foolfillment: the blog

I’ve got a big poster in my room which is almost entirely blank, I’m going to use it with my S3 Craft and Design class on Thursday. The only things on it are big black letters spelling out “Design is…” Onto this sheet I’m going to ask my class to each stick a post-it with a few words, or a picture, explaining what they think design is and why it is important. I am secretly hoping that one of them will write ‘everything’ but I don’t hold out much hope!

Anyway, serendipity struck tonight. Just after looking through “Thirst” on slideshare (via Ollie) one of the recommended shows was called … you guessed it “Design is Everything“. It is perhaps a little above S3 level but it has plenty of talking points and I may try to get a modified version made up - or even better get my class to do one.

I’d like to see what design means to other people too, so on flickr I’ve put a similar image to my poster. I’d like you to add a note to the image and add a few words, just like my pupils will be doing with post-its. Here’s the link.

I’ve been a student now for a few years and I’m quite used to being busier during my summers than my term time - going away to other countries, working to pay for those trips, and generally not having time to do nothing like I used to when I was at school.

This year will be a bit different, I’ve got no plans to go away anywhere abroad unfortunately, and I don’t have any long spells with nothing happening - that’s mainly to do with this being my last year as a student and starting a new job in August.

But I do wonder what other teachers, who are used to working 5 days a week in school and all the other hours outside, do to fill their days.

Personally I have to finish my dissertation, write another essay, then fit in an exam, an oral exam and presentation, a graduation, a graduation ball, a wedding, a caving trip (hopefully), a week or so up north walking, a week in Perthshire, a trip to Mull for the Regatta, and all the other things that will no doubt come up.

On top of that I might have to find a place to live, maybe buy things to furnish the new place, maybe buy a new car, and work out all the things that I should have prepared for my first year of teaching.

And in all of that I want to try and get a bit fitter, and learn a bit of French and improve my German somehow.

So with all of that I don’t think I’ll have much time left.

Well, I thought I was fairly safe from this meme but Armin Grewe who writes Ministry of Propaganda and the Islay Blog tagged me to come up with 5 things you don’t know about me. This is hard because of the varied (if limited) readership that I have, my parents read this, as do two of my brothers - so not unsurprisingly they know a lot about me, let’s give it a shot anyway.

1. I was once (2001 maybe?) the 39th fastest person in Britain over 200m breaststroke and 45th over 100m breaststroke, or thereabouts, It doesn’t sound much but I like to think it was pretty good. I was in similar positions for the years around that time.
2. I took part in the procession at the opening ceremony of the Scottish Parliament, flanking Robin Harper
3. I once served a desert at work with Brown Sauce instead of chocolate sauce because the chefs hadn’t cleared the cold kitchen completely before dinner service - and I didn’t check.
4. I’m a natural blonde, I just dye my hair ginger to continue a national stereotype.
5. The first single I bought was ‘The more you ignore me, the closer I get’ by Morrissey

Now, I was scratching the barrel there, so one of those aren’t true and it’s up to you to guess which one, although it’s fairly obvious. Now, the next challenge is to come up with 5 people to tag. Let’s go for Ollie Bray, Robbie Alexander, Christine McIntosh, Gordon McLean, and Neil Winton.

[tags]5 things tou didn’t know about me, brown sauce, Scottish parliament, Morrisey, Meme, swimming, breaststroke[/tags]

Little.red.boat turned five yesterday, yet still feels like she’s nothing to show for it.

I have never quite learnt what a blog is, or what one is supposed to do with it, but I like having one

This blog, albeit in its original form turns 4 next Wednesday, and reading that makes me ask the eternal question, why do I keep a blog?* I feel kind of the same as Anna, I’ve only ever been an occasional blogger, certain topics I can write about for a series of posts but keeping up a regular output just isn’t my thing - other than a daily summary kind of thing, and let’s face it that’s of no interest to anyone except me.

I do see the value of that sort of thing though, and if I’d had easier internet access while I was in New Zealand I probably would have made an online journal with photos and lots of links, after all I kept up a similar handwritten diary. It still remains that I didn’t do that, so why do I keep a blog. It isn’t, and has never been, about attracting lots of readers and garnering comments, although I really enjoy it when it’s apparent that people do read the blog and I appreciate each and every comment more than it might appear - I really should make the effort to reply to more - no, the reason I keep it up is it’s a place to put my thoughts down, to clarify my position. I am the prime user and always have been, is that selfish?

I’m going to try to be more prolific, what’s always stopped me is that I don’t want this place to be boring for those that do read it, so I don’t post each and every thought I have; in a world where there is so much information and so much of it is disregarded as being unnecessary I don’t want mine to be bulking up the excess, and maybe that is like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Anyway, from now I plan to post more. Maybe you’d like to suggest some topics and that way it’d be more interesting for you.

Enough rambling it’s almost time for Neighbours.

The fact that I can’t bring myself to use blog as a noun maybe means I’m just not cut out to be a real blogger.

I’m rubbish at regular updates, I thought that by promising a daily bit about Peru it would make me actually do it and for a while I was quite good, writing up a few days at a time and post dating them, I was even managing my PDF, but recently I’ve just lost the thread a bit with uni work and personal commitments.

I’ll rectify that tonight I hope.

Spending the day inside today, waiting for a phone call that will more than likely bring bad news about the car.

It’s not been starting properly, so it went in to get the glow plugs changed but that didn’t work, so back it went. Turned out the relay for the glowplugs was filled with water, so that was changed and it should have been the end of the matter, but it went back in on Friday when it still wouldn’t start.

A rather ominous conversation on the phone on Saturday said it might have been the battery but it wasn’t. Something else isn’t working and they are spending today trying to track it down. That they haven’t found it yet indicates bad news to me, but what do I know?

I went to get measured for a kilt today, which i’m getting for my 21st in October, so I’ve just spent the last half hour looking at tartan samples. According to this site I can wear either Forbes or Gordon, but the pictures on the site don’t seem to match up with the sample in the book so I went to google and came up with these results which are all pretty different. I particularly liked this result - is it some sort of sporran?

I managed to find a pair of socks that are totally intact today, no holes in either sock. Dad always seems quite upset when he sees one of my toes protruding, so this might be a nice surprise for him tonight.

On Friday I’m going to Glasgow to get my yellow fever vaccination and the first of three rabies injections.

Apparently the side effects of the yellow fever jag include confusion and irritability - that’s just me on any normal day so it seems like even if I do react badly with it I won’t be able to tell.

At the moment I’m working as a waiter in The Rocks in Dunbar - the first time I’ve done much waiting - I think I’m doing okay, they keep telling me I am and I’m enjoying the work.
Now I have experience of the work it gives me the chance to do more like it during term time if I need to which will come in handy.

said the cow with the fancy collar

Another photo from our travels in Europe last year, I realised I never finished re-telling our tales. This photo was at Gasthaus Michelhof, Furtwangen.

The prize of two tickets on the Paris Metro is up for grabs (I can’t gaurantee that they are still valid) if you get the correct answer to these questions:
When we left Germany, what country did we go to next and name the band who recorded a song that shares a title with the last post I wrote about our travels in Europe?