Saturday, November 18, 2006

My parents celebrate 30th aniversary

Today, we had a small family get-together on the occasion of the 30th aniversary of my parents´ wedding. My work at school has tought me that not everybody is so lucky to have sensible parents, not every child has a chance to grow up in a peaceful and supportive home. My Mum and Dad have been great partners and friends to each other for all the years I have known them and they have been wonderful parents to my brother and myself for as much time. I am very thankful for that and I wish them many more years together.


(The photo is from their trip to Sweden 2 years ago)

Sunday, November 05, 2006

I admit

Ok. I admit it. Being sick and being home alone is not an awful lot of fun. Quite on the contrary. If I was not as well behaved as I am, I might say it sucks. I still have fever, which means I still have a few days to go.

There is a good side to being ill. I read The Little Prince again and I started the World According to Garp again and I finally made a compot out of the Rosh ha-Shana left over apples (dont laugh.) The bad side to it is that I have not seen a living soul for far too long, I started to talk to myself and what is more, I am scared of the loads of time I have to ...think. I found out that if you have time to think and you have nothing to disturb you, you actually really think and what you think about is unfortunately not always what you think you would want to think about. Well - scary.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

A school trip and others



Yes, I did it. I took my 7th graders for a day trip. We went out of Prague to see one of the many Czech old Jewish graveyards to a town called Brandýs nad Labem. Honestly, however, the main aim of the trip was to spend some time together with the children in a less formal environment. And it worked out really well. The kids were great the whole time, they worked fine on the assigned tasks at the cemetary and seemed to have great time. (by the way in case you wondered - the lady with a child in the picture is their class theacher from 3 years ago and by ways of coincidence my good friend, Kveta Kruger could join us with her son Ondra for the whole trip) I was also very happy - I had a chance to talk to the kids more about things not related to school like the last episode of The Simpsons or the recent coolest computer games, I hope I have understood the class dynamics a bit better and above all I had a good time. Most importantly, I managed to return home with the same number of kids I had left the school with earlier and each of them was intact, which is an achievement in itself (anybody who has ever worked with children would know I am serious)





Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about myself. It was a very cold and windy day. I went for the trip already with a cold and I came back home half dead with high fever. So I am down with some kind of the flu taking antibiotics experiencing for the first time what it is like to be sick living alone and on the top of that without a TV. The first day wasnt that bad - I rented a couple of DVDs and spent the day partly watching them, partly sleeping and partly cooking teas and "goodies for sick people" for myself. My granny, who promissed to visit me tomorrow to ease my lone being sick, told me she was sure I would give up my decission not to buy a TV after my first illness. So far it seems I can still manage without it even though the DVDs on my comp are kinda´ cheating.

Last but not least, I wanted to tell you that my brother Tomáš, whom many of you know, started to work in his first real full time adult job yesterday. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what the job is as the name of it consists of aprox. 10 words which I havent memorized yet. But I understand he is a part of the expert team that creates software for one of the biggest banks in the country called Česká spořitelna (where I have my monies too so I hope he makes the software really nicely). He has far the best pay of the whole family and as the only one out of all of us has to go to work in a suit and tie. All of a sudden he looks very professional and also painfully handsome and we are all very proud of him:-) In the picture below he came to visit me today and after a long day of work, which he described to me with many words I did not understand, he fixed a bit my computer that has been at least as ill as I am for the past couple of weeks. Highest time to take him to a doc before it is too late - being sick and not having TV nor a computer is something even I could not handle:)