T-Bird Anni Rides Again

I’ve just realised I should have another essay finished by midnight tomorrow.  I just don’t think I can do it.  I’ve read and re-read the passage for the fisrt half o fthe question and I still can’t find the answers to the questions listed in the "guidance notes" and now, of course, I’m so wound up about it that I haven’t got a hope in hell of getting my head round ti.  I’m hating the course, it’s making me anxious all the trime because I just can’t seem to understand it half the time, it’s not writen clearly or logically at all.  I’ve no recolections of all but the vaugest details of what’s gone before (litterally I could write down what I remember freom the first half of the course on a post it note, a small post it note.) and this course doesnt give you any indicators of what may come up on the exam so I’ve no way of reducing the amount of stuff I’ll need to try to re read in the 3 weeks between the last essay and the exam.

So give up totally and take something different at the enxt intake or defer until the next tiem the course starts and try again from a postiion of having a few months to red the course through at a slower, less pressured pace? 

Right, trying to get a grip here, and you all know how hard getting a grip on anything is round here……

I’m struggling with this, but why?

I have no sense of time management.  Thta’s a typical  Dyxie thing and it’s something I’ve yet to learn a way around despite it being a fact of life since I’ve been small.  I NEED TO LEARN THIS!  It doesn’t just affect study, it affects Rainbows (I run round on Wednesdays realising that I’ve not done stuff I needed to for the afternoon’s meeting) it affects the house (shopping doesn’t get done, tea slips later and later, housework gets forgotten because I don’t realise how much of the day has slipped away already until its evening and I’m tired) it affects Aprilia (I don’t organise things for her, I lose track of time in the day and promised stories don’t get read until I’m too tired to enjoy that time with her at bedtime, I don’t listen to her read because by bedtime we are both too tired to deal with her faltering, wobbly steps into reading)

I don’t distinguish detail.  Again, a really typical Dyxie trait.  I see a big picture, that’s great, it’s something that a lot of non-Dyxie types can’t do and it’s because of the different way our brains work.  Trouble is, I don’t see nitty gritty.  Imagine looking at Constable’s Haywain painting, and then being asked to pick out specific leaves on a tree in the background and discuss it.  That’s how it feels for me to be given a huge amount of text and pick out small points in it.  That’s how I fouled up the last TMA.  There was one sentence buried in the middle of a full page of A4 "guidance notes" that said not to look at who was providing the care but at the types of care available.  I’m still not sure I understand the distinction (the person provides the type of care - a Galenic person provides care based on Galenic ideas thus talking about him necesarily means talking about what he does and vice verca surely?)

I hvae to read things again, and again, and…well you get the piont.  I have software that will take the strain to a degree but after you hvae listened to Metal Mickey (or Metal Michelle depending on the voice!) for a while it’s easy to zone out!  To be fair, that’s not an excuse, I zone out much faster when I try to read for myself.   I should use the software all the time to get it to read stuff to me but I don’t.  Why?  Lots of pathetically lame reasons.  it requires me to sit at my desk wich isn’t a comfortable place to sit whereas I prefer to sit on the bed (bad move, bed = comfortable = snoozy!)   It requires me to spend a while each time scanning text from the source book (colelction of other people’s blitherings on a given subject) so taht the PC can read it because although teh course books can be provided on CD, the souce books can’t and scanning requires me to womble back and forth clicking buttons on the PC then going over to the scanner and turning pages…. obvioulsy I need someone trained in ergonomics to sort the study area out!  And scanning the whole book before the course started may have been a good idea too, although mind-numbing boredom crept in after chapter 3 I think….  It means I need to remember that I hvae been given £££ worth of software to do all this, accept taht it wasn’t given on a whim but because, actually, i do need it, and use the bloody stuff.

I have no idea how to take notes.  I could get a specialist tutor to help me with this.  There is funding available for it.  But that would require someone to come into my "study area" - AKA the bedroom - to guide me through stuff.  Some of you ahve been to my house.  If I were to point out that downstairs is much tidier than upstairs would taht explain why I don’t want this to happen….. 

So, there we have, in cold hard text, exactly waht the real problems are.  Okay so this course has been tougher because it’s less Dyxie friendly than the last in it’s format but really, it’s me not the course taht it the problem.  I’m sure they could re-write the whole course to make it easier to access, change the format of the guidance notes to make it clearer etc but to be fair, dyslexia only affects a small percentage of their students so why should they?  So even if I ditch this course and take a different one, ther’s absolutely no promise that it will be any easier to access, easier to understand.  i have a plain and simple choice.  Keep going or jack it all in.  I’m not sure that I’m being a good role model by jacking it all in when I won’t let Aprilia give up on her reading really am I? 

You know how some days just start with a niggle and carry on the same way?  Well yesterday was one of those.  I may well blog the things that were winding me up elsewhere if I can be bothered.  Chocolate cake kept me from being too vile during the day but then we get to evening and our day got rapidly better.  It was "Midsummer Madness" at Petty Pool, a mid year training thingie for Guiders to tide us over til the proper one at the end of the year (or more like it was a social event under the guise of training so we could all get together, enjoy a cuppa and a scone and do a few activities)

 As Duke was already out I took Aprilia with me and thus chose activities that we could both enjoy rather than sitting through any presentations about new resources so we opted for campfire singing/action songs for the first part and then campfire cooking for the second.  Bear in mind here it was typical British Summer Weather (that would be torrential rain then….) but then we are a resourceful lot and you can have a small-ish fire in a large, open-sided shelter with a concrete base you know   Having giggled our way through a lot of silly action songs I suddenly found that I really didn’t care much about everything that had niggled me all day, one cream and strawberry scone later I couldn’t remember what most of the niggles were and by the time I’d made dampers (flour and water dough wrapped round a stick adn toasted over th fire) and reminded myslef of how much nicer marshmallows are when toasted over a real fire (candles are okay but not a patch on a proper fire, and as for holding them over the gas hob, hmmmm) I was very chilled.  I could even cope with Aprilia singing one particular song all the way home (I’m alive, awake alert, enthusiastic!)

well that was the plan!  She’s been getting later and later to go to sleep recently and thus later to wake up.  So I went and evicted her from her bed at 8:30 which I didn’t think was such a terrible crime but was met with great indignity.  We got through most of the SL stuff for the day but managed only a token bit of reading and writing and somehow we forgot maths entirely.  Never mind, she’s good at maths so I can afford to be a lazy b***er with that!  There was also extra added Harry, Muddle Earth and Roman Mystery.  There was brief interest in excercise, she declared she was going to do half an hour on the treadmill which I suggested may be a bit optemistic as half an hour is really a bit much considering the resistance on the machine makes it significantly harder than just walking for that time.  She managed a very creditable 10 minutes and has decided that that’s probably about right each day!  So then, did she go to sleep any earlier this evening?  Um, well, it’s just gone 10:30 and I’ve just removed the Hama beads from her room…..

We had the police round this evening after kids from one side of the estate declared war on kids from the other side and decided the alleyway next to us was as good a place as any to hold this war.  It started out with racially confused insults (they couldn’t quite decide if they were insulting someone of Oriental, Asian or African origins, or maybe they were just too damned thick to know the difference) which escalated to snapping bits off the already damaged fence at the front of our house to throw at each other and from there to picking up stones and throwing them.  After threatening them with "Clear off or we call 999" they bogged off for half an hour then came back.  So Duke made the call.  He was given the local "incident hotline" number by the 999 operative.  A good 10 minutes later he got off the phone with a promise that someone would be with us soon.  And indeed, half an hour later they were!  Not bad considering Cheshire Police HQ is a 5 minute stroll from our house   Strangely enough, it had all died down by then….. but we had photos (ah, the joys of having a really wide opening window facing onto the alleyway!) which were duely taken away.   this is how it started last time, about 4 or 5 years ago now and it carried on escalating for a well over 2 years until the brats grew up but they were teenagers, this was kids in Primary school uniforms, this could potentially go on for another 10 years FFS!  Ah well, the last lot ripped out our back fence, maybe this lot will do the front so the insurance will pay for that to be replaced too!

We really enjoyed watching the Jackonory version of Muddle Earth the other year and have been meaning to bully the library to buy the book for ages (they don’t have it - shocking!) but now we have bought it and are 6 chapters in I have to say it’s nothing like the adaptation, it’s way, way better   The language is really good, not dumbed down as I sort of suspect the BBC version was.  The humour ranges from down right slapstick to really subtle that only someone who had read a bit of Tolkein here and there would spot, the illustrations are fab, the characters are daft but still somehow "real" rather than the 2D type of charicatures you sometimes find.  I’m loving it, Aprilia is loving it and my only complaint is that it’s making bedtime stories last even longer than normal cos I want to carry on reading!

Today was declared a non-gardening day so we went to Cheshire Oaks, bought a toy Nev for Aprilia (reduced from £20 to £5) who she insisted on taking to Brownies with her, also got Muddle Earth which is hilarious and several other books including, at Aprilia’s request, the JOlly Phonics dictionary.  Oh, and I got something I’ve been looking at for ages, a solar charging battery pack complete with fan, light and clock which will be fab in the tent as it only needs daylight, not sunlight to charge so I can keep it inside, keep it charged and always have a light and access to a bit of power for charging phones etc as well as having a way to shift the hot air out of the tent.

We also dined out and, as usual, whislt waiting for the food, I read to Aprilia.  After a while a lady came over from another table and I was braced for  "why isn’t she in school"  etc but instead got "I hope you don’t mind me saying but, it’s lovely to see someone taking time to read to their child during the daytime, and even more lovely to see how much she is enjoying it"   It made me feel all successful home-schooling-mum-ish!  Little does she know…. I do it to distract Aprilia from the "i’m bored, when is the food coming?" routine!

Duke made one long raised bed along one side which has neatly consumed all the "spare soil" from leveling the garden.  I dug out the strawberries which really weren’t doing too well and shoved them into pots out of the way where they can either survive or not really (past caring, they were one of my more expensive wastes of time effort and money a few years ago…) whilst we raised up where they were to the right level and then Aprilia put marigolds and teddybear sunflowers in their place.  Whiskers has made a skill out of being in the wrong place at the wrong time all day and thus has been regularly showered with soil.  She eventually sought refuge in the compost bin!  All we need now is a couple of weeks for the soil level to settle (a bit of rain at night would help, but not too much, we are talking clay here after all) and then a final leveling out, dressing with compost to give the grass seed something more pleasant to get going in, and then seeding.  Jax, thanks for the tip with the fleece, I’ll look into how much it will cost to do that, I suspect that a bit of a blanket would probably help enormously and to be fair, anything trying to grow in our garden needs all the help it can get!  Oh, and Duke needs to put the shed back up in it’s new location, and make a gate for the back so we don’t need to fetch bikes through the house, and then I get to settle down with the seed catalogues and some squared paper to draft out my dream cottage garden boarder!

it went thunk, pitter patter, Nooooooooo!  and at the bottom of the stairs appeared a very stressed looking Daddy who had just dropped a carton of milk which had knocked 6 complete Hama boards onto the floor.  We have saved all bar 2, one was a randomly filled by one of Aprilia’s friends but the other was designed and made by Aprilia this afternoon, was utterly lovely adn we can’t remember exactly how it looked to replicate it.  Ah well, at least we don’t have to admit to the full extent of the drama (and next time I will fuse them as she does them!!!)

No really, we do have almost a really nice garden!  Duke rotovated it yesterday, and it did take him the full day too as it was really lumpy and hard baked in places not to mention the buried "treasures" such as brick ends, scafolding clamps, bits of broken land drain kindly left for us to discover by the house builders.  It’s almost flat now, a bit of raking and a lot of sieving is tomorrow’s job as I want to get as much root-like stuff out as possible.  I *know* we won’t get rid of the horsetail completely that way but if we can at least reduce it to a shaddow of it’s former self we have a hope of rooting it out a bit at a time from there.  It covered a good 50% of the garden until recently when I set to getting rid as of much as I could.

I wandered up to Wyevale yesterday in the hopes of "out of date" turf but it seems there was non to be had, they order it in when it’s asked for according to the spotty youf at the tills so we are back to seeding it and banning all and sundry from playing on it for a month or so.  Hardly ideal but worth it in the long run. 

Duke and I also gave our May trees a serious prune and they look way better for it.  The bonfire with the prunings was a sight to behold too, May burns really hot and fast!  There’s space behind them now for our compost "darleks" which is where the previous year’s compost gets left to finish off - having lots of wood shavings from the guinea pigs means that it does take a little longer to rot but it’s really lovely once it has.  Just moving those to what was previously "dead space" has made a huge difference to the feel of how big the garden is.  The shed is being moved to a better location too, leaving the prime, sunny real estate it used to take up available for nicer things like plants! 

So, despite s sh*tty essay, I am definitely having a good week! 

this week last year I covered the Cheshire Show with the Red Cross.  We had to be there at 8am At The Latest and didn’t get away til nearly 8pm on the Tuesday, I was treated like a diserter for leaving early to collect my child from my parents on the Wednesday as they couldn’t keep her past 5pm due to prior commitments.  She was with them because children don’t come on duty, in fact how dare you have children at all really?  We were on duty for the full time, with "breaks" being fairly grudgingly given for those of us in the tent (the Ladies Who Lunch amble round with radios and first aid kits whilst taking in the show, the Workers try to find where the LWL are when they give vague descpriptions of where they have found a casualty but otherwise don’t really see the outside of the tent much at all)  There is always a struggle to get sufficient people to staff it.

Today I covered the Cheshire Show with Girl Guides.  We were asked to be there about half an hour before our rota-ed shift which for me and Aprilia was 9:30am.  They were delighted that i could bring my own Brownie with me and how lovely that she came in uniform.  There were sufficient people willing to work just one short shift in return for a free day at the show that we were a bit crowded in the tent and some of the ladies went out to hunt down a few more visitors for us! We had a great time on the stand, Aprilia pretty much ran the activity set up (a rope maze that people had to climb through without ringing any of the bells strung from the ropes) as well as making sure there were plenty of goodlie bags filled and ready to hand out.  More’s the point, she was ALOWED to run it, under the quiet supervision of one of the Guiding equivelent of the Ladies Who Lunch (the Trefoil Guild) leaving me to chat to stand visitors and glow with pride over my girlie!  After my 2 hour shift was over we wandered round for a while, had a go on the fun fair and then headed back home all happy and feeling generally loved by our organisation rather than used by it.

Would you like to guess which organisation will be getting my assistance in future years? 

Aparently I didn’t answer the right question, which comes down to me understanding "health care" as how you would be treated (would you be given some herbs or have half your blood drained off) and not who you would go to (the bloke who gives you the herbs or the bloke who drains off half your blood supply) and so fouling up the whole essay.  An essay which took me in excess of 4 solid days work to produce, came in masively under the limit and was a total and utter waste of time and would indeed have been better left undone as 45% will drag my average way down whereas I’m allowed to not submit one at all thus keeping the average closer to 60% which gives me more scope for cocking up the exam.  And the comment of "you should have phoned or dropped me an e-mail was insult to injury.  He went on holiday the week before the essay was due leaving his whole tutor group with no one to ask anything.  Because you can’t discuss with your peers on the forums, that’s cheating (because that would *never* happen in a real uni would it?  No one would dream of helping out a mate with a few pointers would they.)

Someone remind me why I’m doing this?