Two fun books

Since I do some homebound teaching for the school system, I spend a lot of time at the library. Last week, this book caught my eye.



It's called Indigo's Star and it's by Hilary McKay. Yeah, it's for "young adults" but I liked it anyway. This is a great story about a family in England. You must read it to believe it!

There's also another novel by the same author about the same family. It's called Saffy's Angel.



Go to your library, get these books, and read them. They're funny and they won't take you too long to read.

One good thing about moving

Ok, there are a lot of downsides to moving: packing, weeding through years and years of crap you never should have gotten to begin with, packing, saying goodbye to people, packing, things like that.

But, one great things is that I've heard from several people I haven't heard from in forever. Hopefully, I'll be able to stay in touch a little better this time around.

Ah...procrastination!

You know, it's amazing the things one can find to to when one is putting off packing boxes.


And now, on a not-so-unrelated note, I got this in the mail today. It's a 1 Gb USB Flash Drive. I got it so that I can take some of my data with me (conveniently) when I move. If you want one, go here. (Don't worry, Mom, I paid much, MUCH less than the list price.)

So, to take advantage of all that roominess, I thought I'd play around with installing Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird on there. And since I was at the library (read: place with free high-speed Internet), I also downloaded OpenOffice.

In case you're curious:

• Firefox is a FREE, open-source web browser. It's smaller than Netscape and Internet Explorer, it's more stable (at least for me), and it has a lot of nice features.
• Thunderbird is a FREE, open-source e-mail program. After my copy of Eudora Pro stopped working (probably due to the massive amounts of email I was saving for some reson), I went to Thunderbird.
  
• OpenOffice is a set of programs (sorry - "productivity suite") which includes, evidently, a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a graphics program, some presentation software, and some database tools. I've just used it once, but from everything I've heard, it's much better than the Microsoft stuff. Plus, you can't beat the price!

Harriet, Sweet Harriet

I've already written about Harriet and me having dinner and wandering the bookstore last night. This morning, I got an email from Harriet about her blog. It made me kinda sad and yet happy at the same time.




Then, this afternoon, I got an email from Harriet with this picture:



It made me kinda happy and yet sad at the same time.



And that's just one reason why Harriet is awesome.

Packing

I'm used to living in clutter so the mess of boxes and wadded-up newspaper is, sadly, nothing very new for me. I spent several hours today packing boxes of things I don't need to take to England but that I don't want to get rid of. Thinking it would be fairly easy to get flat things packed, I decided to pack my picture frames. I quickly discovered two things.

First, I have way more pictures thatn I thought I did. Family pictures, pictures of lighthouses, space exploration pictures, punk and skateboarding pictures, good grief! At least they're flat...

Second, without the things on the walls, the house really looks different. As I said, I'm sadly used to the clutter, so it was the things on the walls that made the house look lived-in. Now, as I go up the stairs, instead of seeing my family's picture, I look at the empty spot.

It's kind of sad.

Blog Comments

When I set up this blog, I could choose if I wanted to allow comments or not. I decided to allow comments even though I really didn't expect to get any, especially from people I don't know. But today, I had a comment from someone named MZ in Tokyo. It's kinda neat...

Thanksgiving and Such

My life right now isn't all about getting ready to move. Thursday was Thanksgiving and I spent it with my mother and father, and my brother and his fiancé. We had our traditional turkey, cornbread stuffing (one of the best parts!), mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, rolls, olives, pickles, homemade jams...everything! And for dessert we had mincemeat pie and pumpkin ice cream pie. Ahhh......yum.....

Yesterday, I drove back to Roanoke, worked at Photo USA, and had dinner. (Are you excited yet?) After that, I went to No Shame Theatre's Thanksgiving-themed night. It was one of the best I've been to in a while!

Today, I worked all day at Photo USA - it's the holiday season now and people are trying to get their Christmas card pictures done and have us make copies of old photos.

Then I had dinner with Harriet. She was on her way out of town but we had dinner at a Mexocan place and then we wandered about in Barnes and Noble. Since she moved in the spring, it's been a long time since weve done that. And since I'm moving soon, this is probably our last time. The end of an era.....

I have a job!

I have accepted a mathematics teaching position at Collenswood School in Stevenage, England. It is supposed to begin in January. I spent much of yesterday getting paperwork notarized and having my fingerprints taken for a background check. Now, I have to wait for my background check to be completed, have the school apply for my work permit, and then apply for my entry clearance visa.

Another Interview

I had another interview with a school in England. With the time change and early-morning commitments, it was scheduled for 5:30 am. The interview went pretty well, I think. Hopefully I'll hear something from that school soon. I'm supposed to hear by tomorrow about the interview I had last Thursday.