all tied up

On my fourth day of work I was given a tie and a sleeveless shirt both with the logo of the company on them. I am still waiting on a pair of trousers and two more shirts, but that's another story. Unfortunately for me (and all the other guys) the shirt has to be button right up to the top to accomodate the luminous green clip-on tie. Having the top botton of my shirt done up is bad enough but to add as bizzare a tie must be considered a human-rights violation. Not only does the combination of shirt and tie lead to choaking but the tie actually is harder to put on that a normal tie, which is what the guys should have been given. As punishment I think that the person who came up with the terrible uniform should be forced to wear it themselves.

As a protest and for my comfort I was persuaded to disassemble the concraption and remove the tie proper from the clip mechanism. I did so and found that the tie was too short to wear normally using a knot. The blame for that should lie on my shoulders because if I had thought about it before hand I would have see that if the tie doesn't need to go around the neck but still comes out looking normal, then the tie itself must be shorter.

I spent the next hour in vain trying to put the bloody thing back together again. Then after lunch I had one more try and I persevered and eventually I was able to put it all back together again. I'm not wearing it because it hurts but at least I am out of hot water from the administration for 'destroying company propety'. *sigh of relief*

Happy

I am happy. I'm back home with my family and my darling and I'm enjoying the nice weather. The trip home was long and boring and I still feel a bit wrecked even after a day back.

I was feeling rather down on Thursday having been treated badly by one of the schools I worked at but something happened that make me smile whilst we were waiting for the flight home in Tallinn Airport. A toddler, who looked like he was not long walking, was extremely curious about a fellow passanger and after patting her suitcase a few times, nearly knocking it over, idicated he wanted to be put on her lap. The woman, who was a stranger to both the toddler and his mother, took him up and the boy took residence in the woman arms, cuddling his head over her shoulder. He was there for a good few minutes with both the mother and the woman, never mind all the lookers-ons in a sort of state of oh-look-how-cute-that-is-but-when-will-he-let-go? The mother tried a few times to get him to let go by poking him but he wouldn't go. Watching that sort of reaffirmed my faith in humankind.

Now to enjoy the summer. I will be back posting in a month's time.

Closer

Right now this is one of my favourite songs. It's called Closer by Travis. I have always had a soft soft for this Scottish band. The song is beautiful but so sad. In French I would say: J'ai des émotions mitigées (I've mixed emotions.) The officially video for the song can be found here.

Last day at work

So today is my last day as a foreign language teacher in Estonia. It maybe well be my last day as a teacher, though I doubt it. I love teaching, I just don't very much like being a teacher. 'What?!' you say. Let me explain.

I love standing up at the top of a classroom and discussing issues with students, teaching them some of what I know and also learning something at the same time, both about myself and about the subject in question. I believe mutal respect is important. Students need to respect their teachers but respect is a two way street. Students need to feel valued and they need to be listened to. Not just 'hmm hmm' but really listened to. The best classes are when students feel free to express themselves, know that their contribution is appreciated and have respect for the organisation of the educational system. The worst classes are when students do not have respect for their own education. If students can not see why they are in class, well then they will not have respect for the school, the teacher or the other students. In a situation like this no work gets done and the teacher feels frustrated and undervalued.

If you spend your day disiplining students and getting them to behave and do not get a chance to impart knowledge and actually do some teaching then the teacher looses motivation and once that happens things are real bad.

If all you needed to do to be a teacher was teach I would love the job. Sadly it comes with some many extras that are highly demotivating and frustrating. Somedays I feel like I am working at a crèche or a zoo rather than a upper secondary school.

Needless to say I am glad to be finishing being a teacher today but remember, I still love actual teaching. With my masters in applied linguistics coming up I will no doubt be in contact with the educational system in the near future, though from a different angle. Hopefully I will be able to add to the improvements being made by others so both teachers and students have a more enjoyable and rewarding experience at school.

Death

I know this is a rather somber topic to be posting on my blog but there is a reason for it. This afternoon when I was on my way home (I was walking to towards the bus stop to be exact), I noticed that the trams were stopped and that the traffic was backed-up. When I got closer to my bus stop I noticed that there were two cars in the middle of the road, one ambulance, one police car, paramedics and police-officers and a man in a stretching. It seemed like the paramedics were trying to revive the man but were having no luck of it. They put him in the ambulance and for the next then to fifteen minutes the ambulance didn't move and when it did eventually move off it didn't use the siren or drive fast. I can only assume that the man whom I and others saw in the stretcher had died.

I thought it was sort of symbolic that the ambulance was blocking one of the tram lines whilst the other tram line and the two lanes of traffic were moving. Someone dies and for a moment the world stops to look and then goes back about its business. Yet for the people who knew that man, whoever he was, the world will never be the same. He left this home this morning thinking that today was just another day and he will never return through those doors.

In other news my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop is on its last legs. It along with a Panasonic DMC-LS1 digital camera were the fruits of my labour in my first real job, my summer contract with the then Cork Kerry Tourism (now: Fáilte Ireland South West). Last week I hard problems with the laptop and Windows refused to run because of a missing system32 file. Today Windows ran but froze on the desktop with no access to anything except task manager. I had to restart in Safe Mode and run a system restore to March to get the laptop back on its feet. I've been having problems with the laptop ever since last summer and it was only 1 1/2 years old then. Now everytime I turn on the computer CHCKDSK runs and the computer still takes ages to start and is constantly freezing on me. But it's not just Windows that is annoying me but also the computer has worn badly. The plastic has cracked (I don't know why because I have never dropped or knocked it) and one of the speakers has internal burn damage (from overheated I can presume). I have I think I will opt for an Apple when I go back to college. Hopewfully there will be an offer running.

For the meantime I will just have to burn my important files I want to keep to a CD and re-install Windows from stratch. I wish I could put my files (movies, music, photos) on my lovely Western Digital My Book Home external Harddrive but it's at home because it was too heavy to bring here to Estonia.

My Birthday

kell on
Originally uploaded by Eestlane_Iirimaal

So as it is officially the 4th of May, at least in Estonia if not yet in Ireland, it's time to wish myself a very happy birthday.

I've reached the age of three and twenty and to be honest I don't really know how I got here. The last few years have flown by at such a speed that it's all a blur really. It's scary to think that in just two years I will have reached the quarter century mark :-s

I have always found birthdays a sombering time when I reflect on all the things I didn't get to do during the past year and all the things I still have to do in the years that follow.

Masters. Engagement. Marriage. Babies. A real job. Doctorate. A real home I can call my own. Books both to read and write. Travel. Babies' babies...

The future is like looking through a frosted glass. You may know what is on the other side but it's just hazy and unclear.

And I think about all these things and how the clock is continuously clicking. When we are kids we long to be older and for childhood to just go. How naïve and stupid we were. And still are. It's true what they say, that youth is wasted on the young.

I hope that I'll be able to make the most of the youngness I have so that when I am old I can look back and have no regrets. Well, I mean, not have such regrets of a lost youth but rather have good memories of what I will have achieved.

So here's to me and starting my 24th year on this world.

First run of the year and other news

Baltic flags
Originally uploaded by CaseyLT

Last night did not start off well. As tomorrow is Labour Day and a public holiday in Estonia and I no longer teach on Fridays I was meant to be going on a four day trip with my girlfriend and her parents to Latvia and Lithuania. However one of the schools where I work has informed me they want me in on Friday to prepare the students for the national English oral exams. It's annoying because it's my birthday weekend and I had already mentioned my intention of travelling but unfortunately the rights of students to extra help over-rides the right of teachers to their holidays.

I think however we are still going on a little one day trip tomorrow to Suur Munamägi (Big Egg Mountain), the highest point of Estonia at 318 meters. It is located near the village of Haanja, in Võru County in the south-eastern corner of Estonia, close to the borders of both Latvia and Russia.

There was major calamity here when I got home from work. I tried to start my computer but windows wouldn't load as the system32 file was missing. The computer asked me to run a repair install from the system CDs but sadly I don't have them because the computer came with pre-installed software and I never got a system disc. I have an external hard-drive but sadly I was not able to bring it here because of the weight so I had absoutely nothing backed-up. I was most worried about my photographs of my months living in Estonia. Thankfully I was able to use my girlfriend's computer to surf the net and with the help of google, online forums and a system CD I "stole" from my girlfriend's grandparents I was able to start my computer from the disc.

I then ran a DOS command to run sfc/scannow in cdm.exe and it seems to have done the trick by replacing the corrupt systems files on my computer with the ones of the CD. I can only help that when I later try to restart my computer without the CD in the drive all will go well. *fingers crossed*

Finally I am not long back from a run. When I say 'run' I rather mean went for a very quick paced walk and every now and then I broke into a short jogg. It was my first decent bit of exercise of the year (discounting some trips to the gym) and it felt so good. The problem was that for the winter the roads were slippery from snow and ice so they were very unsuited to exercise. Now I can stretch my legs, expand my lungs, clear my mind and loose my belly all with the help of the open road and my iPod. Just to note, I am not fancy enough to owe a pair of Nike+ running shoes and an iPod Nano. I just have the basic runners and shuffle.

Here's to me loosing a couple before the end of the summer!