The boys and I are off down the M6 in the morning so the gpm corner will go very quiet for a few days. Done: report (my bits), tax paid, VAT return, dishwasher fixed (a nice man this time), swimming rota, laundry mountain and it looks like I might get to bed before midnight. Not [...]
Archive for January, 2007
Technology, email, the internet - they’re great when they work. When they all go wrong it’s worse than snail mail. I’m presently in the very latter stages of finalising a report with a colleague in wildest Durham. This involves firing lots of files with photos and graphs and maps and tables around by email, all at the [...]
I asked one of the boys the other day just what it is they do in SVS. “Oh, learn to write cheques and stuff like that”. How quaint! I felt this wash of nostalgia for the feel of a shiny new cheque book but, as I hardly ever write cheques these days, I rarely get a [...]
That’s the sound made by a coin sliding back up towards its starting point…
That was the sound, I think, of a very small coin dropping softly. Son No 1 disappeared off to his room for approaching 2 hours this evening to revise and I hadn’t said a word. And then, after swimming, he picked up his cornet & did some practice and I still hadn’t said a word. Did something [...]
and I love them dearly (honest!). But those of you who have daughters might appreciate this offering from Ogden Nash.
It feels like a major triumph. We looked at day 3 of the crisis management, non-negotiable revision timetable we started putting together at the weekend and with much harrumphing older son disappeared to finish his solo talk and revise some music. Later, after I’d spent an hour - yes, that’s right, a whole hour - washing the contents [...]
And do they drive their teachers to distraction? They certainly know how to wind their parents up. Prelims start in earnest this week and has the pace of work increased? I should really rephrase that. Is any work happening at any noticeable pace? Did Richard Hammond crash his car? At any mention of exams or revision a [...]
Schools and parents talking to each other always seems to be an issue. Or not talking, which is perhaps more often the case. I saw a comment about this from a disgruntled parent on Don’s website a while back and meant to go and post a comment, only I couldn’t find it when I eventually [...]
I think there’s a law about it. I had to upgrade my computer last year because of the increasing demands from clients in terms of reports. So many photos, complicated graphics and huge data tables to be included in a single report that everything becomes unwieldy. GIS and databases. Reports these days can easily run to [...]
The guineapiglets wheedled the blog location out of me a week or so ago, glanced at it to see what lies I’d written about them and moved on. But the younger one has decided to have a go himself. He is, of course, mortally embarrased about this and I am sworn to secrecy. But I [...]
My father in law died unexpectedly during the night. It’s now 7am and I am just back from dropping my husband at the airport, neither of us having had much sleep. There is never a good time for these things but, with the dreaded prelims starting this week, I can’t just take off to Somerset [...]
My A level choice was a little more considered than O levels, although I don’t remember consulting my parents about it or being offered any significant careers advice from the school. I think one thing about boarding school and slow, old fashioned communication was that I learnt to make decisions on my own very quickly. So it [...]
is quite scary. I’ve put the Latest Post widget on my sidebar and I got Google analytics working a few days ago. So I can now see that my brother in Abu Dhabi was looking at my blog from Dubai. By the way, note to all siblings who might be reading this (may I repeat all) it [...]
I really must finish this. So here goes with No.4
I was a teacher once. Nominally, if not much more. It was my year off (gap years hadn’t been invented at that stage) and I spent it teaching Maths, English and Geography to the 1st & 2nd years in a high school in Kingston, Jamaica. There [...]
You may of course all know about YouSendIt but just in case, here’s a link. It’s a tool I’m starting to use a lot for sending large files which has proved much easier than loading files onto websites for download. It’s the sort of thing that makes working from home possible these days.
By the way, there was a [...]
My geography career came to a premature end when I was about 14 or 15. Roll back a few months to the day of the moon landings when the Howson family, all 8 of us, left for a few years in Jamaica courtesy of my father’s job (Inspector of Taxes, since you asked). I returned [...]
I had recently sat my 11+, at a time when we were living in Hove actually*, when an old school friend of my Belfast-born mother came to stay. She had married a Belgian and settled in Paris so it seemed entirely logical to the grown ups to say “Why doesn’t GPM come back with us?” and [...]
This big new initiative was in the (English) news last week, accompanied by the inevitable many complaints that it wouldn’t work and how could teachers be expected to have the time for this. Now, I realise I am a mere parent and don’t understand these things fully, but from what I heard on the news [...]
A useful addition to my vocabulary that I learnt during one of our many games of Cranium over the holidays. We were unanimous that it is an affliction that our 12yr old suffers from, and indeed the 12 year old son of the friends who were playing Cranium with us.
Your choice of definitions is:-
uncontrollable or [...]
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