Grand plans

I had grand plans to sort the garden and tidy and take stuff to the charity shop and exercise and more but I was knackered after cleaning the kitchen so I had a shower and plonked myself on the sofa in the back room and drank tea having taken a lemsip to try and rid of the worst of the cold. E and D came for dinner and BigA did his specialty, falafel. I did have an early surge of energy on Sunday and set about sorting the compost heap, which was bone dry but some nice crumbly stuff right at the bottom. Then I got a bit overwhelmed by the rest of the garden so dug up my 3 beetroot and took in the last of the cherry tomatoes and dug out things I felt confident were weeds before my body protested and so I spent the rest of the day reading in bed with a hot water bottle and kept my lemsip topped up. Delightfully Hayden made dinner. 

The work week was much of the same, with only a couple of weeks until half term I started to worry a bit about the BTEC stuff, but I have joined a lovely whatsapp group for teachers of it and everyone is being really helpful. I was still feeling rough so it felt a bit harder than it might have been. Some really lovely lessons and some that made me feel I'd earnt every penny and maybe more. 

My evenings were made up of a couple of online meetings, interviewed by the BBC, well, asked a load of questions about online stuff teachers use. Which was fun and I felt very important. And a roller derby catch up about the next rookie sessions. 

BigA has Monday's at uni and the rest in school. Still very much loving us sharing stories about teaching. His mentor is impressed with him and is happy for him to take full lessons (which I knew would happen - lucky mentor) so he's been lesson planning into the wee hours. 

Last night we managed to get some cast off tickets for an Opera. My first. Not the full blown dress up and be blasted affair, bit still I really enjoyed the modern set and interesting use of dance, physical that's and characters. A would have loved the set design. The music itself wasn't exceptional but it took me along and it was delightfully short, BigA describing it as mercifully so. He didn't enjoy it the way I did. I had a really nice chat with a man, who was by far one of the youngest in the audience, closely followed by me and BigA. His friend was the assistant director who got him the ticket, we chatted about the fact it was our first opera. The interesting bit was that in the second half the fire alarm went off and I think we and the cast were a bit taken aback that we were almost evacuated. But false alarm and then back in for a reset and on with the show. 

Then on the journey home there was an unpleasant moment when a man was verbally aggressive to a woman. Luckily me, a man and my man were alert to this and quickly created a safe zone around her, quickly shifting to seats and making it very clear he should fuck off while checking she was ok. We all got on the same carriage and made sure she got off feeling protected. Sad that we needed to but glad we were there.