day so home I popped.  I was highly surprised a family watching hadn't been planned but we managed to persuade the grandparents to come round and they showed up on fine form.  Here we are all decked out in our supporting finery:

Flashing (no less) England flag hat.  Grandma with homemade flag.  Grandpa (unsurprisingly not dressed England-wise) but holding the nibbles they'd brought, complete with England colour napkins!

Sister even had real white football socks on!  My 12 year old innocent face, kinda confused by the banner!

Match time!  And within 5 minutes, Gerard had scored!!!  I tend to think, though try to ignore, the worry that thinks I have anticipated greatly, will actually be a big anticlimax, and couldn't believe we actually scored this early!!!

aside, i have been doing a load of blog posts this evening: Photos of the Year Week 18, Rocky-horror-show-with-attitude and a little update to quick-bite, and it's just gone 6pm now and I realise I have totally missed Neighbours as I have been sitting in the garden - totally shocked with myself, but admittedly kinda proud of the blogging!

On our feet at the goal!

Grandma has excelled herself and brought along Beat the Referee cards for people to hold up, handmade of course! We decided to deal them out for ease of access and had great fun remembering to hold them up at the appropriate time.  They genuinely did add something to the viewing experience!

Mum got 'NO MORE PRANKS - YANKS' - she must have been holding that up after their equaliser - ultimate humiliation - poor Rob Green!  Her hands did get a little tired holding up COME ON ENGLAND most of the time!

Sadly Grampy spent more time with his OH HEAVENS! (so appropriate for his pessimist streak!) up than I did with YOU'RE A STAR!

I love my family.  This may seem a mighty strange way to spend an evening, but for me, I just loved it.  And am so grateful for all involved for appearing to love it too.  Love that sense of coming together for shared enjoyment.  I've talked a lot about my loner tendencies, but I can't help enjoy the shared enjoyment lots!  Thank you and LOVE YOU!  and am not even thinking about the disappointment of the draw now :-)

have just texted grandparents to tell them I appreciate it.

The pressing question at the moment is... what will happen for next week's England match at 3pm on Wednesday.  Staff meeting night!  ??????

Photos of the year - week 18

Monday 7th June

20th donation.  That probably needs it's own post.  I was saddened when I couldn't take photos of the process and it did bring tears to my eyes.  But I was still proud to be doing it even if I didn't feel totally appreciated :-)

Tuesday 8th June

View from my room bed quite late at night. Worrying that the last few weeks of vaguely interesting posts coming to an end.

Wednesday 9th June

Oh dear - photos taken while lying in bed continuing.  But still important to me as Lost was taking over my life.  (finished Series 5 last night 16/6)

Thursday 10th June

How about that for technology???  Watching last few minutes of the previous night's junior apprentice on iplayer on laptop as tonight's finale starts on tv!

Friday 11th June

First match of the world cup 2010!!!  Watching with squash in a beer mug and salted popcorn - what more could you need.  We tried to watch at school, but after some amusing incidents with head, we retreated by to colleague's house.  Why can't I unbold it??

Saturday 12th June

England match time!  Love that family :-)

Sunday 13th June

 Nirvana Spa, lovely family and friends girly day out.  Top notch spa-ing quality (in my fairly limited experience!)  Seriously bold gone bizarre!