Those who can't

A broadly enjoyable few days. On Thursday, the young lady was in town checking up on a surly teenager on work experience, and she came into work towards the end of the day and knitted a fine white and gold scarf for Nik's meerkat mascot. My wedding ring was also ready, so we went to pick it up. Oddly, I felt very different when I slipped it on to make sure it fitted. You know the way you expect to feel different somehow on your birthday, but never do? Well, when I tried my wedding ring on, I felt the sort of different I expected on a birthday, but it took me totally by surprise. With only three weeks to go, I'm genuinely excited, even though it now transpires we don't even have enough spare cash to take the mini-honeymoon we had intended to after the wedding. Ah well.

On Friday I went into the young lady's school to teach some Photoshop skillz to the teachers in the art department. As it happens, a bunch of laconic sixth formers also joined the lesson, and I had to quickly in my head run through the slides I had prepared to make sure that I hadn't inserted some comedy swearing in them. It went well, though time constraints and the fact that the lesson was being delivered to a mixed ability group rather than the group of largely starters that I had expected threw me a bit. Ah well, they seemed to get something from it, and I at least got their stack of graphics tablets out and running.



I also witnessed (and helped teach!) a couple of the young lady's lessons. Some of the kids were little horrors, but the older ones especially were rewarding to work with. Adorably, at the end of the day (since it was near the end of term), her whiteboard was covered in farewell messages from her students, one of which is shown above. Bless!

Yesterday was spend cleaning and tidying in between huge gouts of reading. The young lady wolfed down the new Harry Potter in less than twelve hours, and I finished the very excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Today will hopefully be more of the same. I'm now off to try to recreate a Patisserie Valerie cream tea at home.