Hobbies gained, hobbies lost

Ok.  If we have any readers left out on the interwebs you will have recognised that our blog is now being updated quarterly.  I think I'm ok with that; Peter has given up all hope of ever getting back on the horse.  So it goes.  Looking through the last few posts an update is in order.

Tiki tour through the south island.  I am remiss in posting any photos of this very trip.  While we've been looking through them regularly and enjoying them with friends here in town, I haven't shared them or their accompanying stories with the family.  They'll be going up this week.  I promise.  Again.

The Great Career Shift of 2008.  Peter's still plugging away.  He's signed up to take the GRE here in Auckland later this month, has selected his references, notified his employer and chosen his preferred programs.  Applications are downloaded and will be mailed out within the next month or so.  I am now a GRE vocabulary tutor when I come home, which is much more interesting than the vocabulary work I get to do at work.

The sinking island of lost hobbies: Part 1.  After joining up with a samba group I had to admit to owning a few unpleasant personality traits.  Firstly, I'm still a bit of a music snob.  Playing music with people who can't read music lends itself really well to jamming (assuming that they are amenable to jamming), but it also makes practices very tedious.  The only real way to learn a piece is by the call and response method, which slows the process to a crawl.  I like to have my music in little black dot form and need to know that the people I play with practice their stuff at home as much as I do.  We also never had enough members to cover all of the parts.  This left gaping holes in the instrumentation that grated on my ear.  If the other members were willing to branch out and play some other stuff that used the voices we did have, that would be one thing, but our band leader had his heart set on samba.  And so our partial-band played on.

Secondly, I'm too cheap and undedicated to buy my own surdo primera.  Our practice space was in a 3 metre by 2 metre unit in a storage facility in the city.  Consequently, we had a handy place to stash all of our drum equipment.  My area of expertise became the surdo primera, the lowest base drum that has a standard nylon head covered with a layer of leather and is played with one mallet and various hand-dampening techniques.  It requires a good steady rhythm and is quite fun, if a little tedious and non-pyrotechnic in character.  The sucker is huge and expensive and I wasn't prepared to buy my own.  Consequently, I couldn't practice at home and couldn't make it into the practice space to practice during the week.  Hence I wasn't progressing quickly and got bored with the whole thing.

Ultimately I had to admit that I'm a sucker for melody that can be played by individual instruments.  The group was fun and the people interesting but I have to have more tones to play with other than dampened, undampened and rim.  I was happiest playing the auxiliary percussion parts but couldn't do this much as we never had enough members to cover the foundational voices.

So I am now an ex-samba band member.  Instead, I practice my guitar regularly now and have moved into scale and classical style work.  I suck at this point but my stamina is improving and know the notes of the first 4 frets.  It's wonderfully satisfying.

The sinking island of lost hobbies: Part 2.  Peter's bike now sports a shiny new back wheel, cleaned and streamlined gears and a new chain.  It does not have a front wheel because, to our knowledge, New Zealand only imports the size we need once every 6 weeks, and then only orders 2 at a time before selling them to other people before we have a chance to get to the shop...even though we had ordered them in the first place.  It's all been an interesting and frustrating look into an import economy.  Peter has a co-worker who sells unicycles and unicycle accessories who has ordered a wheel for him.  We've been waiting nearly 6 weeks now for his dealer to get it to him.  So it goes.

He's made another batch of beer in the meantime.  It's looking pretty good and should only be a few weeks before its finished.

The daily grind.  Peter's still feeling unchallenged and uninterested at work.  Not much has changed, alas, and he's really jonesing to just move on already.

That 5 week flurry of work that I predicted in the last blog entry turned into a 10 week slog that only ended last week.  I had no idea just what I was walking into when I signed up to teach in both of the curriculum pathways here at our school.  It's been infinitely interesting and worthwhile, without a doubt.  I thought it would likely entail a larger grading load around exam time and that's it.  What I didn't plan for was the school breaking out the exam schedules into two different sessions, 4 weeks apart, for each of the curriculum pathways.  This means ramp-up and exam grading for one group, then a follow-up ramp-up to prepare for their big end of year exit exam that is set much earlier than the others.  During this follow-up ramp-up, the other classes are ramping-up for their practice exams.  After the first flurry of essays and exams (4 essays for each student), I am now not only working on follow-up essays but another flurry of exams (4 essays per student, again, but for more students).  The grading just didn't stop because the kids now have to put all of these things they've learned into practice.  A lot.  I have never worked so hard in my life.

The current stated of affairs.  I am now half-way through our two week long term break.  Last week entailed lying on the couch reading Bill Bryson's take on going back to the US, with periodic forays into the city to have lunch with friends and shop for cheap books (always a challenge here, the land of the $35 paperback).  Today I'm heading out to pick up a planter box that I bought for a steal on Trademe, NZ's version of eBay.  The goal is to have the herb garden planted and some jalapenos in dirt by the end of the week.  I'm still trying to source some cheap pots to put tomatoes in and get some dirt back under my fingernails.  

To combat stress in our last term of the year I've joined a gym.  It worked well for the last three weeks of last term.  I wasn't sleeping well there for a while and started to get very surly around the office.  I'll keep it up until I don't need it anymore, i.e. come summer break.  By then I should have a better idea of what to expect next year and will be able to better deal with things.  I had to bail on the Aikido club at school.  This didn't have as much to do with time as comfort levels.  The guy running the class integrated a lot of jujitsu into the course, which I'm not comfortable enough with to be practising with young people.  That and there's quite a bit of ground grappling in this combined style, which I'm not comfortable with because it's a boy's school.  It was interesting while it lasted, though.  Man am I ever looking forward to having a dojo close to home at some point in the future.

We have done a few fun things here and there over the last few months, like sledding on a volcano and having dinner with French hippies and learning how to make Japanese food.  As I said earlier, more to come.  I promise.  Again.