so long and thanks for all the fish

i've written a lot of rubbish on this blog over the past few months and it has been good to have a place to be silly and waffle on a bit. but for a whole bunch of reasons the time has come for me to take an official break from blogging for a while. i know this will impact hugely upon a world wide audience of about 11, but i thought i should be polite enough to say "don't watch this space". at least not for a little bit. but thanks for dropping in when you did. i appreciated it.

expertise

okay so yesterday i was advised by the australian person who is the 'expert' on what our malaysian guests need/want from the courses we are writing that i should take out all that controversial stuff about sociology and culture and difference and just focus on learning theory

so figuring that i should bow to someone else's superior wisdom i took most of it out and rebadged it as innofensive things like cultural diversity

and in my meeting today with the malaysian team, about the only gap they saw in the materials was "where is the sociology"...

quite a hard question to answer really.

seeing stars...

every so often i get one of those peculiar headaches which messes up my vision and makes everything kinda starry looking and blurry; i am told it is a type of migraine and the good part is that it doesn't actually come with a big ache kind of thing, just a vague sense of disorientation. so it is a bit weird,, and yet at this precise moment i am almost relieved to have one of these thingys because it gives me an excuse to stop sitting at my computer screen and thinking about the cultural applicability of various strands of ed studies and sociology to settings in malaysia.

on another note: i amm wondering why i bothered to actually get a doctors' certificate saying i needed 5 dayys off work. it's kind of like, just having the certificate is supposed to be a proxy for acctualy taking time off....

anyway: this is a round about way of saying that i am tired and cranky but still very grateful that i get to write FOR malaysia but don't have to go TO malaysia

(ps: some one asked me if i was going to malaysia soon; i said no caues i had small children and it was too difficult. they said "yes it is hard, but if you only go for two weeks it wouldn't bother them". everyone's an expert.

lost for words...

i am trying hard to get back into the normal swing of things and that would,n ormally, include the occasional blog entry. but i seem to have lost my blogging voice somewhere in the process of losing my actual voice (yes literally). so i think it may take me a bit of time to get back into the swing of things. as an opening move i'd like to note here that one of the cutest things the kids say at the moment are to refer to a big brown bear as having "two big gobbly eyes" instead of two big goggly eyes.

the grey stuff between elephant's toenails....

today i went to work for a whole two hours. i now feel like i have been run over by a large pack of marauding animals. zebras perhaps. or buffallo. whatever; they were things that are big and heavy and don't make even the slightest attempt to step lightly. so it is back to bed (cj you're on dinner!). but first ihave to hide my computer so that sophie doesn't run away with it. now that she has her mouse licence and can launch a browser, find a bookmarked page and navigate around thomas the tank engine all by herself i have a sneaking suspicion she is planning to take ownership of this machine for herself as soon as she can create a diversion....

doctors orders

for those folk who read this, you will have noticed i've been off line. this is a combination of school holiday business but mostly the result of a very bad virus which has basically sapped me of my will to type. and my will to speak. my doctor told me to stay in bed adn not talk (what kind of parallel universe does he live in i wonder) and i've tried but it hasn't been hard. so as a result i am still whacked, but starting to feel plagued by guilt about not working enough...when doctors hand out orders like that they should also issue little pink cards that can be passed out to various folk saying "it's not my fault: i'm sick"....