Sunday

I had a most industrious day today. In addition to continuing on with my quest to import my entire CD collection into iTunes,  I made some designs for my Cafepress store, uploaded some photos to Flickr (see post below), cleaned my room, worked on my novel and watched a newborn foal in his first hours of life.

Annie’s new colt – Saddlebrook Appaloosas – Live Webcam

More Photos Here

Quick Update + Photos

We’ve just finished the assessment period for term 1 and are in the midst of report writing. Hopefully I will be online more after that! My birthday on Friday was great. On Saturday, Mum and I went out and took some photos at the wetlands at Salisbury and then of the horses up in the hills that I visit. Saturday night I went out for dinner with my family, my sister’s boyfriend and my friend K. On Sunday, I relaxed. I did a little bit of shopping and processed some of my photos.

I have opened up a shop at Cafepress.com to sell my photos and some of my graphic designs on clothing, homewares and the like – the link is on the right hand side. I am planning on uploading more images soon.

I still haven’t made much time from writing although my head has felt in a fog since the weekend – too much staying up late, I think. We have two and a bit weeks until the holidays and I am looking forward to the break… I just have to get through marking and reports first :p

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Playing Catch Up

Holidays are over and it’s back to work. I wrote a post on the weekend but either my computer chewed it up or WordPress was having hiccups because it promptly disappeared and I couldn’t get it back.

I had a pretty eventful last week of holidays. The first two days were reasonably restful. On the Monday, I stayed home and worked on SR, trying to get as much as possible finished. My sister was also home all day, sick. On Tuesday, I went out with my friend K. We went driving through the Adelaide Hills, climbed  one of the King of the Mountain climbs for the Tour Down Under in my zippy yellow car, saw some young thoroughbreds at Lindsay Park Stud and then had lunch at a nice pub.

Wednesday morning at 2:46, I woke up feeling very ill… I was sick all of Wednesday with gastro. The only ‘good’ thing about it was that I managed to watch most of the inauguration of Barack Obama, though I missed the swearing in itself.

On Thursday, still feeling a bit under the weather, I went back for my first day of school with the rest of our staff – the students didn’t start back until Tuesday the 27th. I am teaching English, ESL, Australian Studies, Legal Studies and the Personal Learning Plan. Both Thursday and Friday was a rush of gtting things in order for the first day back and in truth I am still getting organised, although most of the hard work is done. I am teaching mainly Grade 10 and my classes have been wonderful so far.

I kept my weekend pretty quiet – I was feeling sick still right up until Monday, although it was mainly loss of appetite, which I could handle. I did a little bit of work in my garden, although a lot of that will probably take a beating – we’ve had three days of HOT weather including two days of 44C weather (114F), so a lot of my younger plants are dead or dying. Because of the water restrictions, I can’t give them another long soaking with my hose until Saturday and I can only carry so many buckets or watering cans of water.

~ Jewel

Photos

Over the last two days I have been driving through the Adelaide Hills looking for some good photo opportunities. There is a spot about twenty minutes from my house where horses often graze. More often that not they aren’t there when I want them to be (ie, when the weather is the nicest) but I was very lucky yesterday, especially when some of them came down to the fence to greet me and pose for photos. Today’s attempt at taking horse photos was not as good because the main group were out of sight but I did get some nice flower shots instead.