Be Careful What You Wish For

Who ya gonna call?

Last week I was idly thinking how much I would like a holiday….and now I am being told to stay at home for a week! (And being paid for it!) Maybe God heard me after all. That doesn’t mean I am taking responsibility for the earthquake though.

Our chimney has been rescued by the fire service. Luckily before those nasty after shocks this morning. (There’s a lot to be said for a man in uniform with handy skills.) It’s wrapped up like a chicken carcass and we are still counting our lucky stars.

I only wrote this post so I could show off the cool photo I took. Now I am going to play with flickr and facebook photo stores,so if I lose my camera or laptop they are stored in the cloud.

Earthquake

They always used to tell us when we were kids that the big quake was just a matter of when and not if. They lied. It was supposed to happen in Wellington, not here. Dammit.

And not in the middle of the night when it is really freezing, and you can’t see what you’re doing and all the torch batteries are flat and there’s no power, so you can’t ring anyone to check they are still alive.

It was very loud and very scary, especially since we are on the second storey. It sounded more like an explosion than what I would have expected and while it was happening I just froze. John thought the house was going to cave in, but we have very little damage and we are very happy to be so unscathed.

Chimney after quake

Our chimney looks like a pile of jenga blocks but that is pretty minor. Bit of paint and window cracking, but overall our old girl has withstood things well.

The things that really come to mind are people, then comfort. No electricity means no hot water for a shower. I was ready to kill someone just for clean hair. John was desperate for sausages for the barbecue. We went to the supermarket and got the last pack of sausages in the freezer. How funny is that.

There were no D batteries left. Obviously everyone else had discovered they had non-functioning torches too. I went for a walk and found the neighbours doing the same. We were all trying to pretend it was a normal Saturday, while rubbernecking around the neighbourhood. The pool was closed, the river was full of dirty silt, there were no soccer teams in the park, but the only signs of what had happened in our lucky suburb were leaning chimneys and the odd damaged brick or concrete fence.

A little wall damage

People have been calling from China, London, Hawaii and the North Island to check on us. Nice to know people care. Unfortunately we don’t have a very exciting disaster tale to justify their concern, but I can live with that.

Don’t recognise myself

Sometimes  I don’t recognise myself.

This week, I happened to meet someone in the course of my everyday work. They were talking about their everyday work – and I thought, Yes. That’s why I changed my job.

The person speaking was sooo negative about what had happened in their institution and the impact it had had on him, etc etc.  He’d been there too long, had unpleasant stories to tell, and I wanted to take him aside and say: Look mate, you have a choice: Get another job, do some counselling, buy a self-help book.

But then I remembered, we all think we know how other people should run their lives. I knew I had to change my job when the words NCEA and new curriculum started to fill me to the brim with total boredom. And hearing that bitter and twisted person this week made me so glad I am where I am now. There, but for the grace of God…

The week ended on a highlight. It was the third week of a Writing for the Web course I had been doing with some juniors from a local primary school. We wrote news stories about their experiences, then the seniors uploaded the juniors’ stories to the school blog they had created. It was amazing to see the very little seven year olds being helped by the ten year olds, then we could all sit back and read their combined work on the internet.

That was when I didn’t recognise myself. I remembered how negative I used to be about e-learning, how impossible it seemed. Because it was so hard trying to do it with virtually no training or resources. But now that I have the training and the learning centre resources, e learning is exciting and rewarding.

I’m actually writing this post to practise my own blogging for another class I am teaching. So now I have to tell you about what I am reading, so I can practise putting a book cover image into the post. It’s Novel About my Wife by Emily Perkins who is a really great Kiwi author!

John’s reading it now, while I read the book he has just read: The Passage by Justin Cronin.

Perkins’ book is the story of a young woman’s descent into madness, while Cronin’s is an apocalyptic futuristic super-scary tale. Both far more enjoyable than their descriptions seem to suggest. Life is too short to read crappy books and these two are great!

The Passage

The wonderful Kiwi author Emily Perkins

Connections

Well, I enjoyed doing this paper because I did most of it at home where I could concentrate and meander through things as they appealed to me. I rediscovered my rss feed from Out of Print – which has lovely whimsical stories about books and libraries. I am deciding whether or not to continue with the school librarian listserv and I finally got around to reinstalling the delicious tool on my thingee bar. I am kind of glad CCL Learn is nearly over but also glad I did it. I really want my team to do it now. Unfortunately Lynette was going to be doing it with me on this wave, but she is on sick leave. I still haven’t figured out why you guys couldn’t hear me on Skype. IT looked at it and couldn’t solve it either – so I don’t feel so bad. Andrew is going to look at it when he comes in on Friday. Looking forward to coffee at Bean Scene on Monday.

Being famous

New Zealand: Christchurch (South Library and New Brighton Library) from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

 I think this was the ultimate in teacher/librarian satisfaction. On Friday last the two visiting librarians from Holland came to visit my book club. They loved the kids and interviewed us. It was so much fun anad reminded me of when I was about 22 and did a Todd Dealer advt. It was the first time my mother-in-law saw me - on national tv. My only moment of stardom until now!! Except I am not sure why i have only embedded the link and not the video itself. Sigh - just when I thought I was learning heaps of new stuff, I find a stumbling block. At least it works.

It’s raining it’s pouring

I just finished the Social Networking unit and I will put some time aside tomorrow to do the Web 2 one. Haven’t had time to explore Ning properly yet, because I have been preparing for the premiere of my Writing for NCEA course which starts at Upper Riccarton Learning Centre tonight. I was quite intrigued with the point made in the introductory reading for Web 2 that the tools tend to be aggregating or diffusing. Made it a lot clearer to me. I like thinking in metaphors like that.

Later….I always swore that I would never do Bebo, but it looks cool. I thought that because I got so sick of kids at school bullying or being bullied on Bebo. I would have to spend hours in class sorting out their stupid Bebo dramas instead of teaching. One of the teachers was obssessed with it and used it to track what her neices and nephews were saying about her recent divorce…I thought PLEASE….

I was kind of intrigued by the council that had an emergency blog. I mean..the tsunami is on the way..are you really going to stop and blog about it. Yes the water is coming, yes I can see the water, yes my feet are wet, I am drowning….? Actually there was an interesting post about swine flu.

I really wanted the badge thing from the National Museum site that shows a photo of the latest museum acquisitions for my blog site. but it didn’t work and even the great expert Donna couldn’t do it. So I didn’t feel so bad. We think it is because the side bar on wordpress is too narrow. When I get a moment I will play around with the sizes in the html code. We discovered we had to do that with glogster a while ago. Watch this space.

I just found outofprint t-shirts

On the road

Sorry, I should have put this up last week. I found the coolest website. You buy a t-shirt which has an out of print classic book cover on it and part of the money goes to buy new books for kids in Africa. How cool is that? It also has an interesting rss feed which doesn't give you feeds about t-shirts - but interesting trivia about books and libraries around the world. Did you know there was a library in America where the librarians shop on-line for you for your groceries?

My iGoogle Page

I am not adding a screen shot of my iGoogle page at the moment because I have one already on my personal laptop.I have CHCH weather contrasting with the weather in Brighton, England, because my stepson is there and I like to see how his weather compares with ours. I have Sunsets of the Day – which I love. I often save them to My Pictures and use them as backgrounds for my screen. then I have a virtual waterfall – just cos I like it. And a classic picture of the day of Marilyn Monroe.

Last night I looked at Google Docs for the first time. I am running it around in my head to think about how to use it in the learning centre programmes or my own life. I showed the calendar to my husband because he had been asking for a tangible calendar to put  his varsity deadlines on, but when I showed him Google calendars he agreed that would be better.

Gadgets and Widget

I am working really hard to finish my units this week. I want to take some time tomorrow morning in lieu for working Friday evening, and Monday morning on NZ Post Book Award events. so I have set myself a goal of finishing xyz so I can relax. Otherwise I will start stressing about the xyz work I should be at work doing.

I had seen the Digital NZ gadgets last year when we did some work with the National Library. Everything was so new it didn’t fit into my head very well. Now I have 18 months under my belt, I was excited to see it coming up in the CCLLearn session this afternoon.

I embedded a search widget on a group area of our learning centre website.

So now when the students arrive and start their Antractica story they will be able to search for images for their stories.

the first day of CCLlearn

Well it is nearly to the end of the first session of CCLlearn. I have found it disorienting to be in a new online learning environment. I keep thinking I will do something wrong! I am sure I will enjoy it and I see from the choices on the menu why we need so much time. I take a long time to learn new things…