rare shot of D&J both seated during a meal...
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Jamie's report
Warning - cringe-inducing parental gushings below:
Jamie got her end-of-term report today. As I've previously mentioned she has been working hard on her own on her reading recently, and in the past few weeks also on her sums, so it wasn't really a surprise that the teachers' remarks were very positive. Her form teacher writes:
I am very satisfied with Jamie's progress! She is a happy girl in class, and enjoys participating in all activities.
Her work is excellent. None of the other teachers have any problem with her. Her reading level is very good. She is interested and attentive. I hope she continues along the same line.
And her English teacher writes: Jamie applies herself very well in English lessons.
They give green, orange or red marks - representing good, improving or needs improvement - for various aspects, and Jamie got 40 green marks out of 40. These aspects include general ones like 'participates enthusiastically' or 'listens attentively' and curriculum-specific ones like 'can read words and phonemes containing the consonants l, s, m, p, t, d, b, v, n and f' and 'can produce verbal messages using the present and future tenses'.
She's very excited about her Christmas pageant tomorrow.
Jamie got her end-of-term report today. As I've previously mentioned she has been working hard on her own on her reading recently, and in the past few weeks also on her sums, so it wasn't really a surprise that the teachers' remarks were very positive. Her form teacher writes:
I am very satisfied with Jamie's progress! She is a happy girl in class, and enjoys participating in all activities.
Her work is excellent. None of the other teachers have any problem with her. Her reading level is very good. She is interested and attentive. I hope she continues along the same line.
And her English teacher writes: Jamie applies herself very well in English lessons.
They give green, orange or red marks - representing good, improving or needs improvement - for various aspects, and Jamie got 40 green marks out of 40. These aspects include general ones like 'participates enthusiastically' or 'listens attentively' and curriculum-specific ones like 'can read words and phonemes containing the consonants l, s, m, p, t, d, b, v, n and f' and 'can produce verbal messages using the present and future tenses'.
She's very excited about her Christmas pageant tomorrow.
Happy Christmas
We'll be spending Christmas in Cornwall this year, flying out on Thursday. Jamie has her Christmas pageant at school tomorrow, she'll be one of the shepherdesses, while Danny will be having a Christmas party at the creche at the same time. We're hoping the weather picks up by Thursday, we've had heavy winds and rain the past dew days, and it's hailing as I write.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Danny's catalogue of destruction
This week:
- 1 ceramic Christmas angel decoration
- several handfuls of Frosties trodden into carpet
- DVD scraped across brick fireplace, with fatal consequences for DVD
- Various toy cars left behind in cafes and shops
- Several buckets-full of water emptied from bath onto bathroom floor (spotted just in time!)
- Allowed to run around naked for 1 minute after bath, proceeded to use minute to pee on the floor next to the Christmas tree.
Good as gold the rest of the time.
- 1 ceramic Christmas angel decoration
- several handfuls of Frosties trodden into carpet
- DVD scraped across brick fireplace, with fatal consequences for DVD
- Various toy cars left behind in cafes and shops
- Several buckets-full of water emptied from bath onto bathroom floor (spotted just in time!)
- Allowed to run around naked for 1 minute after bath, proceeded to use minute to pee on the floor next to the Christmas tree.
Good as gold the rest of the time.
Friday, December 10, 2004
Bike
We came close to getting our Dutch family to buy a bike for Jamie there and shipping it to us, but we were lucky enough to find what looks like the perfect model, including full chain guard, on Spanish eBay, and bought it. Fingers crossed that it is as good as in the photos when it arrives.
Musings
Every bank holiday weekend in Spain, the Spanish media focus on the number of deaths in traffic accidents. Good job; in other countries this hidden holocaust tends to pass unnoticed unless there are large numbers of casualties in a single accident. This past weekend was a long bank holiday weekend (Saturday to Wednesday), and the signs above the road when we were driving on the motorway last Friday pointed out that there were 77 deaths last year on the same weekend. The final death toll this weekend was 55, a big improvement but still a frightening number. The last fatal car accident, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was the particular focus of attention on the news - a driver drove 10 km on the wrong side of the motorway, continuing despite many near misses, eventually colliding head-on with a car that had just pulled out to overtake a lorry and was therefore totally unaware of the approaching danger. The car contained a family of four, two young children in the back. The parents were killed (as was the driver of the other car), but the lorry driver managed to use his fire extinguisher to douse the flames sufficiently to be able to pull the kids out, badly burned but alive.
My first thought when I was watching these reports was, yes this is tragic, but what about the 52 other deaths, the hundreds of other injuries, the dozens of people who will have lost limbs or become paralysed, the hundreds of families affected by death, serious injury, trauma. Then I realised that unless you personalise it and zoom in on one event, person, family, it all remains simply another bunch of statistics, accompanied by film of firemen cutting open another car wreck.
Spain has a long way to go in reducing its death toll on the roads, but it's getting there. Totting up casualty figures on bank holiday weekends is an effective way of keeping the subject fresh in people's minds, something they could copy in other countries.
My first thought when I was watching these reports was, yes this is tragic, but what about the 52 other deaths, the hundreds of other injuries, the dozens of people who will have lost limbs or become paralysed, the hundreds of families affected by death, serious injury, trauma. Then I realised that unless you personalise it and zoom in on one event, person, family, it all remains simply another bunch of statistics, accompanied by film of firemen cutting open another car wreck.
Spain has a long way to go in reducing its death toll on the roads, but it's getting there. Totting up casualty figures on bank holiday weekends is an effective way of keeping the subject fresh in people's minds, something they could copy in other countries.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
December's here
Haven't got around to updating for a while here, sorry about that. After a frantically busy November work wise, I've been taking a well-deserved breather the past couple of days - before the next set of deadlines, which are looming just around the corner.
Yesterday we went Christmas shopping with Anja (Carmen's mum). We went looking for a bike for Jamie, but it turns out that nobody sells bikes above toddler size with chain guards on them. Either this is some sick fashion, or nobody in Spain understands anything about kids and bikes. Jamie's already come home with torn, oily clothes after borrowing a friend's bike. Adult bikes with chain guards - plenty of them. Kids'? Not a single one in 3 hypermarkets and 2 sporting superstores.
We treated ourselves to a new espresso machine, after we had to reluctantly give up on our beautiful Krups. We sent it in for repair in March, and finally got a definite quote in September - 200 euros, which is very nearly what we originally paid for the thing. (When we sent it away it was leaking but still working, but of course by the time we got it back it was completely #$*%ed). So we decided to spend the money on a new machine, and picked out a suitably black and moody looking Philips espresso maker. Unfortunately when we got it home it didn't meet our expectations at all (apart from the fact that the coffee tastes excellent), so it's going back tomorrow. I think we may be borrowing Anja's Senseo machine with a view to buying our own later - certainly a lot cheaper than an espresso machine, and a lot less fiddly.
Jamie had lunch with friends from school, whose mum then picked up Daniel from the crèche at 3 after she dropped the girls back at school. He didn't mind being picked up by her, unannounced (although of course we'd told the crèche) and apparently had a great time out at their holiday chalets in the countryside. He was in the best of spirits when we got back at 6 and picked him up.
Jamie is getting very excited in the run-up to the various present-giving events. We are in a pretty unique position in that, with our 3 nationalities, we have potentially 3 different gift-givers on three different dates - Sinterklaas on 5 Dec, Father Christmas on 24/25 Dec and the Three Wise Men (Reyes Magos) on 6 January. Followed closely by Jamie's birthday on 15 January …! We try to pick one of these as the main one, but inevitably other family members give gifts on the other dates - but that's fun as well. She's still at that enviably innocent age and believes in all of them. So with Anja going home to Holland tomorrow, the Reyes Magos visited us last night to leave presents for Anja to take back to Holland with her for Frank! Just like what Sinterklaas did in Holland just before Anja came here (never mind the fact that Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of St Nicholas, lives in Spain the rest of the year) with presents for Jamie and Danny.
I have been out jogging and cycling regularly recently. On Tuesday afternoon I took a route jogging that I hadn't taken since last summer, with Jason. It's a circuit to La Acebosa, about 7 km with a steady incline rising by about 60m, plus some rises and dips in between. Last summer I kept having to stop because of cramp in my calf muscles, which is part of the reason I hadn't tried it since, but it went like a dream this time. I'm really pleased with the way my fitness level has been increasing steadily.
Work has been piling in again in the past few days, this time from my favourite NGO, known here as our 'mortgage sponsor'. They hadn't actually sent me that much work so far this year, which had been a niggling worry at times as they had contributed to a large proportion of turnover in the past. They have made up for it in the past couple of weeks though - I'm fully booked with work for them for the next 12 days, plus I've farmed out a big Russian job for them - nice.
Yesterday we went Christmas shopping with Anja (Carmen's mum). We went looking for a bike for Jamie, but it turns out that nobody sells bikes above toddler size with chain guards on them. Either this is some sick fashion, or nobody in Spain understands anything about kids and bikes. Jamie's already come home with torn, oily clothes after borrowing a friend's bike. Adult bikes with chain guards - plenty of them. Kids'? Not a single one in 3 hypermarkets and 2 sporting superstores.
We treated ourselves to a new espresso machine, after we had to reluctantly give up on our beautiful Krups. We sent it in for repair in March, and finally got a definite quote in September - 200 euros, which is very nearly what we originally paid for the thing. (When we sent it away it was leaking but still working, but of course by the time we got it back it was completely #$*%ed). So we decided to spend the money on a new machine, and picked out a suitably black and moody looking Philips espresso maker. Unfortunately when we got it home it didn't meet our expectations at all (apart from the fact that the coffee tastes excellent), so it's going back tomorrow. I think we may be borrowing Anja's Senseo machine with a view to buying our own later - certainly a lot cheaper than an espresso machine, and a lot less fiddly.
Jamie had lunch with friends from school, whose mum then picked up Daniel from the crèche at 3 after she dropped the girls back at school. He didn't mind being picked up by her, unannounced (although of course we'd told the crèche) and apparently had a great time out at their holiday chalets in the countryside. He was in the best of spirits when we got back at 6 and picked him up.
Jamie is getting very excited in the run-up to the various present-giving events. We are in a pretty unique position in that, with our 3 nationalities, we have potentially 3 different gift-givers on three different dates - Sinterklaas on 5 Dec, Father Christmas on 24/25 Dec and the Three Wise Men (Reyes Magos) on 6 January. Followed closely by Jamie's birthday on 15 January …! We try to pick one of these as the main one, but inevitably other family members give gifts on the other dates - but that's fun as well. She's still at that enviably innocent age and believes in all of them. So with Anja going home to Holland tomorrow, the Reyes Magos visited us last night to leave presents for Anja to take back to Holland with her for Frank! Just like what Sinterklaas did in Holland just before Anja came here (never mind the fact that Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of St Nicholas, lives in Spain the rest of the year) with presents for Jamie and Danny.
I have been out jogging and cycling regularly recently. On Tuesday afternoon I took a route jogging that I hadn't taken since last summer, with Jason. It's a circuit to La Acebosa, about 7 km with a steady incline rising by about 60m, plus some rises and dips in between. Last summer I kept having to stop because of cramp in my calf muscles, which is part of the reason I hadn't tried it since, but it went like a dream this time. I'm really pleased with the way my fitness level has been increasing steadily.
Work has been piling in again in the past few days, this time from my favourite NGO, known here as our 'mortgage sponsor'. They hadn't actually sent me that much work so far this year, which had been a niggling worry at times as they had contributed to a large proportion of turnover in the past. They have made up for it in the past couple of weeks though - I'm fully booked with work for them for the next 12 days, plus I've farmed out a big Russian job for them - nice.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
