Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Back To School 2013!

Ack. Back to 6.00 am risings. Back to Year 8, a class I will have to get to know and hope I can get on with. Back to trying to run a library on $3000 a year, if they haven't taken off more or decided, over the holidays, that we will have to ask a co-ordinator for money every time we need to buy something.

We began yesterday. I took a pile of donations from my book blogger friend Stephanie Campisi. Today I'm taking some more. A huge bag that should keep the readers going for a while. We spent most of yesterday in meetings. Thank heaven I don't have a class today - they only have Year 7. I will have a little time to prepare, if not for getting the library going, then for class.

LATER...

The day is over. I was caught up in plenty of first-day stuff and did very little else. I opened the library at lunchtime to see who would come and met some Year 7 boys. Two of them wanted books - lovely!

Tomorrow I 'll have a book club meeting to arrange days and activities. Hopefully there will be more manuscripts to read and maybe some writers. Can't wait to show the younger ones the ebook apps!

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Holiday stuff

I'm trying not to think too much about the year to come. The timetable at this stage is scary, with most of my class time with my new home room lumped together on Fridays plus a literacy period, so I won't be in the library much on Fridays. And they have removed a period of Pathways to make room for more maths so I not only have to work out how to get the fundraising unit done in half the time, but I'm "underalloted" so will get pulled out of the library for covering other people's classes more often than I like.

So, no, I'm thinking holidays. Yesterday was the first day of 2013. I washed the floors, cleaned the bathroom and wrote a few hundred words of my novel. Hopefully I will write some more today.

And while I was doing my house cleaning, I had some dough rising. My poor oven has been out of action for quite a while, so today or tomorrow I will be calling a plumber to see if I can get it fixed finally. But meanwhile I've discovered pan-fried bread - flat bread rather like naan, which takes about fifteen minutes to make, counting the time you spend mixing. I got it from the Internet, on Taste.com.au

And yesterday I made use of the Greek cookbook my library tech, Lucy, gave me before the holidays, to make pita bread. It uses yeast. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but most of the pitot rose high enough to be rolls - flattish hamburger bun type rolls. And guess what? Delicious! :-) So maybe if I can work out why it happened I will do it on purpose next time. I had one this morning with a delicious soft cheese left over from my Yuletide picnic. Yum! I have no idea how it would toast, but hopefully I will have finished all my pita breads before they get stale.