So, I have now been without nicotine for 3 days. I am feeling very pleased with myself. Part of the reason for quiting the fags was to make sure that my lungs were free and clear on the 1st April so that I could at least manage to keep up with young Colarusso in the Edinburgh half marathon. Now I am feeling more confident at that. I didn’t run at all last week so I pushed myself today. This time I went from my flat to the meadows, twice round it and home again, all in 34 mins… bring it on!

Other exciting developments include: I have discovered that I have been tying my shoelaces incorrectly for my whole life I was doing a granny-bow [overhand knot, left over right, followed by overhand loop, left over right, one of those should have been right over left], now I have  corrected and improved my shoelace tying, and I have discovered that there are 17 ways to tie your shoelaces , bet you didn’t know that.

At work I have a student working in my department. He is training to be a physics teacher, so he mostly works with me. What I have seen of him so far is very good. KNows his stuff and works hard. Very pleased to have him.

Somebody, who has ideas above their station, suggested to me today, in front of a member of the senior management, that I “trot to the front of the school” to get the keys to the science storeroom. I trotted nowhere. Grrr…

I hate to do this, but I am going to link to a myspace account. I know i know I know. Myspace is stupid and I don’t really see the point. However one of my favourite bands, bloc party is letting us listen to their new album on it, so here it is. I am going to see them in February with the Honourable Miss - woo hoo! Haven’t been to a silly live gig in forever. The last one was Muse… and they were inter-galactic.

After a fab fun filled weekend in fife, I was feeling a little run down on Sunday night, but nothing that is worth complaining about, and Monday passed off without incident. I wasn’t particularly grumpy, I didn’t overreact to any minor incident with the kids, and I didn’t moan about my head hurting, in fact I was feeling fine.

So I was very surprised when I got into bed and I started to ache. It began in my ankles and slowly spread up my body. I was aching all over eventually. Then I started to sweat. Now, my bed is in the bay window of my room and there are lots of little draughts that come and keep me cold in the night so I knew something was wrong. Then I passed a delerious night with visions of Idi Amin threatening to kill me (bad dreams induced by having seen the Last King of Scotland - it’s good, just not as good as everyone says).

So, I was all set this morning to phone school and tell them that I wasn’t coming in, but then I remembered two things:

1. My Standard grade physics class are behind where they should be and nobody else in the school can really teach them (I am the only Physics teacher)
2. My car was parked where it would get a ticket if I didn’t get up and move it

So I got up - rather later than usual and made it to work on time. My register class were quieter than normal, and when somebody came to ask me something and then remarked that I looked the wrong colour, I took that as a sign that I really shouldn’t be in school.

When my 4th years arrived, I explained to them that they were behind, nobody else could teach them and I was going home after I’d finished explaining all about work done, potential energy, kinetic energy and how to calculate how fast something is going when it hits the ground after being dropped from a height (this really is a vast amount of stuff for them to absorb in an hour and a half, but they did it), they took it well. They all sat quietly and got on with their work. This particular group can be a joy to teach becasue they really are bright and motivated, and they can make me laugh out loud.

So by 11am I was back in bed, where I stayed until 4pm when my marvelous lovely wondiferous flatmate brought me lemsips. You know, I’m convinced they put cocain in lemsip, it is tremendous stuff. I was still sweating, but I no longer ached and was able to sit upright and watch five episodes of the West Wing.

Now it is late and I cannot sleep becasue I slept all day, tomorrow will be fun.

We had the first meeting of the school’s technological information technology group thingy (I am sure it has a real name, and if Kate will be so kind as to put it in a comment somewhere then you’ll know). We all met in the cunningly named “Offoce” which is a pub.

Kate had done some great work, she’d put together a pack containing possible aims,uses and products that we can use to promote using mobile technology as a teaching tool.

To be honest, when I heard of the plan (which involves giving our kids some expensive pieces of kit) I thought it was stupid. I thought we would be better off spending the money hiring a teacher. I still think that the money would be better spent hiring teachers

My brother (who works in Web Development) often wonders where the funding for IT things comes from. He asks me if there is any proof that IT does indeed improve results in the classroom. And I cannot answer him. I think that IT is a tool, and if the teacher is able to use it, then that is great, however, if the teacher is unable to do that, then why waste the money? Surely we should ask the classroom teachers what they want the money for.

But if we are going to spend money on technology, I’d like to be there to help them spend the cash.

There are loads of exciting things that we could do, and there are likely a million things that we can’t concieve of yet, and we need to get started. I’d just like it if all the staff would embrace the technology, some of them seemed kind of reticent.

Today is the first day I can remember in years that I have actually gone without nicotine of any kind. Realising that I could forgo the regular nicotine fix that I used to get on the commute to school, I decided to waith until I was in school to attach my patch. Then I found to my delight that I didn’t actually want to put on the patch in school. So I waited the whole day. Nothing. I have had Emma Turner swanning about smoking fags, she’s even drinking wine, I could steal some wine and then justify stealing a fag, but no, I am blogging instead.

So to today’s other big development: my book on HTML and CSS arrived. You may have noticed that my other website is just a copy of someone elses site - I confess to stealing their HTML and changing the text. So, because of that, one of my New Years Resolutions was to learn html and css. So, the book is here, time to learn things.

Now, being an environmental man - I drive a car with a tiny engine, I am on the eco committe in school, I am going to start an allotment - I like to recycle things. So when I got the book from amazon, I wondered about the best way to dispose of the box, so I made myself a waste paper bin out of it

All it required was a little extra cardboard and some duct tape. Duct tape is my new favourite thing.

David has cunningly invited himself and two of his friends (whom I have not met) to come and stay in my house in Belfast and then visit Donegal during the Easter Holidays. We needed to sort out some final little details so I brought my little EIS diary with me. Sean liked the duct tape notebook hack.

So David and discussed various options this dat and that date etc so all is well and DC is penciled into my diary and is coming to Norn Iron in a few months.

But it could not stop  there. Julie started adding some entries that she thought were important - my period is due in the middle of February, also in february I am having buttock surgery. So that#s good to know

My good friends Joe and Julie live down the street from me. There flat is a little grander than mine - it has a sweeping drive, a Croquet Lawn (I’m not making this up) and a balcony. I called in the other night and joe complained that one of the tyres on Julie’s carhaving a puncture. Joe had never changed a tyre before so he had driven home on the flat anyway. He asked if I had a torch so that he could change the tyre (it gets dark by about mid morning at this time of year). So the next day I called round with my super bright one million candela torch.

Now, I have changed a wheel on my Micra before. In the dark. On a country road. In the rain. With only a cigarette lighter to see by. So I was pretty sure that if it was possible on a Micra, then those clever boffins at Mecedez would have made it a sinch to change one of their 19 inch rims. How wrong I was.

We looked in the boot of the car and found a number of strange things. First off, the spare tyre was not inflated, I thought this might be a problem. Then there was a plastic box and a bunch of wierd metal things. We finally gave in.

Once inside the flat, seated at the kitchen table, we got out the instruction manual. It turns out that the plastic box we had found contained an electric air pump which we were to plug into the cars cigarette lighter (do we still call them cigarette lighters? They don’t even come with cigarette lighters in them anymore). The various odd pieces of metal were in fact a warning triangle and a jack. There were very specfic instructions about which nuts to loosen in which order - like cracking a safe.
Back outside, my one million candela torch went out.

Eventually, we managed to change the tyre. It was especially gratifying that I was soaking wet (why does it always rain when you change a tyre? Maybe we could use that fact to irragate deserts - drive aload of duff cars out there and pucture them, the rain will be on within 30 seconds) We were men.

First day back to school today. In an attempt to maintain resolution 1, I was in early (for me) and I have planned what I am teaching for the rest of the week. My technician nearly fell over when I wandered into her room and pinned my equipment orders for the rest of the week to her specially made board. I did feel a little stupid, one of my requests was for a battery and a lightbulb - surely I could go and get those myself from the cupboard [oh no! we have rules about things like that, john].

Resolution 6 (smoking ban) is holding together quite well. I think that without the patches, there would be murder. I showed my classes pictures of lip cancer on my enormous projector screen. Some of them were impressed, but the smokers sort of turned white - well the ones who weren’t orange from fake tan did. The jaffas remained as orange as marmalade. Is it really beyond the clever scientist types to make fake tan that looks like real tan? That’s it, I will make my fortune by producing brown body paint.