Fave Friday

I forgot! Bad girl. It's not like I even had going to work as an excuse - thought yesterday was the last day of marking. I finished my paltry allocation with a few hours to spare and was left to swoop in and do my backreading duties on a member of my team who left 700 essay questions for the last 24 hours. He finished 14 minutes before the deadline. I was awestruck. I quite like the online marking, even more as a team leader, because I can snoop on other people's progress and stats. I'm also glad I was team leader because I don't think I would have finished on time if I had had a normal allocation, whereas taking six days out in hospital didn't stop me from getting all my team leader stuff done, especially since most of it was having to be done at the start.

The extra cash is not going to hurt, either!

But I digress. We had an Indian takeaway last night. so here are...

My Five Favourite Things From The Curry Shop

1. Paratha. An Indian version of fried bread. I like how it breaks up in circles.
2. Tandoori chicken. I don't much like really sloppy curries, so the dry chicken is perfect.
3. Chana Massala. I'm a sucker for the humble chick pea. I have to mix this with rice because otherwise it's too saucy (see above), but it's really tasty and a portion will usually do two meals if I have it with the chicken.
4. Banana curry. I know, it sounds so, so wrong. My local curry house doesn't sell it, but I had it at the Christmas curry the Thursday knitting group went on last year and it is amazin'. Very coconutty and kind of sweet - could be eaten like a dessert.
5. Sag Aloo. I think I mean sag aloo - spicy potatoes and spinach. I make a mean version of this myself which is a Slimming World recipe, aka "No Guilt". In fact, I like my own so much I never order this anymore because I am disappointed when it's not as good as my own.


I was a little concerned, after my op, that certain things might disagree with my stomach and last night was quite a big test, since I ate a big meal* and I had a fizzy drink. But I've been fine. Evidently I can go on as normal without my gall bladder - I was worried I'd end up unable to eat cheese or fat or chocolate or something. Come to think of it, I haven't had any cake yet - now THAT would be tragic.

* Interestingly, since having the op, my appetite has shrunk. Maybe it's because I didn't eat for so many days, or maybe it's because I'm being a bit more thoughtful. Last night I ordered the same amount of curry things as usual and half of my meal is sitting downstairs in the fridge waiting to become lunch. Normally there are just the chickpeas and some rice left which I hoover up for breakfast....no, I have no shame.

Fave Fridays is from Kelli's Blog - she has a great deal of stuff on it so it's definitely worth a look.

One Local Summer Week 4

This year, for the first time ever, I have grown something edible in the garden that isn't a tomato.


This monster is a courgette which cost me 50p at a school plant sale. It had one yellow flower and one leaf, and now it's so mahoosive that it's attempting to devour the tomato plant sharing its planter. The thing moves with the sun, too. I can't believe how big it is.

It is already courgetting. How exciting! I get all these courgettes to myself because Mr Z is not a fan. I didn't used to be a fan until I realised how versatile they are. And today I cooked with one I'd grown for the very first time and realised exactly how tasty and juicy a real fresh courgette is. They will be back in the garden next year, definitely.

All the time I was in hospital, while I can't say I was hungry, I did think about food A LOT - I love eating and not being able to indulge was torturous. I put my mind to thinking up ways I could cook my courgettes. Here's my recipe for this week - I made it today, with all local ingredients rustled up from the fridge and the veggie drawer.

Courgette Rosti

1 courgette
1 potato, peeled
1 egg, beaten
Salt and pepper
Some cheese
Spray oil

Grate the potato and the courgette. Squeeze in a colander for a little while to get rid of the excess moisture. Season well and stir in the beaten egg. Heat a frying pan with some spray oil in it and press handfuls of the mixture into cakes. Fry on a lowish heat for about 5 minutes each side - until the potato is cooked. Sprinkle with cheese for the last couple of minutes.

I had these with some onion marmalade I also had in the fridge and they were delicious - a really good lunch. I didn't take a picture...because I was foolish, and added the cheese to the potato and courgette before cooking, and so it sort of stuck to the pan and didn't look great. Blush. But it tasted delicious! And there are three more courgettes waiting for the chance to be rostified tomorrow, so there might be a picture yet.

Oh...for the purposes of American readers (since OLS is an American invention) I think maybe you call courgettes zucchini? We call them courgettes when they're little and marrows when they get really big.

The Saga of the Gall Bladder

Well, I'm home!

The surgery took place on Monday. The surgeon seemed to think the gallstone which was stuck in my bile duct had passed, since I was no longer the colour of a Simpson. I was dubious, since I still hadn't eaten anything and thought that might have more to do with my healthier appearance. When they went in, it turned out the stone hadn't passed, and it took three and a half hours (instead of less than one) to scrape out my pulsating, swollen, inflamed gall bladder and fish out that nasty stone which had been preventing me from eating for the best part of a week.

Mr Z rang the hospital at 10 to hear that I'd gone in and should be out by 12. In the end I finally got back to my ward around 4pm, by which point he was fairly frantic, having been there for four hours without any updates from the ward staff. Snaps to him for keeping his cool, because I would have hit the roof if the positions had been reversed. I spent the evening sketching out on morphine and heroically refused more painkillers when I finally regained lucidity, a decision I regretted by morning, by which point I felt so sore that I thought I would never feel right again.

That passed quickly, though. A shower and an ice lolly (and the pain pills, natch) later and I was already well on the road to recovery. Tuesday night was a bit of a shocker, though. The heat was unbearable; there was a nightlight right above my bed (so I ended up actually sleeping on the side which had been operated on in an attempt to block out the brightness); two other patients had just come back from surgery so the nursing staff were clattering around them every couple of hours; I was in pain lying down and couldn't tilt my bed up because it was about a century old and didn't have a remote control thingie; and smell? Poor old Joyce in the next bed took care of that. Bless her, they gave her a senna capsule and, as I lay there in the dark, I'd hear, "Oh no! Oh no!" followed by some very lavatorial noises; and then her alert light would go on and the nurses would come and change her, and the bed. This happened 3 times.

When the doctor finally said I could go home on Wednesday (after making me wait four hours) I nearly wept. I couldn't get out quick enough.

I am feeling OK now, as long as I keep nice and still - perfect for marking. I can eat again, and I lost 12lbs throughout the incident. I'm excited to think that I never have to go through that pain again.

The nursing staff were amazing - just so helpful and patient. The woman in the bed opposite had me grinding my teeth within half an hour of being put on the ward but they kept their cool with her, and were completely unruffled and unperturbed throughout my entire stay. One even went and made me a sandwich with ham she'd run down to the canteen to get, when I said I wouldn't eat a hot meal for lunch. They absolutely keep that place running - I could count on the fingers of both hands the number of minutes I spent talking to doctors during my stay; my consultant didn't even come back to discharge me: he sent a junior doc who wasn't allowed to do it and had to ring him to confirm! But the nurses were stars (and the first doctor I saw - she was also quite good). Perhaps I should send them something.

Here endeth the tale of the gall bladder. It is gone; it cannot grow back. There does not seem to have been an impact on my digestion, that I can tell as yet. And really, it ended up being quite well timed, since now it won't interfere with my holiday, and it's a very quiet time at work.

Typically, my school won at the conference I'd spent all year setting up. That was the only bad thing about the timing, really.

Blog Interrupted

To quote a LOLcat somewhere - I has teh ill.

I have been having stomach pains every few weeks since January. The GP sent me for a scan which revealed gallstones, but she said I wasn't ill enough to warrant an op.

Well, I showed her!

After several days of constant stomach ache, by Thursday I was unable to eat anything without being sick (witness: I had to pull over on my way home from work to vom up 2 segments of satsuma), and by Friday I had such blinding pain that the GP admitted me to hospital, where they have the morphine.

Then it was a bit better.

Then I ate some lunch on Saturday and it was worse, and they gave me more morphine.

Then it was a bit better.

Today they have let me out for a couple of hours so I can do some work and tie up some loose ends for work - this is really bad timing, since that conference I have been organising for 14 schools starts tomorrow and I am smack bang in the middle of marking. But oh well. Better now than while I'm on holiday. Tomorrow, assuming hundreds of emergency appendectomies don't come in, I'll be parting company with my gall bladder and normal service will resume.

But no OLS for the last week, because I basically haven't eaten anything, really.
And no Fave Friday because I spent most of Friday crying and sketching out on painkillers.
And no Tuesday ten next week either, because I'll be in until at least Wednesday, I think. I don't know for sure, though, because nobody has sat me down and talked me through what's happening. Luckily I had already done all the research online. Doctors love people like me, don't they?

Belated Tuesday Ten

Yesterday was my tutor group's leaving day and ball, so I had a late one last night and not two minutes together for blogging all day.

In honour of them...

Ten Memorable Memories of My Tutor Group

1. On induction day, when they were still officially in year 6, C had a massive strop because B had spent the whole day hanging around K and C was jealous. C drew a disturbing picture on his whiteboard of K being shot in the head while he pointed and laughed.

2. C ate a lot of sweets in registration. One morning I confiscated them and replaced them in the bag with satsuma segments, and then hid in the cupboard until he came back. His reaction? "Apple would have been OK but she knows I don't like orange."

3. K sprayed aerosol over the bottom of a desk in textiles - LOTS of aerosol, ie so much it was dripping off - and then flicked a match at it and set fire to his own bag and singed his eyebrows. The class had to evacuate while Miss Hawker put it out with a fire extinguisher.

4. The boys came to afternoon registration every day for a week or so with a new toy and told me they were being sold in the canteen. I naively believed this until I was alerted to the fact that they'd been leaving school at lunchtime and buying these toys at the local pound shop.

5. Hat day, Christmas of year 11. When the girls suggested, as I sat knitting in my deckchair on sports day 6 months earlier, that I knit them all hats for Christmas, it seemed like a good idea. Then I actually had to knit them. But it was all worth it, they were so pleased with them.

6. When we changed classrooms at the end of their year 9, we all crawled into the bottom of the book cupboard (one at a time) and signed our names on the wall of the old room. They're still there.

7. In year 9, we did a tutor group assembly about the litter problem in school. Half the class dressed as rats while the other half went up on the gantry in the studio and threw scrap paper into the crowd. Then the "rats" ran around to the Benny Hill theme picking up the paper. The HoY's face was an absolute picture.

8. Tutor trips. I maintain we had more than any other tutor and they were all amazing, even the one where L had been ill all day but still really wanted to come and then vommed on the floor of the ice rink boot room.

9. The year I got married, Rihanna release Mr DJ and whenevr it was on the radio in the morning the boys would turn it up. M told me it was the official tutor group song. It still makes me think of them (and driving around running wedding errands).

10. The ball - has to be. They all looked so grown up and I realised how proud of them I was, even though this is a little weird because they're not my actual children. But it was amazing. S even managed to create drama one last time....she has been creating it for several years and was banned from the ball, but turned up fully dressed in her finery anyway and her parents had to be called to fetch her home. They were not happy. But, well...send your child to school on time, in correct uniform, and teach her not to scream obscenities at staff members and it all might have been avoided.
(Same mum bought her 13 year old booze to drink at a morning school event earlier in the year - that made national news).

Anyway. In a strange way I am impressed that S stayed true to form right to the end - she may have been vile to me but she has a lot of spirit and one day it might be useful. They're all good kids, really. Here they are - induction day, 2004, and last day, 2009.





Next year, I'm taking on a tutor group going into year 11 who are losing their main tutor - which is just as well: I don't think I could cope with the emotional rollercoaster so quickly again!

Weekend FO

It should be the law that all yarn must be this beautiful.













Pattern: Green Day - but I called it Santorini, because the blues remind me of pictures of the place.
Yarn: Galatea by Yarn d'Amour in Skye Blue, almost every last scrap of 3 skeins
Needle: 5.5mm circ, 4.5mm circ
Mods: Several...

1. I knitted it in the round and carried the cable from the twisted rib up the front - it's not very noticable because it's not flanked by purl stitches but it adds a bit of interest.
2. I added an extra repeat in the back and a few stitches at the front to size it up (although it's VERY stretchy and I'd probably have been alright without).
3. I did my own thing with the armholes. I thought I was going to run out of yarn, so I knit myself two long straps first and then set out up the back, when it became evident that I WOULD have enough yarn to knit as per the pattern, but too late to match the decreases on front and back. It doesn't notice and I like how it turned out.
4. I knit the neckline ribbing with one twist to echo the waistband ribbing.

A useful technique I used for this was spit splicing the yarn together at the end of a skein - really effective and has reduced the number of ends that need weaving in, as well as making the yarn go that little bit further. I really thought I was going to run out. My poor knitting group were forced to waste considerable amounts of their time helping me to pick out a complementary yarn to do the ribbing and agonising over how it could be changed, and in the end it was totally unecessary - though it was a close thing.

On this garment, I picked up stitches the way Liz Lovick taught us to at the Fairisle. You use a much smaller needle (I used a 3mm), pick up every stitch, then knit a round (don't knit the stithces as they're picked up), then switch to the recommended needle size and decrease across the picked up stitches until you get the right number. This worked like a dream. It came out superneat and actually made picking up the stitches a joy, whereas normally this would have languished in the UFO pile for a month or more while I put it off endlessly.

Check it! So neat.




















Now, I just have to wait for the cold weather so I can wear it.

Fave Friday

A while back I was trawling around looking for blogs about AG&T Education...

....incidentally, every blog I found was an American blog, mostly by homeschooling parents. I don't know whether Google just ordered them like that or I went off on a tangent, or what. It's disappointing, really, because there are shedloads of good bloggers out there on general/History teaching in the UK but nothing on AG&T, that I can find. I started my own. In the interests of keeping home web and work web separate, though, I won't post the URL here....

...I came across this blog, by a homeschooling mum called Kelli. She has all manner of little tricks up her sleeve for regular blogging, kind of like that knitting blog I mentioned a couple of months ago, including Work On it Wednesdays (WOW) where you did something you'd been putting off - that was a great idea but I sort of kept putting off setting myself a goal to complete something I'd been putting off. So (if you understood that) I never participated. Here's something easier though - Fave Friday. Five favourite things! Any things! How hard can it be?

Five Favourite Fiction Books
1. Like Water For Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel. I wish I was fluent in Spanish and could read the original. Perhaps that would be a good challenge one summer.
2. Futuretrack 5, by Robert Westall. A teen fiction book I still pick up and read again every so often. I really like the story.
3. The Falls, by Ian Rankin. Anything by him, really, but that sticks out as a particular fave. Unfortunately, since most of his books are murder mysteries, they can only be read once. I love his writing, though - he's a real wordsmith.
4. Memnoch the Devil, by Anne Rice. I went through the Vampire Chronicles phase about a decade ago but this one has stayed with me because she has some really unique views on religion. I also really like Queen of the Damned but that's more of a ripping yarn than a thought-provoking treatise.
5. The Dark Is Rising series, by Susan Cooper. More teen fiction, really, but I love all the old English history bits in here, and the way it's like a Famous Five adventure but not cheesy, and the fact that I've read them a dozen times and I STILL don't remember how it ends...


Long weekend ahead. I never really realised, when I accepted my contract as team leader on my regular exam paper, that the fact it was PAID much better than bog-standard examiner is because it's more WORK. I haven't stopped this week and could only manage an hour at knitting group last night, even. Rachel didn't even have time to give me The Look.

I've fallen back into the old routine of up at 6am, work for an hour, go to work, come home, eat, work until 10, Big Brother, bed, repeat. I love getting up at 6am, I get shedloads done and I feel much more with it during my commute and early morning school - it's a shame I can't force myself to stick to it unless my workload is double what it usually is.

Luckily the team leading duties will tail off a little over the next week, once my examiners are well into their allocations and marking consistently. I'm sort of disillusioned with it, though. BUT I keep my eyes on the prize...3 nights in Sequoia, 4 nights in Yosemite, 3 nights in Tahoe and then 2 nights in a haunted B&B in Virginia City...oh yes, it will all be worth it in just 6 short weeks. I'm going to go bear spotting and rafting and swimming in lakes, and getting noshed on by big, Californian mosquitoes, and knit a lace shawl, and take 100s of photographs, and break in some new walking boots, and get an amazing pedicure at that salon near Father Hand's house, and buy Philosophy products, and visit Jimmy Beans in Reno and buy yarn....it's going to be awesome.

Now....60 more responses to backread before I can start my weekend....


I should mention the positive, actually - I taught a grand total of 4 lessons this week. FOUR. Out of 25. I have been hanging out all year for year 11 to finally pop off so I can get all of that time I spent slogging through their coursework and marking their mocks, and it's finally here! I can go to work for a rest, now. I can get eveyrthing done I don't have time for in the evenings. I have been so very productive this week. Go me.