Read the book group book again this month - 2 in a row! I wasn't impressed by the book at all (The Rift by Nina Allen, very pretentious and pretty dull) but I did feel good about the fact that I finished it and made it to the discussion (where I was not very sparing). Overall, I have really noticed an uptick in my interest in reading new fiction ( Read more... )

I've been writing quite a few entries in my head over this week about the complete and utter mess that is our current political situation, but somehow when I get in front of the posting window I feel like anything I could possibly say about the whole thing would be redundant. The whole thing is really rather depressing and yet, as it gets closer, ( Read more... )

Went to see John Finnemore in London on Tuesday, which, despite snow making the travel portion a little more complex than needed, was a really lovely evening. The comedy was great (listen to the new series of Souvenir Programme when it is released) and afterwards, we went to a lovely fish restaurant and had fancy fish and chips before heading back ( Read more... )

I wrote quite a bit of an entry yesterday in between bits and bobs at work but then I forgot to post it and I guess draft saving is not a thing these days? Maybe I turned it off somewhere or something. Anyway. The most annoying thing about the project I'm working on at the minute is that every time you change the code you have to do a rebuild of ( Read more... )

Well, I am now officially a developer again! It's kind of weird because it doesn't feel very like work yet - I've got used to seeing getting the chance to tinker around with code as a leisure only activity. I have a very flash set up with lots of monitors and a nice surface laptop with a stylus that I can make notes on and so forth, which I'm ( Read more... )

So, I made it through! Did the final day at school with only a bit of a sniffle as my class sang a goodbye song for me (which was very charming of them, bless them - they'd filked something I didn't recognise but the result was lovely), and had a great time with my new colleagues at their Christmas party. There was an end of year meeting ( Read more... )

As I get closer and closer to the end of term, I'm finding I've got more and more free brain cycles to do things at the weekend, make plans, feel bouncy and cheerful. It's a very freeing thought. Next week should be fairly straight forward because we are having assessment week, so that takes up a lot of timetable time, and although it does ( Read more... )

Somewhat to my surprise, I have found myself actually doing some swimming again over the past few months and rather enjoying it. I rejoined a gym in October on a limited 3 month deal as the nights began to draw in, the weather got colder and Pokemon Go lost it's appeal. Not really with any sense of anticipation, just a grim sense of resignation ( Read more... )

Term crawls on but I was in a better mood most of this week - a couple of good nights of sleep helped, as did some very very soppy cats snuggling up to me. I spent yesterday afternoon going through my book case purging teaching books. Although I have a lot of these, they are mostly either (a) gifts that I never got around to reading, (b) set ( Read more... )

Ugh. I'm finding the long run up to leaving school really rough. It's really making me dwell on the things I don't like about teaching or can't cope with any more, instead of being able to focus on feeling excited about what I'm going on to. I spend a probably unhealthy amount of time mentally writing long involved think-piece type blog entries ( Read more... )