The only bad Friday...

...is the last Friday of the holidays. Back to work on Monday - oh the horror.

It's not that I don't like my job, I do. But these next few weeks are going to be grim. I am slogging my way through my PGCE assignments, I have two lesson observations, and it's three weeks till my students write their exams. So I am stressed. I have a tension headache pretty much all the time...

And my stress is nothing compared to Bobby's. This new role is really not what he signed up for. He worked 18 hours yesterday. Eighteen hours! So much for the better work/life balance we wanted! He's going to have to work those kind of crazy hours for the next ten days; by the end of next weekend he should know if all his hard work has paid off. He's finding it massively stressful, not so much for his own sake, but because he feels responsible for the other people working on the project. If it fails, they will lose their jobs. I can see why he feels like this; on the other hand, though, he's only been involved in this project for a few weeks - the problems weren't created by him, and he hasn't got enough time to fix them. And it won't help anyone if he burns himself out completely...

We are both still running three or four mornings a week to try to counteract the stress. It does make for a good start to the day, being out in the fresh air, listening to the birds and watching the bunnies in the fields. But once the run is over the stress comes back...

Poor Steve is stressed too. It's the final runup to his exams and he has a lot of work to get through. And a lot riding on these exams.

At least the girls are well and happy. Sophie had a sleepover here last night (much giggling; I'm glad our bedroom is up in the loft - they were up later than Bobby was!) and is seeing a movie with a different friend this afternoon. Milly has been doing a version of Come Dine With Me with her friends; it's her turn tomorrow night so she's been trialling her dishes on us. They are delicious (prawn curry puffs for the starter, tandoori chicken for the main course, and mini mint chocolate cupcakes and chocolate dipped strawberries for the dessert) - let's hope she can recreate them on the night!

Ugh. I'm cold... And it's grey and horrible and drizzly outside today, which doesn't help my mood. I had better get on and finish up the lesson preparation I've been procrastinating; I know I'll feel better when it's out of the way. If I can just resist the temptation to have "just one quick round" of Scramble ... I curse the day I installed it on my iPod, it's freakishly addictive.

Not a happy bunny

I am stressed.

First of all, there's the dreaded job interview. It's on Tuesday, and I'm a nervous wreck. If I don't get it, I am going to be really miserable. Not least because I genuinely think I'd be better in the job than the other candidate.

Secondly, Bobby is finding his new work role highly stressful. He's very anxious and very tense.

Plus, he has a meeting this morning in which he will learn whether or not he's in the 50% of people who are being let go. He thinks he will probably be okay, but there's still an element of doubt. And, he is worried as he suspects that one of our close friends is going to be on the hit-list.

And finally, Sophie's ill. Her teacher noticed her go faint and dizzy in class yesterday, and the same thing happened this morning at home. She was quite unnerved by the experience - she said she couldn't see all of a sudden. And she has a headache and a sore throat. So I'm taking her to the doctor this morning. Which is not as straightforward as it sounds, since we have one car and now that Bobby's taken on this new role he needs it. We could either walk to the doctor's surgery - it's not very far - or, if she's feeling too poorly, we'll have to take a cab. Fortunately, I am not teaching until this afternoon, so at least I don't have to arrange any cover lessons or inconvenience anyone.

Seems like our lifeplan is falling apart a bit. We came here with the idea that Bobby would take a lower-paid job, he'd be home early in the evenings, and he'd be relieved of all the work stress he had in Florida. And our plan worked well. But now, thanks to the economic crisis that I'm so sick of reading about, his job is even more stressful than the one he left in Florida, and he's working late every evening and going in early every day, so we're back at square one, only without the big salary!

Aaaargh.

Slumdog Millionaire

We went to see Slumdog Millionaire on Friday night, and it was excellent.

Intense, and disturbing. But excellent. And very funny, in places. We had thought of going as a family but then realised it had a 15 rating. And I have to say, the rating is justified - I would definitely not have wanted Sophie to see this film. Far too upsetting for children.

Among other things, the film made me grateful that we live in a place where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is not - on the whole - too huge.

It was a very good evening in general; Bobby and I went out to dinner beforehand, just the two of us, at our favourite Indian restaurant. The food's great, and they always give us a free liqueur afterwards, so what's not to like? I'm glad that, even though we've been married for more than half my life, we still look forward to our date nights.

So that was good.

Saturday, though, was not. We discovered that the girls had nits, and practically the whole day was taken up by going through their heads with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. Now I see why all those Victorian workhouses shaved the orphan's heads. It took bloody hours - only someone who truly loved their child would bother. All the websites said that it's not necessary to do anything special to bed linen and so forth but I was so utterly grossed out by the whole thing that I've washed everything on the hottest possible wash. Shudder. I checked their heads again today, and it all seems okay. Touch wood. Yuck.

And today's been blah as well. I had essays to finish for Weybridge, and work to do for tomorrow, and I worked inefficiently (Facebook doesn't help with this sort of thing) so work plus chores (the dreaded ironing) took up pretty much the whole day.

This coming week I'm going to work smarter, so that my weekend is clear.

Ugh

I am miserable. My throat hurts, my nose is streaming, I keep coughing, my glands are swollen, and my limbs feel tired and sore. In short, I have a cold. A bad cold. If I were a man I would be in hospital.

I do not have time to have a cold. I have an assignment that must be written by Wednesday, and I have lessons that must be planned by Monday. But my brain feels like it's filled with cottonwool and I ache too much to sit at my desk. Walking Sophie to gymnastics this morning was a mistake; it made me feel so grim that I went to bed as soon as I walked back through the door.

Ugh.

What a waste of a weekend!

(Why yes, it is true that I don't cope well with illness! How did you you guess?)

Losing the plot

Over the past few days, I've got appointment times wrong. I've mislaid my wallet. I've left my office key at home. I've prepared lessons, then forgotten that I'd prepared them and redone them. I've gone to the cupboard to make dinner and found that the pasta I was sure was there was not there.

Even by my standards, this is ridiculous.

Either I have early onset dementia or - probably more likely - I currently have too much on my plate. Work is hectic. I'm teaching two subjects, plus I have key skills people to take care of this year (don't ask, it's boring - and time-consuming). Then there's all the admin that goes along with the pastoral side of teaching. The forms! The letters! The interim report data entry! Plus the dreaded PGCE work. Assignments, lesson observations, reflections on lesson observations... I feel weak and a touch panicky even thinking about it.

I just keep telling myself, if I can only get through this year, life will get easier.

On the plus side, the children are all in happy phases which makes life much easier. Of course they too add to the hectic-ness of life. But in a good way.

It's supposed to rain this weekend, and I have (as usual) a ridiculous amount of work to do. But, Bobby and I planning a date-night for tomorrow, so that'll lighten the gloom. Can't wait!

Rainy Monday

It's lunchtime, and here I sit in my classroom, all alone, without even a cup of tea. I cannot bring myself to step outdoors just yet because the wind is howling and the rain is bucketing down (apparently we're in the midst of the winter's biggest storm), and in order to get into the building proper (my department is currently in horrible temporary rooms while they build the new wing) I would have to brave the hostile elements. I hope it stops raining soon... I normally go home early on Mondays so that I can spend some time with the kids before I venture off to beastly Crawley. But the thought of walking home in this - Bobs has the car, as I refused to allow him to cycle in these conditions - does not appeal in the least. I'll have to choose - disappoint my poor Sophie-bug, who looks forward to her regular just-the-two-of-us Monday-afternoon hour before the big kids get home, and get a dry ride home with Bobs when he finishes work - or get completely, utterly drenched to the bone (and probably frozen) on the walk home. This is the sort of weather where an umbrella is worse than useless, as the wind is so strong that any umbrella blows inside-out within seconds. Hmmm. Just thought of another option - I could skip Crawley tonight. That way I'd still see the kids, I wouldn't have to drive in this mess, and - bonus points! - I'd miss tonight's boring session on ICT in the classroom ...

I do not like DIY.

That is all.

What a hellish day.

It was our long-awaited appointment at the French Embassy in London today, so the five of us presented ourselves there, on time, and armed with every conceivable piece of documentation. (Bobby and the kids have South African passports, so they need visas in order to travel to France).

When we finally left the embassy at five this afternoon, after hours and hours of waiting and fruitless argument, begging and pleading, Bobby had a visa in his passport, and the children did not. Apparently the standard birth certificates that the South African government issues are not good enough for the French. Good enough to get the children US visas, good enough for the Dutch to issue them a Schengen visa in 2001 - a visa which, I might add, allowed them to visit France as well - and good enough to get settlement visas to live here in England. But not good enough for the French.

The problem with the kids' birth certificates is that they don't list us as parents. So there's no direct proof that they are in fact related to us. We went to the South African High Commission to see if they could organise something for us and they said yes, we could get an unabridged certificate - but it'd have to come from Pretoria, and it'd take four months.

Not much help to us, then, since we are supposed to leave for Paris on Sunday. So, no visas for the kids.

And you know what's so fucking unfair about this, is that if you come from North America, or Britain, or Australia, or New Zealand, you don't need a visa at all. If you come from anywhere in Africa, though - or anywhere at all third-world-ish - then it's a different story. Seems like thinly veiled racism to me.

I am incredibly disappointed and frustrated and sad about this.

Our first instinct was to cancel the trip altogether. It's something we've looked forward to, as a family, for so many months now. There's so much we want to share with the children ... so many memories we would have been able to create...

But, my parents have offered to look after the children for us here, so that Bobby and I can still make the trip. As they said this afternoon, it won't be the same without the children, but it will still be a good trip. Just not the trip we'd planned. They are pretty darn amazing, my parents. And so are my children. They are bitterly disappointed too, but none of them is being whiny or sulky about this whole fiasco. Instead, they are planning things that they can do with their grandparents next week. I am really, really proud of them.

The weekend : thirteen things and a picture ...

Spring is coming, the daffodils are here again!





1. Saturday was a horrid day, and it was entirely my fault. I woke up in a foul mood, and I was snappy and mean to everyone, all day long. I knew I was being unreasonable, and I just couldn't stop. It was awful.
2. Sunday I woke up feeling normal again, thank God, and we had a lovely day.
3. We drove to Beccles and spent the day with my parents.
4. The kids had fun playing badminton in the drizzle.
5. And my mom cooked us a delicious meal.
6. We had to use the mapbook to find our way there and back, so it took us a bit more than the usual three hours.
7. It is pitiful, how much we miss our dearly departed satellite navigation system.
8. The traffic was horrible on the M25 coming home, so we had ample time to stare into the cars creeping along beside and in front of us. About 80% of them had satellite navigation systems.
9. The group least likely to have one seemed to be old men in hats.
10. This morning I woke up to find that my period had started, which goes some way to explaining the horror of Saturday.
11. It is weird though, because my period wasn't supposed to arrive for at least another week.
12. I am going to be really irritated if my already short cycles get even shorter.
13. I am typing this at work before lessons start, and feeling faintly uncomfortable about it because I feel like everyone who walks behind me is reading over my shouder.

We're still here.

As in, not moved.

Despite leaving (she says) dozens of messages, the leasing agent has unable to contact the landlord since Friday afternoon. So, even though we were resigned to moving into the house before the electricity thing had been sorted out, we couldn't, because the landlord would have had to sign some sort of liability thing because the boiler hadn't been tested.

And there's more.

The agent had said that the landlord had cleared out all the furniture in the house last week (it was part-furnished; we said we wanted it unfurnished; she said that would be fine). But yesterday morning we saw someone loading stuff from the house into a van and then driving off; peering through the house window, we saw that there is still quite a bit of furniture in there. Van driver did not reappear all day, even though we kept checking for him.

As for the cleaning thing - well, our look through the window showed that it is worse than we remembered. We can't put our stuff in there till it's had a thorough going-over. The agent has said that the landlord has "a team of cleaners on standby, waiting to get in as soon as the electricity is sorted out."

Right. I have about as much faith in those cleaners materialising as I do of Donald Rumsfeld finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The agent has left a message with our current landlord yesterday, to say that we can't move out this weekend. I do not know how he is going to respond.

The agency doesn't work on Sundays, so nothing can be resolved today.

So here we sit, in amongst our packed boxes.

Our milk is being delivered to the new house tomorrow morning.

And our internet access will disappear tomorrow morning, when our phone gets disconnected.

I suppose things will become clearer on Monday. I am just so tired of dealing with untruthful, inefficient people. At this stage I would love to just walk away from the whole deal even if means forfeiting our deposit. But there just aren't any other houses available round here. Is the universe trying to tell me that we aren't meant to live here? Or is it just telling me that there are a lot of disorganised liars in the property business?

Time to get breakfast going. It really, really irks me that I will have to unpack some boxes in order to do that.

Un-fucking-believable.

The house we're moving into tomorrow? I got a call from the leasing agent at 4.30 this afternoon. There's a "slight hitch", apparently. The hitch is that the owner has lost(?) the key card for the "electric box", and is waiting for new one to be sent from the manufacturer. As best as we can figure out, the electricity must be the pay-as-you-go sort, and he's lost the card that lets him put money on the meter. This means that, firstly, the leasing company can't sign off on the safety check - obviously they can't certify that the boiler (aka hot water heater aka geyser) is safe if they can't switch it on. It also means that the house, which is currently filthy, can't be cleaned, since there's no electricity for vacuum cleaners etc. It also means that, since we have to move this weekend come what may, WE WILL HAVE NO FUCKING ELECTRICITY TILL WHO KNOWS WHEN!

AAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHH!

There is, according to the leasing agent, a small - very small - chance that she may be able to get another working card from the post office for us. So we have one tiny glimmer of hope. But I am not holding my breath; there was no conviction in the agent's voice when she told me this. In fact, she sounded utterly defeated.

Oh, and I have a job interview on Wednesday morning. Let's hope we have hot water and laundry facilities by then or I will not be making a good impression.