As we left him on Wednesday, Chris told us to “Tell everyone I’m not dead yet!”

The cancer caught up with him at five this morning.

What a week. Christmas was fab, as usual. We spent it at the Mill with mum, dad, Dougal, Liz and the kids. A smaller group than usual, but we all had a good time.

It’s been a while I know, mostly because I’ve been staggered by the workload associated with the teacher training course. Such a staggering workload in fact that I’ve decided to drop out for the time being and get some more experience in the classroom as a teaching assistant before hopefully reapplying for a more local PGCE course next year.

Now I’m a larval maths teacher, I have to set homework, and that means I have choices:

1. I can use the homework associated with the textbooks we use
2. I can cut and paste past exam papers and things together
3. I can write my own homework assignments which I can either
   1. Write out longhand and use a photocopier
   2. Generate in electronic form and print out

The first two options aren’t exactly bad, and I’ve used both of ’em before now, but the resulting homework sheets can look scruffy and, well, inconsistent. My gut feeling is that kids respond better if, not only do you have high expectations of them, but you treat them with respect. A mongrel collection of homework assignments with no consistent style to them doesn’t say “The teacher has made an effort, so I should make one too”.

Oh.

Bugger.

Photos I took at the weekend of my brand new nephew Stan Frank Dougal Cawley, and some other photos taken in the flat of my grandson Isaac.

Exercise 4 of chromatic’s Write Your Life tells me to:

Create a new invention, change your life circumstances, or somehow write away a difficult or time-consuming task. First define the problem, show how it affects you, and then invent it away.

But I’m not going to do that, exactly, because I already did it.

I stopped buying Wired ages ago. I pretty much stopped reading it before that. All that said, you should read The Long Tail; a well thought out and argued analysis of what happens when stuff stops being scarce.

This is exercise 2 in chromatic’s excellent Write your life exercise.

Home. Four letters. Easy to understand. Hard to pin down.

If we take home as being “The place where one sleeps”, then home is a two bedroom first floor Tyneside flat. If you are fortunate enough to know Tyneside well, then I’ve just told you a great deal about where I live; you can probably sketch the floor plan, especially if I tell you that there’s the usual extension at the back with a kitchen and bathroom in it.

Exercise 3 in the Write Your Life project.

On a typical morning, I wake up before the alarm goes at 0630, stumble through into the bathroom, then back into the sitting room where I get suited and booted for the day. (Gill, being a sensible type, gets to sleep in some more, so banging around the bedroom in the dark isn’t a particularly good idea). If I’m running to time, I nip into the office, check my mail and skim through my RSS feeds.

This is the first exercise in chromatic’s Write Your Life essay writing project. Follow the link for more information.

So, I’m catching up with NTK and notice my name in one of the links, which is weird. So, being curious I follow the link and it’s the video that got made at EuroFoo this year, for which I was interviewed.

So, today’s the first day of YAPC::Belfast, my birthday and the third day of my teacher training course. I’d really like to be in Belfast, but I wouldn’t have missed what I actually did for the world.

The weather recently has been remarkably muggy, so I’ve been keeping my office window open while I’m working. Which is all very well, but we’re trying to keep the cats in, so I have to keep the office door closed. Of course, it shouldn’t be too much of a worry, we’re on the first floor (2nd floor if you’re American) and surely the cats wouldn’t be so stupid as to go leaping out of the window. Still, best to keep the door shut.

The weather recently has been remarkably muggy, so I’ve been keeping my office window open while I’m working. Which is all very well, but we’re trying to keep the cats in, so I have to keep the office door closed. Of course, it shouldn’t be too much of a worry, we’re on the first floor (2nd floor if you’re American) and surely the cats wouldn’t be so stupid as to go leaping out of the window. Still, best to keep the door shut.