The working week started on Monday with a professional development day, which meant that meetings with colleagues and brain draining activities like marking and filing and organizing and planning took the place of equally tiring, but the heaps more entertaining option of teaching kids. The rest of the week for both Cass and me was pretty stock standard, but we ended the week with a bit of a celebration.
The board of the school hosts a party at the American Club each year, ostensibly to thank the teachers for their contribution. Amongst many others, unfortunately, we didn’t feel in the mood, as the board’s attitude to money spending has meant that my contract is not being honoured and I am not being compensated in money or time as to the terms of my contract and other people have separate, yet related, issues. We took the opportunity of the thinning out of the faculty ranks to go to a restaurant, Pizza Realto, which features delicious wood fired pizzas, yet is usually overrun with other teachers. We invited Carl and Hiroko and took along a bottle of Veuve Cliquot that we bought at Sydney Airport on the way back across. We wanted to celebrate the sale of our unit at Horizons and also toast Carl’s birthday from the day before. Our pizzas were very tasty and the champagne was superb.
Ross and I got some good waves at the rocket on Saturday and I was stoked to do a tail slide back down the face of a wave for the first time, before spinning the board back around and continuing. Who said you can’t teach an old surfer new tricks?! One fascinating cultural experience we crawled past in the car was the tail end of a coastal duathlon. The run-bike-run concept had been well subscribed; the explosion in biking popularity here recently has been nothing short of amazing. The most amazing thing was the standard of equipment that all competitors had. The most ordinary athletes in terms of speed, ability and endurance still had the very latest, hi-tech, very expensive, top of the line bikes and other gear. I never had gear of the equivalent standard, even when I was quite obsessive about my competition a decade or so ago!
On the way back we called into Coombsy’s place, as he was hosting the AFL grand final get together. There was a great group of guys there and we screamed and yelled and did all the usual stuff as we enjoyed a grand final, which was much more of a contest than in recent years.
Cass and I saw Cinderella Man this morning sandwiched between the Cinderella stories of this year’s NRL preliminary finals. Who would have guessed that the Tigers and the Cowboys would fight this year’s decider?
Russell Crowe did a very good job in this film. It is a bit formulaic and predictable along the “Rocky” lines of such boxing/underdog/hardship movies, but it bore the distinctive imprimatur of Ron Howard and subsequently was very polished. I found the fight scenes quite dramatic and especially interesting, considering my recent flirtation with boxing training, which continues most days after school.
Cass goes off to camp tomorrow and won’t return until next Friday. Neither of us enjoys this time of year and she is madly preparing and packing right now.My sister Helen has done some remarkable work for me this past couple of weeks. My stolen camera needed replacing, but I needed the exact model for use with the underwater housing. Of course, a newer model has replaced it, so I asked Helen to seek one on Ebay. After a few false starts she scored a beauty that I’ll receive soon. Here was an Aussie buying a camera in America and shipping it to a third party in Taiwan, the Aussie in Taiwan electronically sending the money to Australia so that it could be sent to the U.S. Phew! Some newer ones should replace the photos from the vault soon. Cats feature today, one with Cassy, and one where I have tried some artistic brushstroke techniques on them with some photo software….. doesn’t really work, but it’s different!