All these things that I have done

Gosh, I wish that I could get rid of this cold! Or at least have my tonsils out - they've been up and down like... well, I can't think of a good simile, but they have. They were really painful yesterday, but they're rather better today and I'm feeling pretty good overall, which makes me feel like I might be going to get actually better, but I've had false dawns with this cold before so who knows whether it'll actually happen. It'd be nice to be well for half term though. This afternoon, there was nice sun and mild weather so I got out and did some hard work in the garden moving plants - it felt good. I just can't wait until I can be outside again - sunshine always improves how well I feel in myself.

I went on my first protest since the Iraq war on Monday. Wish I could say I expect to have such a long gap before the next one. It felt good to be out there saying something, even if I doubt it'll make much difference.

Am sitting in the coffee area at the garage waiting for my one year service on my Leaf to be done. It's hard to believe it's a whole year since I got it but I have to say, I've really loved it. When I was buying it, I was expecting to use it only for my Oxford driving and do parental visits in a loan petrol car but actually, we've ended up driving it to Norfolk most of the times I've visited, which feels pretty cool. It's just a really pleasant drive and it makes me feel good to be bowling along without any worries about what damage I'm doing, particularly given that we pay for 100% green energy at home so I know even charging up is not doing much damage.

The one blot on the otherwise happy story of electric car ownership has been Polar/Chargemaster. They have a model where you can subscribe to their service, in which case you get an RFID card, or you can pay as you go using their app. The trouble is, their app is absolutely terrible. I can't think of a single time I've used it where it hasn't taken about 20 minutes to get it to load the charge points close to me and then get the one I want to use activated. We planned a trip to London a couple of weeks ago and parked where they had a fast charger only to discover that PAYG customers didn't have the ability to use it, something that it didn't say anywhere in the app! It's got to the point where I was just planning a trip to my parents with an extra charge because of the cold weather and I filtered out their chargers - they might be more conveniently placed sometimes but that's no good if they don't work properly! Fortunately, the ecotricity chargers have been much more reliable and easy to use, even when they switched over to using an app rather than an RFID card but still, it's kind of a pain. I guess they basically don't care about PAYG customers or possibly even think that if they make that service rubbish then people will be more likely to upgrade.

Overall, I would definitely recommend the electric car experience, but if you're thinking of getting one, just make sure you won't be relying on Polar /Chargemaster for any key journeys!

I see, as is fairly typical, I stopped updating once I'd done my complaining :) In my defense, the wifi at the reserve was pretty slow so our photos didn't back up to the internet until we made it to Paris for the most part. We were talking in Dakar airport about how unusual it was that actually, if we'd had our phones stolen at that point, we would have lost really quite a lot of data - usually, it's very little.

I will do a proper entry when I get home with all the photos and details of our time at Fathala, but suffice it to say for the time being that it was a really wonderful holiday and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for somewhere peaceful and beautiful. Our luggage never turned up at the reserve, despite repeated contact by the reception desk with the airport but once we had a change of clothes, kindly run up in a very short time by an obliging Senegalese tailor, we actually managed fine. On our way back, we got to Dakar airport ahead of time and so decided to go via the left luggage area on the off chance and lo and behold! Our case, sat there waiting and probably had been for a week. It had lost it's tag, meaning that it hadn't been connected with our lost luggage report, description notwithstanding. Still, we found it, which was a relief as it had my favourite bras in and were able to sort out the details and take it with us on the next leg. It was also perfect timing because it meant that we could collect the other half of the malaria prescription from it just before we would have run out of tablets. It was a bit unnerving to collect it and then immediately check it in again, but it made it to Paris with us, where our two cases were one of the first ones out!

Paris was really lovely - we stayed in a beautiful apartment with some very friendly cats and also some lovely Canadians (<3, ailetoile and stevieg) and it was also very restful. Rather than do the museum thing, we alternated chilling in the apartment, with poke-walks and enjoying the ambience and architecture of Paris and actually, todays wander up to Notre Dame, followed by open top bus along the Champs Elysee made me think actually I'd quite like to go back again. Now, we just have to manage to get onto our plane home and off with luggage and then home to kittons!

So far, holiday going not quite according to plan. ( A tale of delays and me being sad )

Have just spent far too long fiddling with a new journal style on Dreamwidth. I'd forgotten how oddly absorbing tinkering with CSS could be. It turned out to be just the level of engagement I was up for this afternoon, given that I am full of cold and feeling lazy.

Tomorrow, I will have to snap out of my lethargy to get things done because we're actually only 6 days away from our exciting adventure holiday! We're going to be spending seven days in Senegal, staying on a wildlife reserve where you can walk with the lions(!) and then flying to Paris where we're sharing an apartment with elyssa and stevieg over Christmas! I felt so inspired by the experience of winter sun on our Caribbean trip that we just sort of decided to go for this. It'll be the first time I've ever visited Africa and I think you could reasonably describe me as hella excited :) I have no idea what the net connection is likely to be like, but I'll try to post the odd update while we're away.

So now I just have to get through the last few days of term. Fortunately, I won't have to do too much in terms of teaching as we wind down, but given how coldy I feel at the moment, I probably couldn't cope if I did have to so that's just as well! Roll on next Friday!

This is education related, not related to any of the other chaos going on in British political life...

( letter to my MP )

So, since my last update, I have:

- Been to the Grenadan Independence celebration at the National Stadium. Lots of marching up and down, fun with the police marching band and a stirring address by the Prime Minister (to a lot more cheering than I can imagine any PM at home getting!). There were lots of songs about how lovely Grenada is and how the national characteristic is being friendly and welcoming (story checks out) and all in all, it was a rather fun, relaxing morning.

- Been snorkelling for the first time to look at the underwater sculpture garden. I didn't love the actual experience of snorklling - I could never quite get the mouthpiece to feel comfortable and I had to pause for breath quite a bit - but it was totally worth it to see the underwater sculptures, which are gradually turning into an artificial reef, as well as all the little fishes floating around in the clear water.

- Actually done some teaching in school! I taught them some maths, which was interesting. They're good on concepts but they are much more used to being led than my students so they really struggled when I was asking them to spot patterns or reason for themselves. They're very keen though, and were very excited to try out some of my times table games :)

- Been to Brownies, which was lovely! I am going back next week and I'm going to teach them a song and a game from our Brownies and hopefully video some of their Brownie things

- Spent more time floating in the Caribbean - rather necessary after a long hot day at school! The road down to our favourite beach has a drainage ditch next to it, which is lined with hundreds of crab holes - if you walk along in the evening between about 5 and 6 you can see them all out grazing and sunning themselves, which is rather lovely. I have discovered that I can't stop pointing them out even though there are probably literally hundreds there :)

- Been to a Golden Oldies, Caribbean style clubbing night! Not exactly my kind of thing, particularly as my body clock seems to have adjusted to early mornings, early nights while we're here (partly because it gets dark around 6/6:30, which makes it then feel really late!) but we did have quite a bit of fun.

- Visited Fish Friday in Gouyave, where local fishermen basically cook up their catch for the day on street food stalls and sell it to tourists. We saw some great drumming and ate some delicious fishy dishes.

- Hiked around the shore of Grand Etang (it's a big lake near the centre of the island)! All the locals we've told this to have said variants on "gosh, how adventurous!" I think most people just go to the bit of the lake shore by the bus stop but we went all the way around. The trail was pretty muddy in places and there were a few slots where there didn't seem to be much trail at all, but it was actually an amazing experience - we felt like jungle explorers! And we saw a monkey! A real live wild monkey, just eating fruit from a tree near the visitor centre!

- Visited the Palmtree Botanical Garden and the Laura Herb and Spice garden, both of which I highly recommend, especially the Palmtree garden. We got lovely guided walks of both places, saw some massive caterpillars, some more lizards and some really beautiful blooms.

( moar photos! )

So, we made it to the Spice Isle! I'm still in slight "I can't believe we're here" mode, but it's starting to sink in... It's gorgeous here - sunny and hot with just enough breeze to make it comfortable. We're staying in a B&B right in the city centre which, given that this is independence weekend, puts us right in the thick of everything, which is pretty amazing. I wouldn't say the view is anything to shout about but the breakfasts a great and the fact that we're right next to the buses means that it's incredibly easy to get anywhere. The buses are actually more like maxi-taxis, with a clever arrangement of fold down seats to maximize the number of people that they can fit in and I'm more and more pleased with the decision not to hire a car for this trip as the roads are narrow, steep and busy so I think it would have been pretty high stress!

So we arrived on Thursday and we had thought we might go to the beach that evening but in fact after checking in we were too tired to do anything other than have a stroll around town and a quick snack before turning in. Friday was our first day into school and it was their indepedence street parade. All the children were dressed up in Grenadan national colours and we marched and danced through the streets singing "Happy Birthday Grenada". The gist of the songs seemed to be that Grenada has sun, spices and friendly people and I have to say, that seems basically true. When we got back to school, there was a TV camera there and after talking to the head, we got asked for comment! A little un-nerving but I managed not to stutter and to sound enthusicastic but I haven't looked for the spot, incase I look like a grinning idiot :)

After the march, we had the national dish - oildown - for lunch, which was a sort of stew made with chicken and coconut milk and a vegetable who's name I forget which was a little like spinach and carrots and something else rather like bread fruit. It was pretty good actually, although they gave us a massive portion so I think they thought we didn't like it; it was more that we couldn't possibly have eaten it all! After that, they very generously gave us the afternoon out of school to recover from jetlag on the beach! The head teacher gave us a lift down to Grand Anse, which is the main tourist beach and dropped us off by a well reviewed beach bar so we spread out our towels, relaxed on the sand with books and swam in the Carribean! The presense of some clouds in the sky meant that the beach was really quiet but actually it was amazingly nice - not too hot to be comfortable.

Today, with more clouds forcast we decided to take advantage of their cooling properties to do a waterfall walk inland. We took a bus up just past the Grand Etang to St Margarets falls, also known as the Seven Sisters. When being given our sticks as we paid for entrance a nice chap offered to guide us and we decided to take him up on it. Although the route was actually pretty clear, I'm really glad we did as there were some pretty rocky spots to pick our way over and a stream to ford on stepping stones and having a helping hand made all the difference in a couple of spots. When we got there, our guide took a seat on then bench while we took a dip in the pool just below the waterfall! The whole thing was gorgeous - really tropical jungle feeling - and we saw one or two bits of wildlife, even though we missed out on seeing monkeys - still, there's plenty of time for that yet! Our guide knew loads about the local flora and showed us things like nutmeg, cocoa and banana trees as we went along. Despite the fact that the way back was mostly steep up hill, I managed it pretty well, which I felt good about. I wouldn't want to do something that exerting every day but I think we may do another hike type day next weekend.

( photos! )

Yesterday was the first time in what feels like a really long time that I woke up and felt like I actually had energy and was more well than sick. This has been the most horrible cold season and who knows, maybe this is just a brief respite, but it's really putting me in a good mood. For most of last week, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I needed to do, mostly at school, but also sorting out home maintenance stuff and so on and I feel really pleased that I made the firm decision on Monday that I was going to abide by one of my original stipulations when I decided to try the gym thing and accept that I was not well and that I therefore did not have enough spoons or energy to go to the gym so I skipped Monday and Wednesday without making myself feel bad about it, so yay for positive planning!

One of the things that has been stressing me out, apart from the massive volume of marking that year 6 seems to require, is the fact that my Grenada trip is now pretty close and as part of that, two Grenadan teachers are visiting our school starting next week. I have to host one in my class part of the time, so that's kind of daunting, but also, I have to get a massive amount of stuff planned and ready for when I am away so that my colleagues who are still here don't suddenly have double workload! I spent about a hour of my PPA time yesterday just getting my head around the timetable for the next few weeks because we also have to fit in all our mid year assessments before I go and so I got up to make a cup of tea kind of resigned to doing a bunch of planning this weekend, but as luck would have it, the next few sets of maths objectives are ones that we taught last year as well so I was able to have an incredibly productive couple of hours in which I managed to not only plan, but resource and create the smarthboards for all the maths teaching up to the end of this half term! That took a massive weight off my mind and made me feel just really positive about life and everything - I've missed having bursts of productivity!

So far, I've managed to keep it up today as well. We've had our shower cubicle re-done and as we're not allowed to use it until tomorrow, I have been taking advantage of the dryness to touch up the paint on the ceiling and I'm just about to go up and sort out the floor tile grouting too. I also had a gym session that, while I wouldn't go so far as to describe it as enjoyable, was definitely satisfying. I've managed to figure out a routine for using the elliptical that makes me feel like I am challenging myself but is not too horrible/exhausting and, because I was later than I was in previous weeks, the pool was really quiet - so much so that I'll probably aim for this sort of time next week.

I have calculated that I make in the region of 460 car journeys per year, of which 98% of the trips are < 5 miles each way (commuting, Brownies, faffing around in Oxford). However, the remaining 2% of trips (visits to my and Alex's folks) account for around 50% of my annual mileage!