My Manager and Assistant Manager.

Dear World,

Meet my manager and assistant manager. They produced this last night. I can now see why they looked the way they did this morning!

Not sure about the hats, but hey ho.
'Nuff said!

Facebook

If anyone actually reads this (apart from Dad), you may wonder why I have disappeared from Facebook. To be honest, I don't really know. My account was disabled with no warning or explanation, and my many emails to Facebook have gone unanswered over a week later.

The 'help' page suggests that I may have violated their terms of use, and other web forums give more concrete reasons that accounts are disabled suddenly and without warning. To my knowledge, I have not done any of those things!

I am not impressed at their lack of communication, however I am keeping my emails polite and concise, for now. If they condescend to reinstate my account, I will be cutting my losses! I will simply use it to back up all the contact details I actually want / need then abandoning it, since one can never actually delete it completely anyway! My final status update will be a warning to all other users to back up contact details in case this random 'disabling' happens to their accounts.

Ah well, back to 'old fashioned' email and blogging for me!

Typical.

Back to work today after the summer holiday, hoping but not really expecting to find the promised re-decorations completed. It was worse than expected, to the point that it will be difficult to function when the students return next week!

To be fair, the walls are now a nice bright blue, much better than the faded, peeling, 70's style, fake-wood print cladding that was there before, and they have given the ceiling a lick of paint, though it still needs replacing having been patched up with bits of ply when past students put pool cues through it. We also have a full set of working lights, which is exciting. Apparently there was a load of random stuff behind the cladding that needed removing which delayed the process, like cast iron radiator brackets. It is a very old building!

The floor has not been sorted out yet, so we still have ancient, mis-matched, peeling lino tiles in the tea room. The radiators in the classroom are sitting on blocks of wood away from the walls. The computer room has no fitted tables. There is no sink or work surface in the tea room. The windows still lack blinds or curtains. We STILL have no internet, which was promised before Christmas!

These things will get done we are told. Unfortunately the contractors can't do the floor until half term, and many of the other things rely on the floor being in place, such as the sink and fitted tables. The radiators will APPARENTLY be fitted this week. The windows need to be re-measured for blinds, as the cladding was so thick they had to fill in bits around the window frames once it was removed! After that happens, we hope the blinds can also be fitted at half term, though it seems unlikely... No one knows when we will join the information super-highway, but I live in hope.

The problem with all this, is that all the crap useful equipment and paperwork from that area is now stored in the workshops and needs to go back so we can work in the workshops. We don't want to put it ALL back, as it will ALL need to come out again at half term. To give you an idea, it took us nearly a week to get it out last time...

*Sigh* We will find a way and muddle through, as we always do, because what we do is important for our kids. I just wish we didn't have to deal with this sort of stuff too.

Allotment!

Hurrah!

We have finally heard from the council and we are getting an allotment. Typical of council efficiency though, some of the plots have been standing empty for a couple of years (and are now completely overgrown), and we have been on the waiting list for about the same length of time... Grr. Luckily the plot we are getting has been covered over, so it won't be as much work as clearing a small patch of jungle like some of the others. It also has a water trough right next to it - score for laziness!

Anyhow, we just need to get the paperwork sorted out, and the plot is ours. We then enter the world of compost, garden sheds and home grown veg. Can't wait!

If anyone has any tips for growing veg in an allotment, let me know. Ta.

Shitty Artwork

This story had me in stitches.

The art is shit, and the consequences of it blowing away are shittier for the people on the receiving end.

KIKE ME

The other day, we found a post-it note on the floor. It had obviously been stuck on someone's back then fallen off unnoticed, as it had the missive "KIKE ME" scrawled on it in careful, yet spidery capital letters.

I wondered what the reaction would have been in a regular school. Responses would, I reckon, range from a simple eye roll and sigh while binning it, a warning about littering, a spelling lesson or even a huge morality lecture on bullying.

What did we do?

We stuck it on the wall and laughed a lot. Then we laughed at the kids who didn't 'get' why we were laughing. Later, we laughed again. It's still there, and still funny.

Normality is certainly over rated.

This made me sad...

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