adam’s [insert adjective(s) here] blog

well…i didn’t make it to bed before midnight last night. it’s amazing how you can stay up and talk with people for 2 hours when you’re really tired.

went into school for Team X again today. our 1st class was a shambles. it’s hard to think that the kids might be getting something out of what we’re teaching when they don’t seem to be paying attention at all. the 2nd class was a lot better. stayed at school for lunch and hung out with a bunch of kids. i have groupies :oD

came back to the office and had a nap…just like last year in the Hutt team. we wrapped up for the day and i came home.

went round to Carl’s place and hung out for a bit, then we came back here and mucked around before going into Porirua to see ‘Lord of War’. it was pretty cool. it’s all about gun running and getting away with it…now, where did i leave my stash of AK’s?

watch this space tomorrow for a new and exciting(?) feature i’m going to be running right here on my blog!

came up to Palmie again today for my weekly stint with Team X. i prefer Fridays, ‘cos i get to teach in more classes and hang out with the crew for longer…but Thursdays are cool too. the class that we taught today were a bit of a shambles. i think they’d do a lot better if we could spend a lot of time with them one-to-one, but unfortunately we can’t, but i did my best in my small group.

went out for dinner to the McMurtrie’s. Sue and Tony are cool. their son, Dan, used to do Team X and Sue does a lot of the office work for the team. it’s always great seeing them.

i’m tired now, so might try and make it to bed before midnight…something i haven’t done for a long time…

i decided that today, rather than bore you all to tears with another enthralling description of what i did at work (i cut wires…), i’d post something else.

following is a bit of writing i wrote ages ago (2001 maybe…?)when i was asked by Si to write a column for his now defunct website (which you can, for some unknown reason, still visit).

you can tell it’s old, ‘cos i use capital letters at the start of sentences :oP

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Well, this is the first (of many?) columns that I may be forced to write for this site…well, not really forced…more like commanded…alright…politely asked…

The first dilemma I faced while writing this column was what to write it on. When told “write a column on something”, I discovered that something can be a very, very vague topic…Then while writing this little ditty, I thought “why the hell does column have an ‘n’ on the end of it?” and proceeded to look through what I had written. When one says ‘vague’, one does not pronounce the ‘u’, nor the ‘e’, so why have them? So I thought to myself, “what’s the deal with silent letters?” and decided to see if I could write a decent column length column on silent letters, and why they are crap.

Think back to your childhood classroom, where, when a little 5 year old asks the teacher how to spell a word, the teacher replies “how do you think you spell it?”. If the kid had known how to spell ‘knowledge’, they wouldn’t have needed to ask now, would they? ‘No-lij’? There’s a frickin’ silent ‘k’ in the word. How’s a 5 year old supposed to pick that up?

So why do we have silent letters? Who really knows…If I could go back in time, and meet the guy who invented the word ‘knife’, I’d ask why he put two extra letters in the word. Why not spell it ‘nyf’? a nice phonetic word, and aesthetically pleasing too…now there’s a pair of words you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway…phonetic (meaning spelt the way it sounds, which it isn’t), and aesthetically (nice to look at?)

Since I’ve run out of things to write about silent letters…I’m going to end the colim now…next time (if there is one…) “Why phonetics will never work, and why we have words like ‘aesthetically’ in our language…”

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this is probably the reason why i’m not the editorial guy for the Dominion Post.

worked today. then i went into Wgtn to see about my shoes. read my rant below. went to Jade and Andy’s later and hung out for a couple of hours. they’re hosting the home group i’m a part of, and there wasn’t a lot of point in me going home for an hour or whatever only to drive out to the Hutt again and waste more precious petrol.

ate dinner and waited for the rest of the group to arrive. they did and we sat around chatting for a while, then we played Cranium. me and Michelle won…by which i mean we were the closest to winning when everyone deicided it was time to leave.

stopped by Bowland on the way home to see if the guys were bowling. they were. without me. boohoo! :’o(

it’s alright. at least when i got home tonight, i didn’t smell like bowling. i dunno if it’s the lane polish, or the shoe spray, or what, but i always come home fom Bowland smelling like bowling.

hopefully my newly implemented social life will make way for my existing friends at some stage…

drove into Wgtn after work to see about getting my shoes upgraded. but they didn’t have them in a size 12…and the manager wasn’t there, so they wouldn’t give me a refund or store credit.

grumble grumble…

so i’m going to go back in the weekend and see the manager and see if i can get my money back, or a different pair of shoes, or something.

worst case scenario, they just say ‘no’ to everything, and i end up traipsing around in a pair of size 11’s until either they wear out, or my toes do.

being hungry right now probably isn’t helping how i’m feeling.

i’m not even sure if i want skate shoes anyway!

wore my new shoes today. turns out they’re a size too small, so i need to return them. i hope the shop has them in a size 12, otherwise i’m going to have to go through the whole process of picking out another pair…

did about 6 different jobs at work today. everything from soldering to cutting to packing. never enough time to be bored. when it came time to eat my lunch, my lunchbox felt scarily light. i had left my lunch at home…all ready to be packed into my lunchbox. poor me.

came home and ate lunch at about 4:30.

had a meeting with Angela, the Porirua Project K Mentor Co-ordinator this evening. afterwards, i had a short meeting with my student, or mentee, or whatever they like to be called. he’s pretty cool. it might take a while to get some kind of relationship going where we’ll actually talk to each other…i’m sure it’ll work out over the next 12 months.

came home and worked on my car with Dad. it leaks in the rain, and the driver’s side window is broken. found the source of the leak and duct-taped it up. now my car has a styley grey stripe on the roof covering a rust patch. i’ve parked it on a slope, so all the water that has been absorbed by the carpet over the last couple of days will hopefully make it’s way to the large absorbant towel stuffed under the seat. my window is still broken, and doesn’t wind up or down properly.

spent the rest of the evening playing WarCraft III and watching TV.

i need to buy a small diary so i can keep track of everything that’s happening in my life…

went to church this morning. helped out at Frequency - the form 1-3’s…or year 7-9’s (depending on what generation you’re from). it was alright. i’ll probably keep doing it.

went to lunch with my parents and a couple of other peeps. it was great fun. they all tried to convince me to hook up with the waitress. i didn’t.

went into Wgtn afterwards to go shoe shopping with Jen. watched some street performer dude who did tricks with fire, getting out of chains and nailing a nail up his nose. me and some chick got to chain him up. either all my training with Scouts counts for naught when it comes to chaining people up, or the chick seriously lacked chain-tying-up skills. he escaped in 36 seconds. i blame the chick’s chain-tying-up skills…

went shoe shopping with Jen. she was amazed how i could go into a store, look at about 3 pairs of shoes and buy some, all under 20 mins. i took some of her advice (she’s my fashion consultant…), so we went to a “cool” shoe shop, but i didn’t take all her advice, so i don’t own a brand new pair of white skate shoes. i own these:

these are my new shoes :o)

apparently, according to girls, they judge guys soley on what they wear and what shoes they own. so, in theory, now that i have styley new clothes and shoes, i should have a girlfriend in no time!

came home and didn’t clean my room like i’d told myself i was gonna do. played computer games instead. the good thing about owning a few computer games is that when you don’t feel like playing a Sim, or a Civ, you’ve still got a bunch of FPS, RTS, RPS and RPG’s to choose from. i chose WarCraft III and played it for a couple of hours.

watched TV for the rest of the evening. caught up on all my TV watching for the week. i don’t like programmes that are “to be continued”. there’s too much suspense.

i like my days off, except at the end of the day, i feel like i should’ve done more…

got up late and played SimCity 4 pretty much all day, until it crashed. i tried clicking in too many places at once, and my computer got upset and kicked me back to Windows. at least it didn’t kick me back to blackness, or freeze up on me.

watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events later. i’ve had it taking up space on my computer for a while and figured i should watch it. it was pretty cool. watched an episode of Fastlane later. i’ve had those on my computer for ages as well, and still haven’t watched them all. and after i finally get through those, i’ve got a bunch of the animated Starship Troopers episodes too…

spent the rest of the evening mucking around online. found a great website full of peoples’ IM conversations - QDB: Quote Database. [for you more sensitive internetters, it's not censored, so there are some swears...]

there is a big gay community here in Paris
yeah.
it’s called “Paris”.

hehehe

taught 2 more classes for Team X today. they were both cool classes. it’s great to see what some of the kids come up with throughout the lesson, and in small groups.

came back to the office and generally mucked around for the rest of the afternoon. i left Palmie at about 4:30 and made it home safely.

re-watched the last half of Robin Hood with Mum and Dad. it was great. watched some of Doom later, then watched Rove, then finished watching Doom. it’s good they decided to give it an R rating so they didn’t have to make it not gory and really crap. i think the US release of Doom on DVD had 5 mins of extended footage or something, but i dunno what of.

meh…

just won 3 games of pool out of 3 against Katie. w00t!