Monday 29 April 2013

[Manic laughter]

Stage directions in my life are pretty much the above right now. I have time for manic laughter and half an hour for lunch. Half an hour! I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there are laws against that kind of cruel and unusual punishment.

To recap: this morning started with me discovering that whoever had set up our google+ account had done it assuming you could just set up a personal page as an organisation. Google, however, has spotted that there aren't many (indeed any) folks in the world with a name that is entirely initialisations (not acronyms; acronyms are initialisations that you say as a word, like RADAR or COBRA). Consequently our account has been closed and we've got a stern email from Google, which none of my colleagues read because they don't monitor the social media accounts.

Hum.

So that was a new and exciting spanner that was thrown into the engine of my life. All the same; I thrive on challenge, and before long I had a new page up, in the right place this time, but unfortunately currently administered by me. I need to shift that on to someone else quickly, because I won't be here for much longer and it needs to be dynamically managed.

Speaking of dynamic managing, and dragging the conversation away from me for just a second, can I point out that my little sister is running an entire store's social media strategy, has been elected the local Carnival Queen, and is also doing a degree?

I've already mentioned my brother. Seems like my gene pool is for awesome only.

Anyway, enough about her, back to me. Aside from redoing our G+ page I've also put together several montages for perusal by the upper echelons and rattled off a translation for my secret project. All I need now is willing volunteers and actors. It's going to be so, so much fun. Apply within.

My "English High Tea" project moved forward today too, with posters going up around the school with enigmatic images of scones, jam and clotted cream. Not enigmatic to those born on the shores of Blighty, of course, but to those of foreign birth they seem to represent a perfect mystery.

I played a game of chess with Adeline today, which I almost lost at several points, in part because I was distracted by several students and in part because she turned out to be better than expected. This is always an unsettling turn of events, akin to seeing a tortoise outpace a hare. In any case, she saw her doom approaching and resigned, but not before an exciting battle in which I first lost and then regained my queen. Thrilling.

The afternoon was given over to my friend Alexander, who has such a giant brain, so filled with electric thoughts rushing about, that he has become quite bald. It's a sign of his marvelous brain that I could only understand a third of what he'd written, but I corrected what I could and helped him break forty-word sentences into more manageable, human-sized chunks. I was torn away from that task - I say task, but it's so much more fun that the word implies - by more work from this morning. The upper echelons had sent a messenger to ask me to redo something in the photographs.

A task that would take me but a moment, and yet the messenger - because she, too, does not quite understand how I do what I do with photo manipulation and as a result is not as confident as I am in my pronouncements - insisted it be done there and then. Lucky I've managed to reschedule that meeting for tomorrow, so here's hoping everything else goes well.

(Yea, right. "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" or, to put it another way, "No plan survives first contact")

So: tomorrow will be another fantastically busy day, Wednesday I have off which, for the first time since I can remember I am furious about (there is way, way too much to do to just take a day off in the middle of the week!) and the rest of the week I'm without one of my colleagues.

Then next week we've got another three days off ("work ethic" are both hideous, foreign words to the French, and have no place in their vocabulary) and then we're in the middle of May and I've got my year abroad project due, a serious of videos to be ready for two weeks after that and just -

I feel this fortnight is going to stress me out.

Blogs may be a little curter (from French court, meaning short or brief.).

No comments:

Post a Comment