My turn to have a day

I haven't had Mother's Day yet so I think that I'm entitled to pass on this link "Why God made moms" It's really funny and I think I'll have to die my hair blue.

Another week slips by

Wednesday lunchtime found me sitting outside the deputy head’s office with Olivier. He had had a dispute with his English teacher and called his lessons a load of ‘merde’. The result was a lecture about how he has never really put any effort into lycée and two days suspension from lessons; I’ve made a list of things for him to do over the two days, mainly revision, the Baccalaureate is in a month.

On Wednesday afternoon Manpower telephoned with some hours of exam supervising starting on Thursday.

Thursday morning I went to the loo with George Cluny before I started work. He’s on the toilet door urging us ‘girls’ to save water (put a brick in the cistern) and the planet. I hung my coat up over him. I mean, George Cluny, I want him to have a good impression of me….. I wonder who the boys have got in their loos?

I had a nice exam. There were supposed to be 8 international students but the Russians had gone home and someone else was taking the exam in their own country so I had two very polite young men from India; One of them was recovering from chicken pox. Friday was good too. Everyone finished well before time and I had a good chat with the lady I was working with. You remember I had a few problems with someone before Christmas? The class representatives had noticed her rudeness too and she was asked not to come back.

The washing machine went funny again this morning. I had to unplug it to stop it from making a blowing noise. I tried it again after a few minutes and it was fine. I must phone up and see if the company has been reinstated. I discovered that in France nowadays a company that’s due to go under is given 6 months to try to sort things out. Hopefully my guarantee will come back to life.

Yesterday, Rob worked until midnight. The idea was that visitors would admire the sunset from the top of the St Nicolas tower. It was windy, cold and wet – but they were still quite busy.

I also had an interesting find.

Sunday was a good day

Even though it was wet we enjoyed our morning walk. There was a meeting of marching bands being held in the park. The rehersals for that were noisy to say the least, but all of a sudden the load speakers were playing Verdi’s requiem - Dies irae, a pleasant surprise. The afternoon walk was rewarded by a pair of swans showing off their 7 sygnets. Why they are called ugly ducklings, I’ll never understand. They were so sweet and kept together with one parent in front and the other behind.

News report

This was the news report yesterday evening. It's in French, but the images of the divers are excellent. Rob managed to go up and watch from above the divers, he doesn't think that it was the best view. I managed to see one dive with the webcam. One of the divers was injured, but nothing too serious.

I tried some Red Bull last night, Olivier was right; a mixture of cough syrup and lemsip, yeuk.

Live!

Here's a link to the La Rochelle webcam Select 'Les Tours' and you might see them diving off the top of the St Nicolas Tower as I write..... Unfortunately they keep moving around to catch the crowds. Rob is working inside the same tower this afternoon so he won't get to see what's going on. Perhaps he'll bring me a can of Red Bull home - not.

Some light at the end of the tunnel

You wouldn’t think it could get any worse, would you ? Well it did…

When I finally got through to the company that was supposed to mend my washer/dryer they informed me that my guarantee wasn’t valid anymore as the company I bought the machine from had gone bankrupt. We looked on the website and they went bankrupt in December of last year. All claims had to be filed by the end of last year, so my guarantee until the end of 2011 is worth nothing. We phoned the help line and their was a message to day that they would be back in business for 12th May! We’ll be checking to see what happens next…

Anyway, I went to visit my sad machine and I was thinking about the last time I had an engineer to visit. They always ask ‘Have you tried to use the machine since the problem developed?’ So I thought I’d give it a go. Rob ready to phone the emergency services in case I blew myself up. As the machine was still full of water I decided to try to empty it, so I set the controls to ‘empty’ , held my breath and pressed buttons. The machine emptied, no problem. Next, I decided to give it something a little more complicated. I fetched in the hand washing I’d done earlier and set it to spin dry. No problem. I couldn’t resist trying a full wash…, two full washes later and it was fine. All that stress for nothing.

My interview at Manpower wasn’t really an interview, just form filling. Another of the exam supervisors was there to. Manpower are very, very busy, the phone was ringing non stop and a queue of people waiting to be seen. All I have to do now is wait for my timetable, it looks like I’ll be working more in June.

We both had emails from MIL. She fell down the stairs last week, on her back. She’s in pain but okay. She’s 86, it could have been a lot worse.

The bad news or the bad news

When it’s a case of the bad news or the bad news, I suppose the best thing to do is tell it in the order it came. Since 2000 I’ve been supervising exams at the school of commerce in town. Just over a week ago I received a letter telling me that I would now be employed by Manpower as regards my work there. Tomorrow I have an interview with them and they will tell me my hours. I’m just hoping that I can continue to work just mornings. If I stay longer I get migraines. I also have my business to run. Will I be paid less? Will I have to pay some kind of entrance fee? Watch this space.

The other bit of bad news is that my washing/dryer machine has broken down. I went to remove my washing and found lights flashing. When I checked out the problem pages in the booklet it just said “call the engineer”. So I had soggy washing and another load which I washed in the bath. I tried to turn the machine on to empty the water out – nothing. The engineer doesn’t’ work on Mondays. The good news it is that the weather is sunny at the moment so I can dry things out side and if I wash them early in the morning they will be almost dry by the evening. I don’t normally need the dryer except in emergencies or the wet days of winter, but it’s impossible to wring out washing and get it as dry as a spin dryer.

Another BlogExplosion update

You will probably come across this post on one of my other blogs:

A couple of times now the approval queue has been right down to zero. It was a strange sensation after all this time. Some of you might have noticed that your blogs were approved almost instantly! We worked very hard to get the approval queue down to a minimum. Despite all the best efforts sometimes bad blogs do get through. If you see something which offends or you think shouldn’t be there you can report the site. You’ll see the link just below the banner at the top of the page when you are surfing.

Badmin continues working quietly to fix and change things. Lots of people enjoyed the Shoutbox in the past and hopefully there will be some sort of text based chat coming soon.

The forums have been very quiet recently, why not pop by and see what there is on offer nowadays? There are new bloggers saying ‘Hi’ or details of the assigned credits bonus during the month of May. If you have any ideas, worries about BlogExplosion or general questions about blogging there is always someone around willing to help out. We’d love to hear what you think about the changes.