Holiday part 2!

Well, I didn't actually manage to post any more while on holiday, despite taking a day off to do work in* which I could have easily combined with posting but there we are. Victoria turned out to be absolutely beautiful. The place we were staying turned out to be lovely, if a little bizarre. The first night, we ended up being upgraded to the Parlour Suite, which was absolutely crammed with antiques of all periods and satin pillow covers. They were rather bemused that we seemed to prefer one of the less ornate ones when we finally got moved into there after a couple of days! Still, the breakfasts were lovely, the manager was very sweet and it was conveniently close to aveleh and the city centre (sorry, center).

Amongst the lovely things to do in Victoria that we indulged in, under the guidance of the above mentioned lovely aveleh, we went whale watching (and saw some actual whales!), visited the BC museum and the Maritime museum, visited the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (highly recommended, btw), basked on the beach and taken a wine tour. I hadn't really associated Canada with wine but apparently it's the Provence of North America. We did actually try some rather good wines. We bought a few back and quite a few fruit wines, which I hadn't really tried before and so seemed well worth bringing home - I can thoroughly recommend blackberry desert wine, for example. As you might have noticed if you have been on Flickr, we also went to two beautiful gardens - the Butchard garden, which is lovely, and very well known, and the Abhkazi garden, which was absolutely gorgeous and somewhat overlooked and quiet. I actually preferred the slightly smaller scale of the Abhkazi garden, which you could imagine actually being someone's real garden and being enjoyed as such.

Back home now and the cats have more or less remembered who we are again, which is nice. I've finally finished a first draft of my assignment this afternoon, which is a relief, now I just have to get the rest of the medium term plans done and get my classroom sorted out! Fortunately, Mum and Dad are coming over to help with the latter as there seems to be a huge amount of stuff still to put away. I've been trying to figure out what to do with the new Computing curriculum as we're free to use it now if we want. It'll definitely still need work, but I think trying to get a handle on it now is a good start. We're doing online interaction this term so I've set up a class blog and signed up for a service which matches you up with three other class blogs so that you can take turns to provide audiences for each other, which strikes me as a really good way of getting the kids to actually engage with posting. Maybe I'll even try a class twitter account again - I might even actually manage to post in it :)

* No really. I was stressing about the amount I had to do before the start of term so decided to sit down and write the Maths medium term plan, as all the material I needed for that was online. Yes, I know, I'm sad.