It's Sunday night and back to school tomorrow - two weeks of teaching left this term to go, and lots of Class Assessments coming up - which means marking, marking and marking. I spent all day Saturday doing my Year 8 History Assessments. If I read another project on the Native Americans, seriously, I'm going to grab someone by the hair and remove the top of their head. Instead of working at home I took myself to the Gallery Cafe in nearby Annandale, which Kit recommended. It was ideal - plenty of room and excellent Campos coffee to keep me going - I was there for about a good couple of hours. In keeping with my "no coffee in the afternoons" policy, I spent the afternoon marking in the Town Hall pub in Balmain.... which was also very pleasant. I also did some reading for my upcoming "online test" for my DipEd. Where I'm going to find the time for all this over the next two weeks, I've no idea... I have several school commitments in the evenings coming up this week, plus, of course, the Tigers start their season tomorrow evening against the Eagles.


Last night I actually 'went out' - and not on my own, either.... which was something I've not done for some time. I went to a bar in Darlinghurst, just off Oxford St - and felt both very old and very heterosexual. Which is quite an odd feeling. The bar, "Doctor Pong" markets itself as a bar with tabletennis, which is, well, true-ish. It's certainly a bar, and it does have a tabletennis table. On a busy Saturday night it seemed rather like a poor use of space given there were a good couple of hundred people packed in to the place. Still, it was fun - it was a birthday party for a friend of Sian of Michael. I got in at around 3am, and have felt pretty wiped out all day. Clearly I'm getting older. And I'm out of practice. Fortunately, today there were two 6 Nations matches to watch on ESPN, six NRL matches plus the Super 14s (not forgetting the Premier League or the Bangladesh test) ,so I've spent much of the day sat on the sofa. I did go and sit on the jetty at Snail's Bay with a book for an hour though to get a bit of sea air.