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! 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. :crazy:

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 to 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! :excited:

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!

Thanks to Han, I have been tagged with this meme. At first I wasn’t sure what even constituted a vice, and I wonder whether I even had 5 to write about, but then I Wiki’d it and discovered that apparently I do!

1. Slothfulness
Yup. I am one of the laziest people I know. The one thing I dislike about my job is that I have to wake up at 6:25 every morning to get there by 7:30! Strangely enough though, I can happily stay up very late/early at night and not be tired, so I suspect my sloth only works one way!

2. Procrastination
Oh good grief. I can’t believe I’m in my last year at university and I still do this with almost every assessment. I think I’ve got it down to a fine art though, since regardless of my procrastination I’ve always managed to pass every essay/exam I’ve had!

3. Indulgence
Primarily in the form of shopping. Mostly for shoes. And clothes. And cellphone charms. And stationery.

4. Moral relativism
Obviously whether or not this is really a vice to begin with is open to discussion itself, but I think that I certainly have it!

5. Absent-mindedness
Oh dear. The losing/misplacing of objects and forgetting of deadlines seems to be a recent happening in my life.

I would like to tag…
Jenny & Brooke & Timmie & Bubs & Gigi
Please do this! I’m nosy and I want to know if anybody suffers from the vice of “child sacrifice” o.O

EDIT: Just to clarify, the man who died was not my school principal. I am not a student. I am employed by an after school programme at the school where he worked up until his retirement at the end of last year. I did know him, but not very well.

At work this morning I was talking to some of the kids about what they thought of the principal’s funeral. Some of them were too young to know/care, or had only started at the school this year, after he had already left, so their answers weren’t very exciting.

Some of them were hilarious though. One said he’d gone to Heaven, and one said he was “hard and dried up”, but my personal favourite was the child who said that he was “dead and going slimy”. Brilliant. Poor Mr. Former Principal.

In other news, I got a case for my iPod today. Jenny and I spent about half an hour wandering around the mall (and discovering the exit we thought had been bricked over was the same one we’d just walked out!) looking for one, which was a lot harder than it sounded! I only saw ONE that I liked and which was appropriate, but I originally decided not to get it, since it was a bit on the expensive side and I’d already had my eye on another kind of case that I liked better.

By eventually, on my way home, I stopped off at another mall to see if there were any there, and I saw a shop that had the same cases I had seen earlier (A Belkin leather one). I eventually ended up getting a pink and brown one, since it was quite cool, and only a couple of dollars more expensive than the original one I liked. Hopefully my iPod will now be protected against being scratched!

Today has been a bit of a “nothing day”. Since yesterday was only the first day of the semester I don’t have my timetable for tutorials yet, so I’m still rather light on actually classes, which means I didn’t have to go into university today.

This will probably change eventually though, when I have more coursework to do and have to read books which are on restricted loan and can only be accessed on campus.

As for my ankle, it’s stopped bleeding, but the area around it has turned into a great big swollen bruise. Great. Oh well, at least it’s unlikely to get any worse, I suppose!

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 now (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 inform 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 has 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!