loads of pictures and a rapid update. | aug 21, 2003 10:50
busy isn't the word to describe the last few weeks. i've now nearly completed my third week of jma monitoring. I've loved it so much that i plan to come back next year for summer camp and spend the whole six weeks doing it. if that fits in with whatever else i'm doing at the time... the kids int eh second week were a bit of a struggle, and this last week it's more the other monitors that i'm struggling with. the kids are great - but a few of the monitors are having to work way harder than we ought to make up for the monitors that think it's a cruisy ride. at least i didn't get sick like a few others did - that wouldn't be cool. so now my monitoring duties are all complete besides the friday night disco. it's a bit sad - but as of tomorrow i'm back to being an instructor, and back to loads of high ropes sessions. blah. i'm off to blackpool this weekend for a little more sandcircle work. more on that later. having completed the underwater scene for wee five year old ricky-raes room, i've now started the nursery - this time minus amy. cos she's in the netherlands now. it's a soft lime colour with a band of lilac stars outlined in silver. should be wicked. got the first lime coat down tonight, and the second tomorrow - then the stars hopefully all done monday night next week, and back for an hour or so to outline them. then it's time for the serious packing - eek. the heatwave is over. now the weather is a bit shit. almost always looks like rain is on the way - but it just taunts. stupid weather.
i'm perturbed. i am. i'm not the biggest fan of the rugby-shirt "fashion" trend at home - where people wear the shirt of the team they support, but i let it go - however, i'm strugglign with the english equivalent. football replaces rugby, but now it's not only the shirts, but the shoes, socks, shorts, and shirts. it's incredibly sad. i'm ashamed to even be near them.
purdy, my super cuddly penguin is well, though he had quite an adventure last week. i accidently put him in with my linen and he took a ride to the linen department where he was found and put in bag number seventy one. i was horrified to discover the loss. i think he has forgiven me now.
the ground has dried up and cracked, and it's all split open where the moles have dug up on my front lawn. it's quite funny the way all the cracks join up with the wee mole hills. teeheehee.
here, finally (thanks gazza) i present a collection of pictures for your photographic perusal.
the spectacular bee orchid
millions of crane flys in my room
a huge elephant hawk moth
a lovely lesser stag beetle
not a snake... a slow worm
some kind of hunting spider thingy
sask - central staff accomodation
the day the dutchies left
pascal and his wushu butterfly kick
pascal and a wushu backflip
mmmmm fire...
fire + the juice of a mandarin. | aug 10, 2003 10:20am
london was exhausting, but thankfully mainly due to the heat. we suffered delays of no more than forty minutes at a time and at the end of it all, we were merely an hour later than we'd planned to return. the heat was ridiculous. wherever we went, there were more people, everywhere; crowding the already hot spaces. aromas wafted and nibbled at the backs of our brains like thirsty rodents. arriving at Portsmouth harbour, we had accumulated nigh on eighty children, kept in order by about fifteen instructors. i'm left wondering why a parent would send their child aboard a train and only provide them with one small bottle of water for the stifling three hour journey. we provided an additional twelve litres of bottled water (thanks to the lovely folk at the train station) which was consumed in less time than it took me to acquire it. a large degree of relief was felt upon arriving back on centre. oh yes.
we had a fire performer in the bar last night. he's the brother of the bar manager. he also did some juggling and escapology stuff. my my, what a clever lad he was. he taught a few people how to breathe fire, swallow fire, and ahd me juggling fire balls. it seemed like a good idea at the time ok?
this morning i had a late breakfast of cereal and fruit accompanied by a mouthful of mandarin juice. ahhh, goodness. now i'm off to make treasure maps. arrrrrr matey. *wink*
while the temperature didn't quite rise to the forecast 38°C this week, they're still holding hope for saturday. there are implications there; i'm taking kids back to brighton, on the trains. on the TRAINS. trains, as you may well know, run on rails. in this heat, the rails buckle and bend. the trains have speed limits too. this is going to be sillier than a karaoke night in wainui with silly hats. which i think is quite silly sounding. but i'll be open minded - i'll go smiling and be happy. anyways, digressions aside, the highest temperature recorded this week was 36.4°C, yesterday in gravesend, kent. london reached a record 35.4°C. I'm dreading saturday. However, i'm elated by the fact that i'm not instructing at the moment, so i'm quite free to be in the shade. When i'm sending kids down the zip, i have about a square metre of platform near the top of a pole. there isn't much chance to escape the weather up there. abseiling isn't much better.
on monitoring: despite being utterly exhausted, i love monitoring. the kids are a handful - a surreal collection of personalities in each one of them makes it vitually impossible to decipher any of them. but it's been good for a laugh. monday was pirate day - dressed as pirates (well, wearing bandanas, aka pastel-purple bits of sheet coloured in with felts.) we played some pirate-modified versions of tried-and-tested games. then we had a waterfight. now, i learnt a very good lesson here. when you colour your bandana/pastel-purple sheet bit with lots of green felt (it was the big green pork chop... roger roger, this is porkchop calling apple sauce, do you read me, over.) and then you have buckets of water poured over your head, the green felt runs. it runs through the bandana (yes, you can see what's coming here, can't you.) and colours your hair green. all very funny to everyone. even funnier on tuesday morning though, for i learnt on monday night that green felt colours hair permanantly. shampoo does not, i repeat, does NOT wash green felt out of your hair. in the afternoon, we went sailing. well, the kids did, i wasn't workiong, but i went along anyways hoping to get to go on one of the boats if there was enough room. there wasn't. but cos i got wet shoes/shorts/boxers/backpack/etc on the way to the beach (i went on the rescue boat, and keith dropped me about ten metres out from the shore cos he was worried about the outboard hitting the bottom. sheesh.) i went out into the water and lifted the kids up into the rescue boat so keith could take them all out to the pirate ships. my shoes got very wet. and salty. and gravelly too. i had to wash them really good. now they're all sparkly and nice. mmmm clean shoes.
today was my day off. i went to the real england with amy. then she went to london. aaron, her boyfreind of several years, arrives tomorrow. yey for her. the ferry has mirrored ceilings. it's a dodgy ferry. but i took a photo cos it was particularly funny. um, anyways, in portsmouth i went shopping, starting to prepare for the travelling... ahhh yes, the travelling. mere weeks away...
Quicker than I thought it possible, the blue and green emperor dragonfly sweeps in towards me from my left. Hovering momentarily, it flashes it’s iridescence and flicks off in the other direction, almost colliding with a damselfly; the two wrestle in the air like an agile supersonic dogfight. Falling, it recovers and sweeps the surface of the pond. The pond has a weird green scum-like weed icky-ness about it today; flies scurry, hop, buzz and hesitate their way around the surface. The sun beats upon my back. I wonder what the dragonfly is thinking about...
For the third week running, I went to London on Saturday. I took nine kiddies, from a rabble of fifty-four. We signed the kids back over to their parents pretty quickly, giving us about forty minutes of free time to wander the spectacular area around waterloo station. (For those who are unaware, waterloo station really doesn’t have anything much around it that is any more interesting than a parade of two broken tractors in an Isle of Wight paddock.) I wanted some chocolate, but didn’t want to pay the silly amount that all the shops were asking inside the station, so I went in search of a little shop. Mark showed me where to go, which I guess made it more of a follow rather than a search, but it was still exciting. It was. The shop wasn’t very exciting though. A few melted Kit Kats and some overpriced Cadbury bars. I decided just to buy a magazine and have a look at a shop I’d seen over the road. In a dreary London street amidst a scrawl of grey dilapidating architecture there stands prophet; bright and proud with a glossy white façade. Mounted above the door in green transparent Perspex is the word: prophet. I had to go inside. But once inside, it was hard to leave. The owner, William Prophet started chatting with me moments after I got in the door, chatting like he’d known me for years. Clearly he was good at selling his wares. His work is distinctively unique; a style blending futuristic almost alien style shapes with ultraviolet resins to create a range of sparkly-happy clubbing jewellery reminiscent of Liechtenstein era pop art. After some discussion, William offered to exchange jewellery for some graphic design work… it’s times like these I wish I had bought that laptop. However, time is a plenty yet.
Remember the flying guy? The one that fell over the English channel? He’s been in the news lots, well no, I should say more that he has caused a raft of cartoons and letters to the editor based on his little fall. The people of England are largely unimpressed. It seems others have been there, done that before, albeit in slightly different ways. And plus, “he had to throw himself out of a plane” they say, “so-and-so did it from the ground in his peddle plane, and my sisters brothers aunties second cousins married wifes mothers third daughters sister mary did it in a glider from the cliffs in dover.” This, coming from folk who sit in their kitchens tut-tutting, drinking their tea, gossiping about old mavis down the road and how she ogled over Federico on big-brother the other night. Pshaw, pshaw I say to them. ah, i digress... The cartoon was of Mr Blair and his prime ministerial progress to date, including the recent plummet in popularity. Also in the cartoon news was a controversial image (based on that famous photo of a point-blank execution of a Viet Cong (sp?) general from the Vietnam war) of Mr Bush being assassinated by a man with the word “politics” written upon his back. (now I’m wondering, was it politics, or media, ah – you get the idea anyway.) Soon after publication of the newspaper, the cartoonist received a call from the men-in-black asking why he’d portrayed The assassination of Mr Bush. Golly gosh, paranoia runs rampant post-nine-eleven. So, the following cartoon featured a huge gun pointing at a caricature of the cartoonist, with the words “secret service” on the gun. Ah, bless him.
I’ll not be sleeping in my room tonight; instead I’ll be in St Lawrence. They’re the Chalets down the bottom, on the waterfront. In the room attached to mine sleep eight little seven to nine year old boys. I’m a JMA monitor, spending the week playing big brother, ensuring the safety and well-being of the little kiddies. Awwww. There are three summer-camp age groups, two of which I opted to monitor for, and, Murphy being the supreme ruler of all, one that I was chosen to monitor for. However, despite my original doubts, things are going well thus far. I’m becoming used to having several children hanging off of my limbs when I’m walking around, and I’m even looking forward to reading Chris his bedtime story tonight. Because all of my attention needs to be directed at the kids, I’ll not be instructing this week, so it should prove to be somewhat of a rest from the monotony that is life as a highropes instructor. Nah, it’s not that bad, but I do welcome the variation.
The night draws on, I must depart and dabble in a bit of trying-to-make-children-go-to-sleep. (which oddly enough is the exact opposite of everything I’ve learnt in the last few months. Oh, the irony.) Carnage awaits…
forecast for the week: 38°C temperatures by midweek.
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