Snowflakes that fall on my nose and eyelashes...

Hello!

Well, it snowed! In Bristol! We had snow early thursday morning. I looked out my window at 6.45am and there was not much, when I got out of the shower and looked again at 7.30 it was all blanketed in white. Not enough to close schools etc, unlike the midlands, who had a fair bit of snow and had school closures. The day before had been freezing cold driving to work in the morning. Thursday snowed in the morning and was pretty much done when I got into the car at 7.45am. Yesterday It snowed again, not as much, but I had to work ages away, and pretty much the whole way there I was driwing through snow. This in itself is an odd experience, asthe snow doesn't stick to the windscreen like rain does, and it kind of comes at the car, then goes up and over the car as you drive through it. It looks like driving through stars at warp speed on bad dodgy star trek as the closer you get to the snow it pulls towards your car and goes horizontal instead of vertical. It amused me on my hour and a bit long drive to woop woop.

Yesterday I was working in a place called 'Calne' which is near Swindon where I have worked before, which requires a few junctions on the motorway. Then Calne is down the other side, in little hicksville areas, as opposed to main cities. And it didn't exist on my Swindon street directory or my wholeof UK one, so as I got closer and was actually in Calne (I had looked it up on online maps and worked out roughly how to get there) I had to stop and get a Calne street directory. So now I have 5 street directories in my car! On the way to this place you get to drive past New Zealand, which is odd. I wonder which New Zealand came first!

Anyways, the school requested a 'strong teacher' and select rang me. Cos i'm a badass teacher! HAHAH! I think cos i survive all the innercity bristol schools with Somali refugees and issues that come with that. So I am pretrified cos this area isn't as multicultural so what issues they have would be more 'feral children' than children who are a product of their mum and dad being drug dealers and moving around all the time getting welfare. I get there, and i knew the school was a St sumthingorother, but I was thing CofE like all the ones I have been to. No, it was a roman catholic school. The school is very open plan, the head teacher was very enthusaistic. The children were great. A couple were a bit lively, but u get that. But they did their work and were able to work independantly at their desks and do things like write stories by themselves. Which I am not used to. I have not been at a school where yr 2 are at a yr 2 level for ages! I am used to yr 2 who are barely able to write their name, let alone focus on an activity indepoendantly for 45 minutes!!!! So at the end of the day when it came to me leaving the school secretary said 'so you survived then?' and i explained what i was used to and said i had a good day. And she said 'oh, so if we asked you back you'd come?' with a shocked tone. I said yes. Yesterday was a walk in the park for what I'm used to. I didn't have to yell and scream once and I didn't really have to raise my voice! I suppose for that area they were a bit lively and they could have carried away and gone too far if they weren't under control, but compared to what I'm used to, they were angels!!

There were all these decomposing snowmen out in the playground from the day before, as it was only 2'C and not warm enough for them to melt but in the rain their heads had comeoff of they had falled over. Poor snowmen!

Thats pretty much my week. Work, and work and work. Huzzah for 4 days teaching! that means I will get good money next friday, instead of the no money I will get after I have my week off during mid-term break to go to Austria. I can't believe the teachersover here,whinging that they have 7 weeks without a holiday when other schools in other areas have 6. I told them in Australia we have between 11 and 13 week terms with no break in the middle. They looked so concerned for how Australian teachers survive without holidays every 5-7 weeks. Wimps! I didn't tell them I was used to working 50 weeks a year with no holidays. Cos I think some of them would have fainted at the thought of that!!

Anyways, I'mgoing to get out of my PJs now and have me some brekky. Thanks for all the comments on the last blog. Nice to get some feedback from time to time.

Fare thee well!