September Looming

I always look forward to the new school year. Have some new ideas to try out with the classes and hope that we can get on well and learn something helpful language and life-wise.

This.... Absolutely not!! Grrr!

And right now, it's hello, Hato. The HKO forecasts a Signal 8 Typhoon in a few hours at 0600 and someone has named it "Hato." Well, that's my excuse to stay up again instead of adjusting to diurnal hours. Whatever have I been doing...?

Today (yesterday) was pretty cool. Some meetings, some reunions with colleagues and some new things I've learnt: namely, the mail merge function of Word.

So, every year, I make a new planner. Once they give us the timetable and the school and department calendars, I cobble together a weekly planner and use it for preparing lessons and trying to stay organised, as you do. Every year, I set up the timetable and run off loads of copies of it and then manually fill in the dates. For whatever reason, today (yesterday), I had it stuck in my head to do it all on the computer.

"They invented computers for exactly this! I'm not doing it by hand anymore! It's going to save me so much time!"

Right.

Three hours later, having consulted no less than four colleagues, I'm still stuck in my cubicle with little to show for it. And then Colleague No 5 showed up and I thought, "She'll know how to do this. She used to work in [a strongly related field]." and I asked her - and she knew enough to point me in the right direction.

By the fourth hour, which must have been 1715 hours at least, I had a lovely Word document with oodles and oodles of pages that had plugged in the days and dates of the year from my "Hot Dates" Excel spreadsheet. So close and yet no cigar. The dates were American, reading something like "Fri 09-01."

I didn't spend decades treading the fine line between absolutely British and absolutely American to accept this rubbish. "You're my dream" indeed...

So I sift the Internet and come up with a hack that, step by step, lets me tweak the date first in Excel, then in the mail merge process into Word... and it worked. And then I found a missing week in my final output, added that in, punched in all the key dates, double checked it and, finally, printed the 80-page slimmed-down thing double-sided and Bob's your uncle. (I have no relative named Bob, btw).

Took a break and looked up and it was 2035 or something ridiculous. Told you - have no concept of time during the summer holidays. Rummaged through the files for the documents I needed to work at home and reluctantly shut down Ol Betsy, the computer they're eventually taking away and replacing with a Macbook or whatnot.

Went home.

Fired up Ol Faithful and wrote a script for Staff Development Day. Proofread Script #1 three, four times with my co-MC. Sent it off to the TICs. Done.

Looked at the materials for Orientation Day, Script #2, and put it away for tomorrow (later today). Enough. Sometimes you have to look at the work you've done and rest in the moment, so I did.

Not completely braindead, I decided to do some highlighting of Script #1 and Term 1 of the planner. That's just about all I can manage now. Been up since 0713 hours yesterday, you know... Zzzz...