Or should that be, I have learners? I met the instructor outside the learner’s house, as arranged, and we went in together. We met D, the learner, a Romanian woman of about my age, and then she introduced us to her husband, G and her cousin (or possibly he was her husband’s cousin? I wasn’t…
Everything’s all white outside, and there are beautiful dew-bedecked spiderwebs covering all the bushes (I don’t want to think about how many spiders that adds up to!) – I think Autumn must be here. The big news for this week is that I had my last ESOL-HT class! Well, technically it’s the second last, because…
Early yesterday morning the phone rang. It was lytteltonwitch with some shocking news: she’d just heard that otakuu‘s husband had died. I raced to LiveJournal, and there was a post from otakuu telling her friends that her Beloved was gone. And if I needed further confirmation, the media was already reporting the death, as The…
On Saturday night lytteltonwitch and I went to the Chinese Lantern Festival in Victoria Square. I’d never been to the festival before (other than unexpectedly coming across the unlit lanterns during the day once), so I had no idea how popular it was. I arrived at Victoria Square just after 5pm, and already there were…
As you can probably guess by the frequency of updates to my diary, things haven’t really quietened down yet. Work is still busy, I’ve got huge amounts of work to do study-wise, and the ESOL classes on Tuesday nights aren’t helping, because I have to go straight there from work to get there in time,…
I knew going to a convention in late February was going to be a bad idea. I feel like I haven’t had a chance to breathe since coming back from Wellington, let alone do things like update my diary. It’s one of our busiest times of year at work, of course (and although I don’t…
I haven’t posted pictures for a long time of the cross-stitch I’ve been doing for awhina‘s wedding, but I’ve been quietly working away at it: It’s looking pretty good, but my two big worries now are that I’m rapidly running out of time (the wedding’s on 7 April, and I’ve got to leave enough time…
I’ve been back from Wellington for three days, and so far I’ve failed miserably with my attempts to catch up with sleep, reading friends’ diaries, and writing my own. Maybe at the weekend… I have managed (just!) to finish making release notes on all the books I released in Wellington though. A long slow process…
Most driving times charts will tell you that you can drive from Christchurch to Picton in 4 or 5 hours. Maybe allow 6 for breakdowns or if you want to stop for lunch. But they don’t take into account having three bookcrossers in the car, two of whom are also geocachers. We were up bright…
I thought it was only lytteltonwitch who attracts weird people, but it seems to be rubbing off on me. Last night I was in town for my ESOL class (which was really interesting – among other things we talked about cultural differences and culture shock, and had a talk from a Chinese woman who emigrated…