Definitely NOT Dixon of Dock Green

2013-02-04, 10:41 p.m.
Morning All! (actually, its evening but Im not about to go all 1950s policeman on your asses...or on any other equidae you may own).

OhEmFlippinGee its been a busy ole time for me - Ive been trying to read a bit of y'all but there never really seems to be proper time for commenting and all that cool shizzle that used to make the evenings pass so pleasantly.

I went back to the doctors after last week after pretty much giving up on the cocktail of drugs she'd given me - they werent really doing what she said they'd do (help me sleep, cure the flushes etc) and they WERE doing a load of stuff that I wasnt really all that keen on (turning me into a zombie, removing the last tacky remnants of my libido, preventing me from getting drunk etc etc). She's now given me a leaflet on sleep disorders - she's all about the 'factsheet', my doctor - which hints at some kind of sleep deprivation cognitive behaviour therapy which I might have a go at. At the very worst, it wont work and I'll be in the same position that Im in now, which is sleeping maybe two or three hours a night.

It seems like what youre supposed to do is keep a sleep diary for a couple of weeks first. That in itself seems like a tricky thing to do - I can understand that you can write down the time you woke up at, but how do you write down what time you went to sleep? Perhaps you have to have someone watch over you every night for two weeks. I dont think that can be very likely. L is generally asleep and snoring about 0.000000000002 milliseconds after his head hits the pillow so I can pretty much guarantee he wont want to be sitting there with a clipboard on his knee, waiting for me to nod off. And how would he know? Would he have to poke me with a stick every twenty minutes or so, just to make sure?
*poke* You awake?
Yes.
.
.
.
.
.
*poke* You awake?
*sigh* Yes.
.
.
.
.
.
*poke* You awake?
OMIFUCKINGOD I SWEAR I WILL KILL YOU IF YOU DON�T LET ME SLEEP!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
*poke* You awake?

Yeh, that�s not going to work, is it? I could video myself with some kind of night vision camera, but how would I know when Im asleep? I lie very still most of the time anyway, with my eyes shut and everything, so I kind of LOOK like Im asleep, but I rarely am as Im too busy trying to switch my brain off and to stop trying to decide what to cook for dinner tomorrow and what clever thing I could have said to the little kid who kicked me right in the ankle this afternoon (Screeching �JESUS H CHRIST ON A BIKE� wasn�t ideal, but that was all I had at my disposal at the time) and whether or not lions actually LIKE the taste of impala as, whenever you see a lion eating an impala, they never seem to be particularly enjoying it and whether impala would taste nice with a blackberry sauce as that�s particularly good with venison and whether my sister might know as she�s a chef and whether or not Ls snoring sounds more like someone trying to light a particularly recalcitrant fire with a particularly rusty pair of bellows or more like someone drowning a warthog in a bucket of snot and WHY CANT I SLEEP?????

Anyway, the theory is, once you�ve worked out how many hours a night you sleep, you force yourself to stay up until x number of hours before you normally get up. So if you generally sleep 3 hours a night and have to get up at 7, you�d stay up til 4 then go to bed and sleep your 3 hours. Then gradually over time you�d put your bedtime back by 15 minutes at a time until eventually you are going to bed at a sensible hours and your body has �learned� to go to sleep when you go to bed, and to stay asleep until you have to get up.

I have my doubts that this would work but Im willing to give it a try. I think in the interests of not entirely ruining my career I ought to save this particular experiment until the school holidays when it wont matter quite so much if it fails in spectacular fashion and I end up staying awake for three days on the trot or something!


Im still struggling a bit with work � not the actual �teaching�, that�s relatively straightforward if you know your subject, but all the fart-arsing about with medium-term plans and target grades and all the various pointless acronyms that all seem to mean �teach them something worthwhile, and teach it properly�.

Did a monumentally successful photography project last week with one of my low ability classes � going to get the Art Department to judge the images as a competition but cant think of a suitable prize for the winner. I want it to be something worth winning and relevant but our budget is non-existent � any ideas?

Thinking sensibly, the things Im struggling most with this week is that Ive got a really heavy cold and I ought to be at home with a Lemsip and a nice black and white film, not fretting about whether or not 7A2 have learned their French vocab (they haven�t). Im thinking I will probably take a sick day tomorrow � the lessons are already planned and theyre nice easy classes for someone else to pick up. I could stay home, in my jim-jams and concentrate on feeling better. Obviously, I�ll have to pop out in the morning, to buy some jim-jams to stay home in, as jim-jams are not something I can habitually be found wearing. I did buy some very fetching snow-leopard pattern winceyette ones when I was in hospital last year but I washed them with something red and they went kind of pink-and-black and they shrunk a bit and, well, in the end I gave them to wee Treacle who doesn�t care what she looks like when she goes to bed as she is only 13 and doesn�t even have to give a passing nod to �alluring�.

A sick day tomorrow would break the week up nicely and then it�ll be nearly the weekend and next week should be pretty much OK as it�s a short week. We have a Consortium Inset Day next Friday so all the schools in the area will be shut while all the teachers go to someone else�s school to teach each other how to suck eggs. Im going to the Naughty Boys School (its not called that, but it is a special �unit� for troubled/disengaged/lairy kids, and most of them are boys). Im not sure what I might learn there but I think itll be quite interesting. Just kind of hoping that it finishes nice and early as, if I can get to Sissy�s by 5 in the afternoon I can GO TO BRUGES FOR THE WEEKEND! Ooh, wouldn�t that be jolly, dear readers!

L have graciously given me permission to go without him mostly by virtue of not bloody well being invited in the first place and the kids will be at their dads. I could lie on Sissy�s Belgian sofa and read books and drink Lemon Genever and mooch about in brokantewinkels (the spelling might be a bit off, there. My Dutch isn�t brilliant! But anyway, theyre junk shops) and generally have a little holiday. Oh, wish me an early finish next Friday, do!

Speaking of little holidays, the most extraordinary piece of good fortune has sneaked my way! Its deadly secret, so don�t tell a soul. I had a letter from my pension company, which I didn�t understand, but it said something about shares and how much they might be worth so I phoned the pensions people and had a bit of a chat and even though I said I was, they didn�t seem to agree that I was a fiscal-tard and talked me through all the financial shenanigans and anyway, it appears that I had shares in the pension company and they were worth quite a bit of loot! Now, as �quite a bit of loot� is a saying that that hasn�t been applied to me since Moses were a lad, I decided to sell the shares.

Years ago, when I was Mrs Shagnasty and was as rich as Croesus would have been if he�d dropped the Euromillions on a triple rollover, I had a proper shares portfolio and me and Shagnasty used to trade shares and have lots of jolly fun playing the stockmarket and pretending to be high-rollers. Miniscule droplets of this memory mustve still been hanging about in my brain � clogged up with fluff and bits of Weetabix and odd socks, naturally, but there all the same. This latent knowledge allowed me to hang onto my shares until all that horrid scary �fiscal cliff� nonsense was done and dusted and then to sell them just as the markets zinged up with the sheer joy of the whole western economy not vanishing up its own backside. The long and short of it is I made about an extra 30% on top of the quoted selling price!!!! Yay! Get ME!

Holiday-in-the-summer-with-my-kids��get IN!!!

And on THAT joyful note Im gonna go blow my nose to the tune of the Trumpet Voluntary (which is pretty much how my nose-blowing sounds anyways�apart from when it sounds like the Queen Mary coming into port).

Huzzah!

later
s
x





back - forth