I met a guy who people were fawning over last Friday night, so when he sat next to me at the bar, I asked him what all the fuss was about. Turns out he's a local politician who has become especially popular as he does a regular segment on a local cable TV channel. I got one of his adoring fans to take a photo thinking I could find out later who he really was, but as it turns out, hid identity remains a mystery....maybe I'll see him another time!
At the same time, Cass was with The Bookies at a cute Italian restaurant, Vicolo, near the fabled Il Mercato, down in an alley off Chung Chen Road. They enjoyed some exquisite meals and the little place was a bit of a revelation in terms of ambiance and quality. It might be just as well as the magnificent a la carte version of Il Mercato has packed up leaving just the expanded cafe area behind. The Bookies had a great night and successfully whittled down their long list of 24 books to a more manageable 12 books selected to be read in the upcoming academic year.
It's been a crazy busy week and somehow, both Cass and I managed to write our huge caseload of anecdotal reports. This feat was achieved largely due to the fact that Cass had a huge bank of generic comments from years gone by that she kindly shared with me. We were both able to use these as a base to build our current comments and they were a lifesaver. Not only did we write them all, but we proofread them and printed them for the next round of checking by our colleagues.
We both committed ourselves to this task completion because today, in class, we're doubling up our workload with paragraphs from each of the kids on the set text. More grading! It's today we've realized what gluttons for punishment we've become....maybe we can ditch this paragraph next year???! It's very awkard timing because not only do we have reports but we have the gargantuan task of grading 210 full essays next Tuesday onwards and we'll be lucky to get them done before the end of the following week when "school's out for summer"!
The mad days are upon us again and seem to have sneaked up on us a bit this year. Yesterday we booked the car to the airport and even reserved a hire car for our trip back from Sydney airport on the 4th. We have to start packing up the house, getting jobs done and looking after Mary's needs. I got the car inspected last week, but we have to load up on cat food and litter and arrange for Ani to care for Mary. Added to all that, we've both got duty for a BBQ/dance at school this Friday night!
So, anyway, busy days! We stayed at home for most of the weekend recovering from the big week and we're looking forward to the Game of Thrones' finale tonight. We'll put our heads down this week, motor through to the weekend and then prepare for exam week next week and our big influx of papers to grade. I should get one more blog entry in next week before a bit of a hiatus when we're back in Australia....more later. Just one photo today: me and the mystery celebrity on Friday night!