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Posts Tagged ‘online teaching’

Sticking my head up and then down again

Posted in Pandemic, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

It’s now May 11.

I’ve been marking assignments and have another two weeks, at least, of marking. All the tutorials for this semester for me are done and I’m relieved. Teaching online is not the same as in person. These were drastic measures for drastic times and getting up to speed was stressful.

So things though have proven okay. I sat in on some seminars and they were good and apparently the attendance rate was better than the face to face ones. So maybe I should withhold judgement. I also got some ideas about my redraft of my exegesis. Also because of said marking I don’t have much brain power to tackle it. I am positive though and that’s a good thing.

It’s getting close to Winter here. It was one degree C this morning. Lucky our Tesla battery had some charge and I could run the heater to get out of bed. We are trying to minimise using the gas central heating as it costs thousands to run and I’m the only one home and I’m not usually home so it will cost thousands more than the usual thousands. Lucky we have reverse cycle in most rooms and that runs off the solar if it is sunny and cold.

I’m a bit stiff from filling the skip with rubbish. We are doing the home isolation clearing up and landscaping the yard thing. I’ve sort of given over baking mostly although I’m still baking sourdough regularly as I have been doing for over a year. The impetus to landscape the yard is mainly coming from my daughters. My younger daughter pledged 6 hours yard work for my birthday and she’s nearly fulfilled that. My granddaughter Y also pledged time and she did a bit of work yesterday too.

Next step is getting the skip removed and ordering in a mountain of soil, mulching and garden edging. I look into my crystal ball and see lots of work on the horizon but a nice garden come spring.

In other pandemic news, my son is coming back to Australia. He’s been hold up in Edinburgh as he couldn’t get back to his job in Asia. He had to do two weeks quarantine in Melbourne and the he’s coming here to stay in June.  I see the potential for an extra pair of hands.

I have been saving for my half of a Tesla 3 EV car but production has stopped and I don’t know when we can or will buy one. Maybe 2021 now or later. So I want do use some of the $ to remodel the kitchen. You tube is great for this stuff.

I watched hours of Youtube tutorials on repairing or refurbishing the BBQ grill. I did all those things suggested and the damn thing is still blowing flames out of the air hole and not the actual burner. Last ditch effort is to use a brush and then look at the valves. OR throw the damn thing away and buy a new one. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the burner/valve got damaged when we moved as it hasn’t worked since we moved here. We had to be a new cheap bbq for the housewarming. But then, the new grill did the same thing. Flames came out the dial instead of the burner. Perhaps I’m cursed. It was enjoyable however in learning about the BBQ as it was like a car engine for me-I knew it was there, didn’t know how it worked and didn’t want to. Now I feel a little liberated and less scared for all the bits. The actual grill looks great and is much cleaner. I still hold hope that it will work.

The kitchen is more like a pipe dream because of the floors. I need to do the floors and we want to do the whole ground floor so that $$$ and TIME and backbreaking work no matter which way you look. If we do wood we have to move all the furniture out into the garage and you can’t walk on it while you are varnishing for at least a week, maybe two. If we do floating that is easier but they need to be replaced more often. If we do tile then it’s more durable, but cold and we’d need a tiler as I know from experience I can’t tile anymore. It kills the knees, the back and the hands and I’m not that young anymore.

Anyway, I may just be social isolation crazy. I’m still staying home as much as possible. No vaccine. No mixing. Lucky for us in Australia we have only a little of the virus and I’m hoping it will stay that way.

In other news, I’m still weaving. I finished these and it was hard. I totally stuffed the winding and didn’t realise until it was being warped. I tried to just adjust things without taking the unwanted threads away, then when I wound it up I couldn’t unwind the threads as the unused ones went round and round, so I had to undo it all (way fiddly) and then rewarp. The actual weaving part was very quick.

New project is a plain weave, cream and green checks for my son. But I have ideas for new projects!!

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Pandemic dreaming- looking on the bright side

Posted in Annoying advice, Pandemic, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 18, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Yes, I know. I should be all gloom and doom. Things are not as bad as they could be. I’m not going to say they are not as bad as they seem because that’s a different kettle of fish.

I’ve studied pandemic preparedness for my work as an auditor a while ago when bird flu was considered a threat. We got the Swine Flu instead. However, under those scenarios the ‘flu’ was going to be devastating and take a lot of people out thereby disrupting critical supplies such as food and rubbish removal and so on. However, this does not appear to be the case. This is not a widespread failure of everything we know. Food deliveries are still being made etc, food is still be produced and grown. This is not like Stephen King’s The Stand or the movie Contagion. Praise the universe for that small mercy.

The big impact here is on imported food and exported food and medicines. These disruptions to air travel etc have consequences there is no denying. However, I am convinced we will still have baked beans on the shelf. And as toilet paper is made in Australia no potential shortage. I’d like to see people not hoard that stuff. I have plenty of loo paper but I bought it one pack at a time and then found a great big packet from before Christmas in our laundry hidden under guff. As people aren’t going to be visiting in the time of social distancing and social isolation I think we are good–for a while.

We should be alert but not alarmed.

I will be delivering all my tutorials online from now and probably for the rest of the semester. I think this is doable but I’m sure going to miss my face to face classes. I have such a great group of students and I’ve been so impressed by them this year. I feel bad that their first year of university (most of them) is marred by this pandemic outbreak. In one course we have been discussing ‘adaptability’, which is not always easy.

I am also low level scared. It has been on my mind that I might die. But I’m not alarmed by that thought. I think this is because since Matthew’s dad died in December, life has been full of challenges. Bushfire smoke, bushfires and now the Covid-19 outbreak. These events have put a lot of pressure on me personally, although I did not lose my home, it did make me understand that I am not as resilient as I thought I was and that I’m mortal.

So where is the upside here? I think there’s a chance to slow down and connect with ourselves and those closest to us. There is a chance to catch up on books and movies. Social media, often called a bane, might be the only contact people have and for that I think we have to be grateful for technology. We live in a connected world–that helped the virus spread but it will also keep us together.

Today I am baking sourdough bread, an activity I find relaxing and centering. I’m also trying to work out how to put together a half lecture using different technology that is going to be delivered online. A bit of a learning curve.

Stay safe everyone.

 

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