12 of 12, July 2016

A wintry and fairly boring July work-day.

I’d been away last week at a national conference, and on my way home I noticed that my suitcase was on its last legs (well, its last seams, actually). It has now been replaced.

I am not, however, going to replace the disintegrating plastic bag that was in one of my other suitcases.

Speaking of replacing, one of my plans for today was to replace the blown globe in my headlight. I like my Suby, but it has a nasty habit of having short-lived headlight globes.

Once I got to the office it was time to deal with a whole bunch of on-screen stuff. It’s the start of semester, and so getting material on-line for classes was a priority.

And then I had to be the student for on-line set of modules intended to help me accredit teacher education courses. (I hope my students find my material a bit more interesting than I found some of this!)

I glanced around my office at one point, with a feeling of frustration. Yes, my once tidy office has lost the plot again. It has also misplaced quite a few other things. Unfortunately, there is no room to write “Tidy office” on the “To Do List” taped to the back of the mauve notebook.

Another of my computer tasks was to turn my spreadsheet-based list of students into a proper database. I know I’m going to have a fight with someone about using my own database instead of using the university system, even though my system does a much better job of providing assignment feedback. I “love” the way systems force you to do things worse/more cumbersomely than necessary.

Late in the day it was very windy outside, and the building was whistling and rattling as the trees outside created a blur in the blustery breeze.

When I got home I found my cache-making ingredients as I have to replace one of my Melbourne caches which has gone missing. My caching activities have been very limited lately.

I also had time to nuke some frozen bolognese sauce and wolf it down with some pasta prior to an evening meeting.

The evening meeting came with supper. It was, in general, a productive and fun meeting, featuring a running gag arising from my partial misreading of the minutes of the previous meeting. The secretary had noted that in order to address the absence of the regular pianist, we would just deal with it as the situation arises, but I read only the “deal with it” part of this, and that meant “Deal with it” became our default solution for any issue for which we didn’t have a solution (okay, maybe you had to be there; maybe it is only amusing if you haven’t had quite enough sleep!).

When the meeting was over it was pouring with rain and very windy; one of those bleak nights where you’re very glad you have a warm home to return to … providing you can dodge all the garbage bins that were being blown all over the place. [This presaged three more days of wind, wetness, cold and snow in one of Tasmania’s more aggressively unpleasant winter weather events in recent memory.].

(The “12 of 12” project involves taking 12 photos on the 12th of the month. This provides the opportunity to get snapshots of different aspects of your life. I have been doing this since 2009.)