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Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Christmas is coming!

I love all the Christmas lights. The trees along the road opposite the college are all white and sparkly, as are the fir trees next to the park. It makes leaving college in the dark (the sun sets ridiculously early at the moment; it's pitch dark before I've even finished teaching every afternoon) a pleasure instead of a chore.

The other nice thing about the insanely short days is that you can get up very late and still be in time for the sunrise. On Saturday we went for an early morning run - left home at 6.45 - and were able to run by moonlight. Beautiful, specially running round the duck pond in the park. It was a good run - except that it clouded over and started to pour with rain when we were about half a k from home. Nothing quite like slodging through a muddy field in the pouring rain, and having your trainer literally get stuck in the mud! I'm very grateful for hot showers.

Work is going well at the moment; I am feeling organised and (touch wood) on top of things. I have really nice students in all my classes this year, which helps too! And I'm starting to look forward to Christmas. I think all the Christmas shopping is done. I did mine online which was completely painless. Soph needed me to take her shopping, though, so we went to creepy-Crawley on Saturday morning. She is a very thoughtful gift buyer - I was impressed by the things she's chosen. And we had a fun girly morning together.


Christmas itself should be good. We're going to this cottage on the Cornish coast with my parents - I can't wait for long windy walks along the cliff tops! And then warm nights in front of the fire, with the kids, and board games, and books, and hot chocolate.... Only 11 more days! And only 8 of those are work days!

Not everyone seems to be feeling the festive spirit, though - poor Emily routinely has to deal with angry customers on the evenings when she works at the local Chinese take-away. People get annoyed when the wait times are long - fair enough, but why take it out on the two teenage girls behind the counter? One of the teachers from her old high school was in there on Friday night; Millie says this woman got really angry when she had to wait for her order, and then, as they were leaving, her boyfriend grabbed a prawn cracker from the bowl on the counter, threw it on the ground, and snarled "I'll be back"! Seriously, what kind of an idiot behaves like that? Emily and Claire (the other student who works there) both thought it was funny; it sounds a bit upsetting to me, though. You'd think the teacher would want to set a good example to former students - presumably she didn't recognise Emily ...

1 comment:

Rummfor5 said...

:) what an adorable cottage.
The walks sound glorious.
I hope your holiday has been wonderful !