Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Out and About, Work and Relaxation, Dolphin and Type....

Last night Richard and I, and a couple of colleagues from Egypt who are working with him at present, drove to Limassol to have a meal with a couple in another organisation. Egyptian husband, Cypriot wife. We had a very pleasant evening with excellent food, and it was warm enough that we sat outside after eating until about 10.30pm, when we left. It's an hour's drive back so we were rather later than I had hoped, but never mind. The boys were still up and beginning to get worried about us...!

Warm again today. A little weeding first thing, and a bit of lawn-mowing late afternoon. It's a pity it's dark so early as the evenings are really very pleasant, although even by sixish the garden is full of mosquitoes, even when we keep the weeds down. I suppose it's all the trees that encourage them, and we love the trees. We don't get bitten as much as we did at first, and the bites no longer swell up or become itchy, but I still prefer to keep out of the way of mozzies.

Tim got up early and did some of his curriculum work!! Maths and English only, but he did the final workbook test in each so he'll be doing official tests tomorrow. He's doing geometry in maths - American style, so full of formal proofs of things that are really quite obvious. No enjoyable proofs like we had to do at school - actually finding things out and being able to use whatever techniques we liked. Still, Tim seems to be making more sense of this than Daniel did. For Dan it was too painfully detailed and he always wanted to use some other method than what was expected. For Tim it's just boring, but he likes it better than algebra. I wish these American curriculums used the British style of introducing algebra and geometry at a much younger age and then doing them interspersed with other maths, rather than making such a huge deal out of them. It's not as if either is particularly difficult, but so much focus on just one topic becomes heavy and tedious.

There was a jumble sale at lunchtime at the Anglican Church. They do them about four times a year and often have a good selection of stuff. Not too many books today, but I picked up one that looked interesting, and a few classical CDs at 50c each (a little less than 60p sterling) which seemed good value. Oh, and a few jigsaws, which the lady on the stall said were almost certainly complete. I'll do them in the summer when it's too hot for anything much more. We haven't had any new jigsaws for a few years now.

Tim's piano lesson was cancelled because his teacher was helping at the jumble sale. But Daniel had a busy afternoon, teaching the 7-11s at Antidote Theatre because the directors were away. Unfortunately they didn't ask him until just under a week ago so he didn't have a chance to spend time in the class beforehand, and just to make it even more difficult, they didn't have the class in the usual theatre place, as the stage is being re-built. So they started in the car park and then moved to the foyer. Dan said it went reasonably well, which is encouraging as he was quite worried about having to teach 20 children he didn't know! Rather him than me...

Now he's out at karate. Richard's back at the office working with the Egyptians. Tim's watching something on TV. So I'm back at the computer....

A few days ago I signed up for 'Project Dolphin' - an interesting idea that tells us how many keystrokes we do at the computer each day! It then sends a 'pulse' once an hour (or once a day) to log this at the site. I'm not quite sure what the point of it is but it's interesting to know. I apparently do between 18,000 and 30,000 keystrokes per day, which is much lower than many. Sounds a lot, but within email and forums and reviews and blogging, and taking the average word as having about 4 letters plus a space, it's only around 4,500 - 6,000 words per day.

Then this morning I signed up for the type blogs site that sorts blogs according to Myers-Briggs types. What a great idea.

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