one good apple

or two school days well spent…

I’ve been pretty absent from the blogging world lately.  I’m in the midst of exam marking and playing catch-up constantly at work and attending various meetings and parents evenings and showing round visitors so when I get home there’s a huge temptation to just sit on the sofa and stare at the telly until bedtime.  Shamefully, this is a temptation I have been giving in to lately.

A couple of weekends ago, before the general end of term chaos begain we went back to Yorkshire for my stepdad’s 65th birthday, father’s day, and his retirement bash.  Three celebrations rolled into one which is pretty useful when you think about it really.  So thank you George!

We also went to the North Yorkshire County Show that’s just down the road from my mum’s house.  I used to love the fairs when I was a kid.  We’d enter handwriting and painting competitions through school and Aunty Eileen, our old babysitter, would spend a day with us baking fairy cakes and jam tarts for the cake competitions.  Aunty Eileen was a baker and cake maker by trade so we always had a slightly unfair advantage over the other kids who were entering.  And so it was that half way through the day we’d go and look at our entries to see where we’d be placed, collect our winnings then scatter off to spend it on mexican jumping beans and rainbow sherbert.

There were no winnings this year but there was still plenty to keep us going.  It was John’s first county show too, him being a city boy.  I think he particuarly liked the way the farm boys gathered round the sheep all excited-like.

God, I love going home x

I’ve seen a couple of people who’ve done this meme now, notably Mandy, and thought I’d give it a go.  It’s the first thing in days that’s dragged me out of the *meh* mood that I’ve been in lately so thank you ladies.

La rules: type the answers to the questions below in flickr, choose an image from the first page and put them into fd’s mosaic maker.  Oh, and don’t delete your choices three times and have to start again because you’re trying to do three things at once.  Definitely don’t do that.

Okay, I’m going to do these questions as a list; your name, favourite food, high school, favourite colour, celebrity crush, favourite drink, dream vacation, favourite desert, what did you want to be when you grown up, what you love most in life, one word to describe you and your flickr name.

And my answers; emily, lasagne, thirsk, green, donald sutherland, cranberry and orange, canada, pavlova, a writer, donald and enid, dreamy, one good apple.  Have fun and let me know if you do meme too. Oh, and hop over to my flickr for a link to photo credits x

Now I just need it to be the summer holidays and for there not to be 400 scripts that need marking on my desk at home…  Got this link from Floresita and it’s made my Monday x

Every morning on my way to work I drive past the Liverpool Dental Hospital and the set of traffic lights just outside it mean that I always have a chance to sneak at the peek at the people waiting to go in.

Having come from a small town in the middle of nowhere, it came as quite a shock to realise that NHS dentists aren’t handed to you on a platter in the city.  No more so than the time a couple of years ago when - still dentist-less - my wisdom teeth decided to act up.  Toothache is like nothing else.  When you have a stomach ache you can curl up to try and relieve it, sometimes a dark room can help a headache, but toothache?  Well that’s a different matter.

And so, at 7.30 in the morning after another sleepless night I trudged down to the dental hospital to begin the joyless task of queuing up to have my already sore mouth prodded and poked by a tired and overworked student.  I wasn’t even the first one outside, there were people ahead of me in the queue and I patiently went in, took my ticket and settled down for the long haul.

There was a happy ending of course, one that involved no blood and lots of lovely anti-biotics but I remembered my little adventure for two reasons this morning.  The first is that my wisdom teeth are having their bi-annual grumble again, when I feel like I’d imagine my new niece does now her first teeth are coming through.  The second is that when I drove through town this morning I was thinking about how I don’t really wear any make up for school because it’s not important for me to be all dolled up for a bunch of teenagers and how sometimes people can make too much of an effort for something that doesn’t really need it, I looked to my right at the hospital doors and saw a young couple dressed up to the nines, with not a hair out of place, fully made-up, waiting for the doors to open so they could have their mouths poked and prodded and examined.  And somewhere between seeing them and singing along to Paul Simon I thought, maybe I’ll wear some mascara tomorrow.  I’m not really sure what this says about me… x

It’s been ages since I’ve been back to Yorkshire and this half term I was really ready for it.  School’s been pretty rubbish lately for various reasons so going home to see my mum and get pampered has been a light at the end of the tunnel.  Anyone who thinks teachers have it easy could not be more wrong.  So, I left John and the rabbits to their own devices in Liverpool and skipped up the motorway to car boot sales, family days out at museums, all you can eat buffets in pizza hut and trips to the bank holiday markets. 

There must be something about the Yorkshire air but whenever I’m home I sleep like a baby.  Maybe it’s because I know that when I have to get up my mum’ll wake me and if I want a cup of tea or a sandwich my stepdad’ll make it for me.  And there’s never an unexpected gap where the toliet roll should be.  I’m not suprised my sister only moved fifteen minutes away, there’s something very comforting about being near your mum isn’t there? 

Whilst rummaging through the drawers at home I found some old photos that mum and I spent a whole evening uploading.  Me and mum,

my dad and me

and me again, stuffing Seabrook crisps into my mouth like there’s no tomorrow and sporting a rather dapper pair of shoes. 

And that hat.  I had a lot of clothes with my name on but apparently that hat cause quite a lot of trauma one night when we went to the opening of our new village hall only for the wind to blow my hat off into the night.  My dad searched frantically for it and even went back out the next morning to scour the fields for the thing but to no avail.  Maybe somewhere in North Yorkshire there is a sheep that goes by the name of Emily and has some very snazzy headwear.

It’s been a hot and humid day today, no sunshine but lots of heat.  And then this afternoon the heavens open.  Thunder rumbling, lightning flashing, rain pouring down in torrents.  And all the time, it’s still warm and mild and this makes the rain refreshing.  Everything perks up a little, ourselves included and we hang out the bedroom window just watching the rain and counting the gaps between the thunder and the lightning and making sure Donald and Enid aren’t too freaked out by the whole thing.  Warm rain is one of my favourite things in the world.  Just the smell afterwards is worth it, when the whole place just smells green. 

And the rain really meant staying in this afternoon so I finished off a piece of embroidery for John.  He loves astronomy and I found this sweet little pattern from The Flossbox on etsy.  I found some cheap canvases in town a couple of weeks ago so just fixed the finished object to the back of one of them and hung it in the living room.

I loved embroidering this and John enjoyed telling me exactly what colour every planet and moon and satellite should be.  A good team effort.  I’ve ironed the pattern onto some plain terrycloth which I think I’ll make into some kind of little bag.  You can never have enough bags.  I’m also in the midst of making a leaving present for one of the girls at work who’s leaving in a couple of weeks.  I do not want her to go…

I’m going to enjoy the rain a little more and get ready for school tomorrow.  And eat a chocolate brownie x

It’s 8am on a Saturday morning and I’m typing this whilst making strange noises at Donald in order to make him stop chewing the wallpaper.  I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it is that is so incredibly tasty about wallpaper but he doesn’t just rip it off, he attempts to eat it too.  The wall that appears to be his kill zone is now covered with LPs in order to dissuade him from chewing.  This hasn’t worked, he just moves them to one side and continues nibbling.  Sometimes, in a moment of ingenuity I’ll move the records around while he’s not looking so that they’re in a different order.  Then I watch him as he hops along, examining them and looking for his ‘in’ to the wall, in this case The Velvet Underground by The Velvet Underground, push it to one side and realise, hey, this isn’t the bit of wall I was working on earlier!  And then I observe, in much the same way as I imagine Brody and Hooper and Quint observed when that massive shark in Jaws started systematically dismantling the boat, the little sod knock down each and every record leaning against the wall until he finds his ‘patch’ and gets back to work.  Of course, he eats the record too now.  He has a particular fondness for the Bob Dylan ones, and Buffalo Springfield.  I couldn’t tell you why but Bruce Springsteen doesn’t interest him at all, nor does Van Morrison.

With this in mind, and having watched The Money Pit yet again last night whilst waiting for Dirty Sexy Money to start I cross-stitched this,

Just need a dilapidated house pattern to use as a border and I’m golden. 

I started making a coat last weekend but couldn’t be bothered to do the last bits of finishing - the button holes, the hemming, the dull stuff that if I was a millionaire I would get someone else to do - so that’s my job for this morning.  We have no plans for this weekend other that going to John’s mother’s on Sunday to give his dad his birthday present so I’ll probably spend the rest of the day fiddling with bits and bobs in the house and maybe have a trot into town. 

Going into town means I get to go on the bus.  I love going on the bus.  So much so that if I’m meeting someone in town and I’m running late I’ll still hang around at the bus stop for ten minutes to see if one’ll come along before I flag a taxi down.  On the bus you get to read and listen to music and it doesn’t matter how much you had to drink the night before.  You can listen to other people’s conversations and look at things out of the window when you go past.  I get to do none of these things on the fourty minute drive to and from work five days a week. 

Because of this whole Capital of Culture thing her at the moment there’s loads of building work going on and lots of old places being torn down.  One of the old houses my bus route goes past has the whole front taken off and you can see the old wallpaper and fireplaces and shelves still on the remaining walls.  It even has part of the staircase still intact.  I love looking in an imagining what it was like to live there.  When I was a kid I used to stand on my head with my back against the sofa and imagine what it would be like to live on the ceiling.  I suppose this is the logical, slightly more grown up version of doing that.

So, to town, to town, to buy presents for the Magic Yarn Ball swap I’m doing on Craftster at the moment.  And maybe a treat or two for myself too.  I’ll put these two to good use too I think,

Have a good weekend x 

Not got much mojo this week.  I think it’s probably a combination of going back to school and this miserable weather we’re having at the moment.  I mean, snow?  In April?  Come on… 

So anyway, I’ve consoled myself with embroidery and made this picture

that was meant to fit into a frame and be part of my mum’s birthday present.   Too big for the frame.  Meh.  It can become something else when I get a little more motivated.  I also finished off a shopping bag for my sister,

This week a kid who left school last year came in to say hello to me and let me know how he was getting on.  This is a kid who last year was banned from my classroom for forcibly berating me on the corridor because I’d ask him to leave the class.  And he wasn’t just banned from the classroom, he wasn’t even allowed to talk to me on the corridor, in the canteen, the whole kit and caboodle.  The whole thing had straightened itself out by the time he left, but if there was one kid I would not expect to want me to know what he is up to now, then it would be him.  And there he was bright as day and I was really very proud of him. 

When you work in a school you tend to get really insular.  The seasons come and go and the kids move up the school ladder but as soon as they leave you don’t really think too much about what happens to them.  So it was nice to see someone who just wasn’t made for school doing well in the real world.  It also made me realise why some people say in the same school for the whole of their career.  There’s something very comforting and cocoon-like about being in a place where not a whole lot changes.  Of course there are changes and there areunbelievable pressures that you have to cope with every day but there’s a lot of safety there too.  Like Neverland but with league tables and target grades, stacks of marking and not time to do it, kids who can’t wait to get out and grown ups saying, ‘I’m sorry, is my lesson interrupting your conversation?’

Today I’m going out for a pad around my neighbourhood with a Brownie Cresta II camera I got for £1 at a car boot sale a couple of weeks ago.  I’d bought it more for show than anything else so was quite surprised when I got home to find that it would work and had nothing missing.  Then it’s shepherd’s pie for tea, the only meal I cook that John actually enjoys eating. I’m quite the Gordon Ramsey you know … x 

My mum came up to Liverpool on Thursday and we went out and did some touristy things that I wouldn’t have done if she wasn’t there.  St Georges Hall,

and the Walker Art Gallery,

St George’s Hall was particularly good, the last time I went was for a Freshers Fair in my first year of uni and nothing will spoil the ambiance of a place more than obnoxious students. 

It’s kind of a sad story but the man who made the hall killed himself not long after it had been completed.  You see, what happened was, they built it the wrong way round.  On day one of construction someonehad the plan, looked at it, and placed the first stone.  Then the second and the third and well, you get the idea, without realising that it was facing the opposite direction to what it should be.  So what you have now is the most amazing building, a total testament to Liverpool as an economic and social force, that has it’s back to it’s own ornamental tiered gardens and instead chooses to face a busy main road.