A Funny Old Week
It’s been a funny old week for me, I’ve been rushed off my feet but haven’t really got much done. This is mainly due to the fact that I’ve been trying to earn some money by invigilating exams at the University. I don’t earn a huge amount for it, but it is better than nothing and it does mean that I get to have lunch with Anna every day which is nice.
However, fitting in a whole days work at the university, along with running my website design business, keeping up the training and being a full-time house husband doesn’t leave many hours in the day.
I’ve been getting up at 5am each morning and barely have any time in the evenings until 10pm. I’ve just about managed it, although I was quite tired during yesterday’s swim training session so gave up after just 30 minutes in the pool. I justified it to myself by the fact that I didn’t have much time if I wanted to meet Anna for lunch and that practising bad technique wouldn’t be doing me any favours anyway. I hoped that knocking it on the head would mean that my next session was a better one. Quality over quantity and all that.
Invigilating the exams is a fairly easy task most of the time. It usually involves just sitting in a room with a student for a few hours, making sure they have everything they need and enforcing exam rules. No cheating and no mobile phones etc. it can be a little boring, but I go armed with plenty of reading material, podcasts and my iPad to keep me busy.
One of the exams was a little different to the others though thanks to the fact that the student I was invigilating for had an epileptic fit as she started her exam. I had to deal with this, call an ambulance, sort her out and then ship her off to hospital. She’s OK though and was apparently discharged from hospital later in the day. I do feel a little sorry for her though as it wasn’t her fault and shell now have to re-sit the exam at a later date, having already prepared for it once. I feel a little sorry for me too because it means the university only pay me for the hour I was there dealing with the situation, rather than the 3 hours I had set aside to invigilator the exam.
It did give us an idea for a First Aid scenario to test the Scouts with tonight though!
I haven’t done much in the way of website design work this week of course, but the fact that it is my own business means that it still takes up quite a bit of time dealing with enquiries, bookkeeping and all of the day to day tasks that don’t necessarily earn me any money but all need doing.
Other than all of that, we haven’t had chance to do much. I’ve only just kept n0 top of the household chores, although, thanks to the extremely furry cat the house cold certainly do with a good vacuum. The garden has been neglected for yet another week.
I did manage to cook a new recipe from Rick Steins India cookbook one evening though. A very nice smoked salmon kedgeree. Except that I didn’t use smoked salmon, just plain fresh salmon, so it probably wasn’t really a kedgeree, more of a salmon biryani, but semantics aside it was really nice and as there was enough for two nights it saved too much cooking the following day. We baked a new chocolate cake recipe last night as well. A gluten free cake with no flour or even a flour substitute that Anna got from a colleague at work. It simply had chocolate, butter, sugar and eggs in it so was really no more than a large baked chocolate marshmallow. It’s not the prettiest of cakes by any stretch of the imagination but it tastes nice and doesn’t help the waistline!
I’d like to say that next week will be a little more normal, but I don’t know what ‘normal’ is, and the fact that I’m painting and decorating for someone all week means that it won’t be anything of the sort.
