Ok well actually the "other stuff" is actually going to come first, just in case some people only read this and decide they’re not interested in the Friday 5!

This morning I began to wonder what kind of idiot designs a school hall with a ceiling made up of loose panels precariously balanced on thin crisscrossed beams. Towards the end of the hour, a kid kicked a ball up high enough to hit the ceiling, and one of the panels became dislodged on one side!

We were like "Oh no, now there’s a hole in the ceiling! This is very bad! The school is going to kill us!" and so decided to see if we could find a stick or a pole long enough to try and get the panel back into place. I was the tallest person there, so I ended up standing on a chair with a pole someone found somewhere, poking the roof trying to fix it!

The supervisor was trying to help me, and hit the panel way too hard and made a dent! Eventually a kid came back and put a cushion on top of the pole and tried to do it!

At first we were like "Hahaha! How will it stay on!? It will fall off and hit you on the head!" (which it did), but in the end we got it up high enough without it falling off and managed to fix the ceiling, so it turned out that it wasn’t such a bad idea after all! Yup. My morning was…interesting!

I have no idea why you’d make a ceiling like that though, especially in a hall/gym, where surely the architects/builders would have used their sense and realised balls are going to hit it! The only thing I could think of was that it was for easy access to electrical wiring, but still, if you climbed up into the ceiling and tried to crawl around, you’d fall through! o.O

Anyway! Two posts in one day!? Impressive, even if I do say so myself!

Brooke and Jenny, I think you two should take up doing the Friday 5 too!

1. How and when did you learn to swim? I don’t really remember a time BEFORE I knew how to swim. That sentence might imply that I’m extremely athletic and still swim regularly now, which is not true. It just means that I was one of those kids who did a hundred and one extra-curricular activities at primary school, and swimming happened to be one of them. Interesting, I do remember being perfectly happy in the deep end (6 feet) of the swimming pool, but terrified of the sea as a child!

2. How and when did you learn to drive? N/A – I still don’t! Well, that’s not actually strictly true, I’ve driven once. It was in a paddock. There was a pig. The fence was almost demolished. The experience will hopefully never be repeated.

3. How and when did you learn to tie your shoelaces? I don’t remember, but I remember trying to show other kids how to do it at work last year. It didn’t end well. The shoelaces finished up even more knotted than they were before we started!

4. How and when did you learn to cook? From my mum’s stepmother…and in food tech at high school. Not that I cook terribly frequently now. I CAN, it’s just not something I enjoy.

5. How and when did you learn to type? Again, I don’t remember. I don’t think I ever did "typing lessons" or learned from a set method. It’s just kind for happened because I spend so much time on the computer! I mostly use two fingers, which I KNOW is WRONG, but I’ve still got pretty fast as doing it, so it’s not like it bothers me!

Well what DIDN’T happen today!?

At work this morning TWO kids arrived and announced they’d forgotten their school bags! One had left it in his mother’s car, and one had left it at his house, which meant we had to ring their parents and ask them to please come and bring them in, or arrange for them to be delivered to the child’s classroom!

Then, as the supervisor was looking through the filing cabinet for something, the telephone rang. She ran into the kitchen/office to answer it and left the bottom shelf of the cabinet open. I’d been standing in front of her, and a few seconds later I stepped back…into the open shelf.

Obviously my foot came off second best in this argument, resulting in a three inch cut on the inside of my left ankle. It was surprisingly painless to begin with, and I didn’t even realise I’d broken the skin until I felt blood running down onto my foot and into my shoe!

Luckily we have a well stocked first aid kit in the office, so I was able to find appropriate sticking plasters for it in there and I’m now none the worse for wear, aside from a bit of swelling and bruising (at 6:15pm, when I did it at 8am this morning). Oh well. It happens, I suppose.

As if that wasn’t enough, it turned out that the phone call the supervisor went to answer was to tell us that the former principal (who left at the end of last year) had just passed away! He was the principal when I was a student at that school (and I left in 1999!), and at the time he left he told everybody he just felt like it was time to retire, but apparently it was more because he’d been suffering from terminal cancer and had received a very bad prognosis.

The funeral is going to be held in the school hall on Wednesday, and I think for many of the kids this will be their first experience with the death of somebody they know/knew quite well, so I’m very glad I’m not a teacher right now!

Anyway! Today was also the first day of lectures at uni, and it was absolutely insane, it felt like the whole of Christchurch’s university aged population had suddenly converged upon our campus! Funny how there are never this many people around when it’s winter!

I only have one class today, called Life Stories and Social Analysis. There are only 22 of us taking this subject, which I think is a good size. I might actually get to know some people for once! The lecturer made a very good first impression upon me, so I hope she continues to be as good as she seems to be!

A LOT more random stuff happened today too, but I either can’t remember it all of a sudden, or it doesn’t really seem important enough to warrant its own paragraph in this blog! Oh well, I suppose it’s better to have an eventful day than a boring one!

Just because my summer school exam is over doesn’t mean I get a break from uni from now until the end of the month!

At the end of last year I signed up to be a "UC Buddy" for incoming first years this year. I had training for that yesterday, and, me being me, managed to get myself involved in a whole lot of other stuff in the process.

One of these things is campus tours, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, entails me showing groups of new students around the uni, so they have some idea where their classes and stuff will be before they start lectures the week after next. Somehow I don’t think I’m the best person to be giving people tours, since I don’t even know my way around the entire campus myself yet, but oh well, apparently the woman organising the "Get Connected Week" gives us a map, a list of places to show people, and a list of answers to FAQs. Should be interesting, let’s just hope it doesn’t decide to rain like it did yesterday!

Today at rehearsal we started to get some of our set – including my wall for Humpty Dumpty. I originally thought the wall would be a solid thing and my costume would include false legs which flipped over the side of the wall at waist height, to give the illusion of my sitting there, and when I fell off at the end of the scene, I would simply crouch down behind the wall and pull my "legs" with me. As it turns out, it’s more complicated than that!

The wall is an actual wall, which is on wheels, at the moment it doesn’t have its brick facade on, but it will eventually. I sit on it backstage and the two crew members who are concealed behind the facade wheel me onstage! I sit there the whole scene and at the end of it, I actually fall backwards and end up in an armchair, which HOPEFULLY will be appropriately positioned to prevent me ending upon the floor!

Apparently the two crew members will stay hiding onstage throughout the whole scene, so they’ll be there to make sure I don’t have an accident, but still, I’m checking my life insurance policy before we open! It should be funny though, I hope. It was funny today, when I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to me and all the kids thought it was hysterical!