Neighbours

I have new neighbours and I can only assume they are American (although they may be Canadian - I defy any of you to tell the difference between the accents). How do I know this? Well, it was the casual comment of "We sit here looking at them, looking at us" as I closed my curtains last night.

New neighbours... not upstairs, not downstairs and not across the hall. These new neighbours are across the street!

MCF:H

I have a new addiction. It's an on-line game, one that I play by myself and it's kept me spellbound for hours. The name is Mystery Case Files: Huntsville and it's a simple spot the (half) hidden objects in a detailed picture then do a Chinese puzzle. So simple yet so absorbing.

Footie Photo

You know, I've been trying to get online all day - given myself a headache in the process! Anyway, an update on the footie photos...

I took 338 photos of which, maybe, four or five are decent. The rest are just blurs or completely out of focus. It's interesting because my hit rate with my non-digital camera is much higher (about 80% decent photos) but I put that down to several factors:

1) I'm still getting used to the camera, it's much lighter than I'm used to and therefore camera shake is much more likely (I have to lighten my touch)

2) I was photographing people playing football, an all-action genre and one I'm not used to

3) It was night-time, under floodlights and I didn't make any adjustments for lighting

Initially, I was a little disappointed at the low number of usable photos but, in hindsight, it's not surprising.

Here's my favourite:



I didn't get a shot of the goal but this was the goalie's reaction (and, yes, it isn't totally focussed but you get the message).

Running on empty

This evening I went to watch the school's over-16 football tournament. As I'm sure you know, football is the national passion here - everyone either plays or watches (in fact, admitting you don't like football is akin to admitting you've cooked and eaten your parents) so this evening's event was pretty well attended.

Now, despite accusations otherwise, I didn't go there to see sweaty young men running around in shorts - I went there to photograph sweaty young men running around in shorts! At least that was my excuse to try out my new camera.

Things were going fine (I'm told the football was good) and I took something like 300 (yes, three hundred) photos when half way through the final my battery ran out - arrgghhhh!

So now I'm waiting for the battery to recharge (it takes about three and a half hours and I must get a spare) before I can look at the shots, delete the 299 rubbish ones and show you lot the decent one. Oh, and I've arranged to photograph the winners in school on Monday evening.

32 Degrees

When I left for work this morning at 10:30am there was bright sunshine and an ambient temperature of 32 degrees. At 1pm while I was out getting my lunch the sky was overcast. At 1:30, while I was eating my lunch the wind got up and it got darker still. Then on the stroke of 2pm, as if it were waiting for the pips, the heavens opened and BsAs was flooded again.

Unfortunately I had left all my windows open (32 degrees remember) and what with the rain, I was pretty sure that I'd have some rain on the floor. So on my break I raced home to find...

a swimming pool in my living room.

I was so shocked I didn't even take any photos!

A rapid mop-up followed by a hands and knees wipe over and the floor was dry(ish). The plants on the balcony had taken a bit of a battering and one of the curtains was dripping but no serious damage was done.

Really, what kind of weather is that?

The eyes have it

We're coming to the end of the year here and starting the run up to end of year exams. All those students who've been just a little too laid-back during the year are suddenly starting to look worried and I keep getting comments such as "I owe you three pieces of writing". Now I admit I'm not the best at marking writing, just trying to decipher some of my students' handwriting is bad enough without trying to understand what they are trying to say.

However this is made much worse when I'm suddenly handed a bundle of written work six weeks after the due date. I can't remember what the writing was about at that point let alone how I marked it for the people who handed it in on time. Now, in theory, it shouldn't matter how I marked the others, I should be marking each piece against the criteria set by the original question but, in reality, it isn't that simple. It is pretty commonly admitted in the staffroom that students who do their exams on a different date to the rest of the class usually score lower than their peers. We don't know why but there seems to be some sort of collective consciousness in an exam room that helps participants and the same applies to written work.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that I'm about to be inundated with loads of student writing. My eyes, my eyes.

Walking on a sunny afternoon

Spent today with my friends. We went to La Boca, Plaza Mayo and San Telmo. Here are some shots showing our route...

La Casa Roja

Calle Mayor, san Telmo

Plaza de Defensa, San Telmo

Painted Houses, La Boca

Window Sculpture, La Boca


and this has only taken me three days to upload - ah, the wonders of modern technology.

Zoo

I spent a wonderful afternoon at the zoo with my friends, took loads of photos (a selection of which are shown here) and managed not to get sunburnt even thought it was as hot as hades today. I love the new camera although it's much more sensitive than I'm used to, but with 2 gigabytes of memory I've plenty of room for shaky shots, blurred focus and experimenting.

Anyway here's a selection...


Don't know what this is. Can anyone tell me (I do know it's indigenous to South America)



Can you see the aligator?



Some form of parrot (especially for Audrey)



Did you know elephants can walk backwards? (and do so for fun)

More soon - I'm thinking of starting a photoblog where I post one image a day. What do you think?

Saturday morning

Saturday morning and, after a spectacular thunderstorm last night, BsAs is just beginning to wake up. The sound of bird song is diminishing and the rumble of traffic is increasing, they'll fight a battle over it for a while but ultimately the birds will win.

My friends arrived yesterday, slightly bleary-eyed but full of enthusiasm for their holiday. They brought my new camera with them and I've started taking photos - next up, loading the photos onto the PC. I will be studying the manual for a while. See you later.

Never mind the quality feel the width

It's a quarter past eleven at night and I'm ready to go to bed. This is not normal for me. Normal for me is one in the morning but I just can't keep my eyes open. I think it's the disturbed sleep over the weekend. Four nights of sleeping in beds (or horizontal coach seats) that are only two foot six inches wide (that's about eighty centimetres to you metric types) has not been good. It isn't that the beds are too narrow (although they are) it's that I have nowhere to put my arms. I like to sleep with my knees bent but my arms stretched out - a cross between a foetus and a yearner in the following diagram:



and narrow beds mean my hands hang off the edge - and I don't like my hands to be ahanging! It isn't that I'm afraid of the monster under the bed (we came to an agreement many years ago, I won't push him out into the cold daylight providing he doesn't attack me - it works well enough) I just don't like the dead feeling I get when my hands aren't supported. Luckily I have a wide bed here (a queen sized one - no comments please) and I don't have to share it. So now I'm going to get into it and fling my arms about as much as I please.

Good night and sleep well my lovelies.

Ankles, hips and calves

So, L and I went away for a relaxing weekend in Cordoba.

Now it's three days later and I have a sprained ankle, painful calf muscles and aching hips. - where does the relaxing come into it???

Photos to follow soon.

1492 and all that...

This coming weekend is a holiday weekend which means no meeting on Friday and no teaching on Monday. It's Christopher Columbus day (or something similar - hey I'm British, how the hell would I know?) and the day is to mark his discovery of the Americas.

Of course he wasn't the first to discover the Americas. Apart from the native population, there had been Viking visitors ever since the tenth century (give or take) but I guess Chrissie was the first to make a big fuss about it. Interestingly this continent isn't named after Columbus but supposedly after Amerigo Vespucci. If you want to know more go here. Anyway, the upshot is I get a day off work.

So I'm off to Cordoba (the Argentine one, not the Spanish one) for a few days r&r. I have a stack of homework to take with me to mark but I plan on enjoying some long(ish) walks, taking lots of photographs and catching up on my sleep. I'm going with L so it should be peaceful all round.

Four out of seven

So, what has happened today? Well I started the day feeling a little down after the wonderfulness that was my birthday (did I tell you the school buys cake for everyone on a birthday?).

I looked at the work I had to do for my on-line course and thought I'd never meet the deadlines but this afternoon I had an amazing burst of productivity and managed to do four out of the seven tasks outstanding. The remaining are all 'think/reflect' type tasks which I expect to be able to do tomorrow.

Sometimes I amaze myself!

8th October 1961

It's my birthday today. After many hours of painful labour my mum finally pushed me out at 22:35 GMT. She says it was worth it - I'm inclined to agree.

I'm now forty-six years old. I feel about seventeen and look about thirty-six (or so my students tell me [isn't bribery a wonderful thing] no really they do, honest! would I lie to you?).

Thank you to everyone who has sent me birthday wishes, they are all appreciated and next year I'll be celebrating in the UK.

See you then.

Elephants

Yessssss! I did it. Only for about a minute mind, but I did it.



So that's elephant, camel, horse and donkey. Anything else you think I should ride?

Colour

With the return of the miserable weather has come the return of my miserable sore throat and blocked nose. However I am confident that these will disappear as quickly as they have appeared once the weather improves. In the meantime, to cheer myself up, I have surrounded myself with flowers and the colour orange.



The flowers are a mixture of fresias (from L when she came to tea) and marigolds which I bought for the colour. In addition I have mandarins all over the place. I'm not that bothered about eating them (although I will get around to it eventually), it's more about having the colour around me.

Orange is my favourite colour (equal with purple) as it symbolises life, energy and vitality without the aggression of red (at least to me) and I need all the life, energy and vitality I can get at the moment. When I lived in London, my living room was painted orange - a very tasteful colour wash of dark orange with terracotta and warm yellow swirled through it. It was always a happy, warm room. As you know, here in BsAs, all the walls of the flat I live in are painted grey - miserable, drab and lifeless. No doubt it would win some style award or something for being shiney if nothing else, but for actually living in...

Whither the weather...

After a lovely day yesterday, the weather gods decided to get their own back today.

I was woken up at 8am by thunder. Now those of you who know me, know I can sleep through anything - I did sleep through the 87 hurricane in London - so for the thunder to wake me it must have been loud. Then, instead of venting it's anger, so to speak, the thunder continued to grumble throughout the day and now at midnight it's still rumbling. On top of that it has rained, oh how it has rained. The old 'cats and dogs' doesn't even begin to describe it. I've said before how it rains here absolutely vertically unless there's a wind blowing at which point the vertical becomes horizontal, well today there was no wind but the rain showers were pretty regular. So about once an hour for fifteen minutes, the heavens opened and the earth was flooded.

I managed to get to and from work (and a quick trip out for food) without getting too wet but some of my students were imitating drowned rats (and only about a quarter turned up). It reminds me of Egypt, land of the eternally warm weather, when it actually rained for three days. Nobody knew what to do as it hadn't rained in Cairo for about twenty years. The roads were mudslides, the cars discovered what the windscreen wipers were for and then discovered that they didn't work - fun for all!

You know I am looking forward to the summer, I need my sunshine but I do miss the British rain.

Busy, busy, busy

I had a wonderful day today. First a talk with my beloved parents about their plans for the future - molto interessante. Then I helped L return a computer she'd borrowed, we had a great parilla lunch followed by an extremely long walk. We (I) needed the walk to, well, to walk-off the lunch and I needed to check the location of the place J will be staying in with her family. However, all that left us exhausted so instead of walking the remaining distance home we hopped on the subte.

By time I got home my feet felt like they were on fire - I haven't done that much walking in a long time and the cheap trainers I've got aren't really intended for city walking. Still it was good to be out in the warm sunshine (even though I stay in the shade) rather than in the dark and horrible flat. BTW I now get about two hours of sunshine coming onto the balcony in the middle of the afternoon (ie the time when I'm at work) but I'm hopeful this will increase as the summer goes on.

I sorted out the strawberries this evening and the fridge is full of strawberry-stuffed jelly while the freezer is full of freshly frozen strawberries - Mmmmmm. Then I've finished the day by doing some of my on-line course stuff.

I am ready for bed.