Off sick

*cough cough*

Couldn't go to school today. Terrible ill.

Somehow Debbie managed to take this photo whilst looking after me. Maybe I have sunbearitis?

Marking junior exams

Busy weekend :-)

This has been a full-on weekend so far! Friday started with a work bbq for the English department, which we went to the start of then pumpkined when it got to Dom's bedtime. The evening was very relaxing, although Dom was still very excited from seeing other little kids at the bbq so stayed up an hour or two later than his usual bedtime.

We both got emails on Friday from Harper Collins asking to see full manuscripts, so we headed in to school to pick up my flash drive with the most recent versions and print out my novel on Saturday morning. Debbie only finished her first draft this week, so we've spent a lot of time proofing and editing this weekend. The plan is to post them off tomorrow :-)

We managed to fit in a trip to Belmont to see family and some grocery shopping too. Hopefully the weather will be good enough for us to go for a walk this afternoon, and we have to go buy big envelopes (my manuscript is about 170 pages at 1 and half line spacing, Debbie's is about 300?).

So, a productive weekend!

Lastly, this is a poster my Y12 students made me. The whole class signed it.



The quotes are things I allegedly said in class, and the pictures are visual representations of war poetry metaphors I got the kids to copy down (the monstrous anger of the guns, the shrill demented choirs of shells, and a dust whom England bore).

Oh, and for those who are interested (if anyone is), my BMI is somewhere between 25.3 and 25.6ish. So 'healthy' on the BMI scale (as opposed to 'overweight') is within sight. Maybe by Christmas?

Cows go moo!

New Shiny

I have a new school laptop! It's all shiny and new and has a nice keyboard and hasn't yet been dropped, so it works properly :-) I was actually quite excited when I realised that this laptop is so new and flash and from the future that it can play music at the same time as I'm typing up reports or making handouts for my class (or looking at the internet). My old laptop stopped being able to do that a little over a year ago. It wasn't broken enough to need replacing and it could still handle intensive tasks like video editing (maybe at a slightly slower pace), but playing music whilst doing something else tricky like looking at a word document? No dice. Actually, sometimes just playing a long song was too much for the old lappy and it'd have choppy playback. Anyways, this laptop also came with a cool backpack so if I need/want to take it home it's way easier to do so on my bike. I say thank-you Board of Trustees for paying to lease this new toy :-)

Birthday preparations

 

Prizegiving Over!

All 4 senior prizegiving ceremonies are done and dusted :-) Just the two junior ones to go, and they are much, much simpler by comparison. Along the way the seniors also finished classes for the year, so my teaching load has dramatically dropped. This is the first year I've had a senior form class, so my contact hours are even lighter than the end of last year. Also, Debbie is not likely to go into labour in the next five weeks :-) All round it's looking like the next 5 weeks should be made of awesome, and the 5 weeks after that will kick all kinds of ass. Or arse. Somewhere in the new year Dominic will have his operation, all going to plan. It was either going to be December or late January/February, and given that December is only a couple of weeks away next year looks much more likely. Debbie gave the hospital a call during the week and while they were a little vague (and suggested she call back again this week) they thought February was a lot more likely than any other month. There were a couple of minor dramas with prizegiving, but on the whole it went well and people seem happy with my leadership. Next year will be smoother, now that I've had a go at being head honcho. Now to read, relax, and not have to worry about the mountain of work at school because we kicked the mountain over last week.

11 months!

Dominic is now 11 months and a bit. Where did the year go? It oddly feels like it's been a really long year, and like Dom is growing up super fast.

This size comparison photo was a day late, I think.

Overdue 11 months photos

 

Rejected!

It took a long while, but I finally heard back from Random House. They are not keen to publish my novel. I have made a few minor changes based on excellent feedback from Jenni, and it's already been submitted to HarperCollins now anyway. (when it got to 6 months and 3 follow-up emails and I still hadn't heard back from RH I decided to send the ms off to HC) :-)

Manuscript resubmitted

Sent my manuscript off again this week. Better title this time, better synopsis. Only the first 3 chapters this time, which is a mixed bag of a chapter I really like (the first one) and two chapters of exposition that I like some of. It's only 16 pages. Next time I might look at shifting the chapter breaks around so chapters 2 and 3 are combined. Maybe not. It's Harper Collins, who appear to be speedy with responses - which should put the rejection letter some time in the school holidays.

Insanely Busy

Prizegiving next week. Working very hard. Not eating junk food this week. Making progress with work. Lost 1.5kg so far since Sunday. Bored Debbie with approximately 3* random outbursts of school-related verbiage. Goals for next week: 1. Successful senior prizegivings 2. Reach 83kgs (currently 83.5) 3. Enjoy evenings and not tell Debbie too many boring work 'stories', where story = any random crap I remember about databases, lists, spelling of kids' names etc. Looking at that list, not boring the hell out of Debbie may be the biggest challenge :-) I think I'm sitting on 50/50 with my 'anecdotes' at the moment, with half of them being actual stories, occasionally even amusing ones, and hald of them being things like "I think it's interesting that the names for prizegiving are typed up three or four times to go in different placeszzzzzz...." I will occasionaly relate a story about 'polishing the boss's bronze owl' with sufficient double entendre to make it worthwhile. *maybe it's more like 30?

Hurricane Hits

So our Evil League of Evil Application Baby Hurricane is now up to 1,071 views (vimeo and youtube combined). While we probably account for 20 of those, it's still nice to think that a decent number of people have seen our little movie. It's interesting to note that our DrivethruRPG contest entry Rolling Thunder has more than twice as many views, which is awesome but does make me look at the number for Baby Hurricane differently. Anything over 100 views is fairly staggering if I actually think about it - 100 people choosing to watch something we put on the internet? That's huge. But 2000 makes 1000 look smaller, if that makes sense :-)