You know you’re tired when….

You know you’re tired when as you try to get dressed every article of clothing you put on gets annoyingly caught on every possible limb.

You know you’re tired when every part of your body except your brain is screaming “Don’t get up!”

You know you’re tired when despite wearing one for the last 6 yrs it takes you 3 or 4 minutes to put on your tie because you can’t remember which side goes where…

And when you are procrastinating instead of doing work you desperately need to do….

Hello? Anyone there?

Seriously guys, I’ve been writing on this thing for months now, amazing posts about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I’ve discussed world politics, music, football, fatherhood and everything in between and what response do I get? Nothing, nadda, zip; it’s almost as if I haven’t been hitting the save button the whole time… hmmm, guess I’ll just have to get back into posting my ridiculous thoughts and ideas again!

The Weekend

I love the weekend. Guess that doesn’t make me that special but thought I should start this post with a positive statement. As fun as the weekend can be and as much as I look forward to it, I think it’s killing me. Not that it’s the weekend’s fault, it does nothing but share the love once a week. No the fault is mine.

You see you really want to get the most out of your weekend, you want to squeeze every last minutes worth of enjoyment out of those two days before dreaded monday comes back with a vengeance. I have no self control though, I don’t know when to stop squeezing. I fill up every single minute of my weekend with squeezey fun activities and by the time monday comes I’m totally exhausted.

At the moment I’m involved in a deadly cycle that I’m pretty sure has no end. It starts like this, Monday morning, work hard, finish a couple of things off, get more work. Tuesday slacken off, I’ve got all week. Wednesday should probably get going on these things… this afternoon. Wednesday afternoon freak out cause I’ve got so much to finish and don’t want to do it on the weekend, stay up late wed, work like crazy thursday, stay up late thursday night, work like crazy friday DONE!

Finally the weekend is here and I can relax, catch up on some sleep and just veg for a while. Actually, now that you mention it, my weekend has been crammed in with approx 8 million ’squeezey fun activities’ to do and I end up getting less sleep than during the week. Sunday night lying comatose on the bed I remember the next morning brings dreaded monday and I swear I’ll work smarter next week and not have as busy a week or weekend.

Never happens.

Back to School

I still remember the moment it happened. I was sitting on the couch, quite comfortable really; munching on some lunch while watching the Sydney test.  If you’d asked me that morning if I had an inkling of what was about to happen I wouldn’t have had the foggiest. I mean, surely I had another week at least? Wasn’t Christmas and New Years just a few short days ago?

It was Officeworks. Seriously, what kid is going to require a 1 TB external Hard Drive? Every year, at the same time, in one way or another, be it watching the cricket, reading the paper or browsing a catalogue; Teachers see their first ‘Back to School’ ad and come crashing back to reality.

Not that I’m complaining, it IS quite nice getting 5 or 6 weeks off in Dec/Jan every year (not mentioning the other 7 weeks), especially when your wife has holidays at the same time. But still, it seems to be coming sooner every year, like Christmas or Easter. I thought I saw a pseudo Easter display in Woolworths a few weeks ago, yes in January. Yikes.

But I digress. Back to school, it’s a precious time really, when tens of thousands of students and teachers try to squeeze as much enjoyment as possible from the few remaining days they have. Of course for roughly three weeks the only ads you’ll see are for USBs, books, pens, bags, shoes, muesli bars, LCMs and pencil cases and of course, Lowes. This year I’ve also seen a couple of ads for laptops and the previously mentioned 1 TB External Hard Drive. Now as a teacher who likes to think he keeps abreast with all things tech, what possible reason could a High school student have for 1000 Gigabytes of portable memory? A single page of writing is a mere 10 Kilobytes and even a two hour movie is only 1.5 Gigabytes or thereabouts. So which school is making their students bring in their 100 million page homework assignment for marking? How convenient a piece of technology for the student that needs to show his teacher his 1200 hour home made movie epic?

The irony of the situation is that both teachers and students want the same thing; at least …. 6 weeks more holidays. Unfortunately, this doesn’t take into account the amount of content that teachers are supposed to squeeze into a single year, or the eighteen different outcomes, sixteen quality teaching standards and eight student learning styles we are supposed to take into account.  Perhaps we should start school a month early? Even three weeks would help actualy, the I could spend more time teaching skills or even… wait, what the hell amd I saying?

6 weeks it is.

The Beach holiday

I just got back from a beach holiday. It was a great week away and very generous of my wife’s family for inviting us and letting us stay in their beautiful house very close to the beach. But before I forget there’s just a few things I need to say about Beach holidays.

For starters, what’s with the sand? Now call me un-Australian (especially this close to Australia day), tell me that a beach is made up of sand so I should expect it, but i just can’t understand why God had to make beaches out of such annoying stuff? I mean what is the purpose of sand? Don’t get me started with all this “it’s the product of a process of oceanic erosion beginning eons ago” mumbo jumbo; have you ever tried to get the stuff out every crevice and crack your body possesses?

And what about sunburn? I probably wouldn’t stick out too much at a white pastey man convention and yes I do get a little burnt from time to time but nothing burns me like a trip to the beach. I could probably muse about the wide open spaces, the longer amount of time I’m spending in the sun or the fact that the water acts as a reflect for the suns rays (actually I probably should because there all true but that’s besides the point). The fact is, regardless of how much sunscreen I lather on, or how many times I paste myself white, one of two things happens; I miss a spot or I get burnt anyways. In fact I’m sure it’s all part of some big cosmic joke, let me paint you a picture:

God’s chatting away with Melchizadek, “Did you see the Knicks game? Everyone thought Rodrigues was going to make that Home run for sure!” Melchizadek might be chiming in with some witty response until God interrupts him “Oh check it out! Scott Wimble’s going to the beach again, what spot do you want him to miss out on this time? Back of the knees? Left shoulder? Oh I know! Neck!”

(hmmmm, might work on that one. For those who haven’t worked it out yet, it’s currently half past one in the morning and I can’t sleep… but I digress.)

This is usually where I’d finish up, sand and sunburn, the two ruinous elements that can put that sting in an otherwise enjoyable beach trip. But not this time. We were actually staying with Megan’s family for the second hald of their stay up at Byron Bay and the day before we arrived not one but three members of her family had been stung by blue bottles. Sitting around the table on our  second last night at Byron the stings were still smarting and my (stingless ) sister in law chimed in with a cheeky “Hands up who wasn’t stung by a blue bottle last week.” To which I simply had to reply “Hands up whose never been stung by a blue bottle?”

It’s actually quite painful, even when you’re fully expected it. It also itches which I didn’t expect, sometimes being a smart alec has its disadvantages; especially when you’re trying to get to sleep with itchy feet.

It’s over already?

wake up, open presents, drive, eat, drink, sleep. Is that really all there is to it?

Putting up a shed

Sore hands, check. Sunburnt neck, check.  Aching arms, check. Yep, I just spent the entire day putting up a shed. It’s such a manly pursuit, the shed is simply and wholly a man’s world and what could be more manly than putting one up?

I’ll tell you. Spending all day, trying to figure out the instructions, letting about thirty “That’ll do” s out and finally, with a sigh of resignation, leaving the job half finished and going home. Now don’t get me wrong, we did a stella job, magnificent really; four walls, the door sliding mechanism thingy and one side of the first part of the thing you put in before you start putting on the roof. And don’t be thinking the three Wimble men are inept around the house; Dad is a veritable handy-man extraordinaire.

We once had plumbing problems upstairs, so he cut two huge holes in the wall behind the shower and underneath the bath on the way up the stairs, played around a bit and…ta da! All fixed. Good as new. He covered the hole in the wall by the stairs with a large map of the United States and used some kind of putty to wedge back into place the large piece of wall from behind the shower (it was in the hallway outside my room). After a couple of months, he even painted over the mortar so you couldn’t see he’d done it!

It wasn’t even our fault. The instructions on this DIY shed were simply ridiculous. Listed are A-P parts, all looking exactly the same, not to mention five and a half thousand screws/bolts/round metal thingys. The diagrams were straight from the minimalist artists handbook and at times I swear the artist thought to himself “That’ll do” and just stopped midsketch. The annotations also seem to say “This is the easiest thing you’ll ever do, in fact I’m going to write as little as possible to save ink…”

To be brutally honest, we probably did enough work to put up three sheds; what with putting that bar on, then realising it was wrong and putting it the other way around, then realising it was actually supposed to go the way it was first… but on the other side. Oh my, what a bonding experience for the Wimble males! Shouldn’t that go there? Or there? Why wouldn’t you just screw it where that little hole is? You need a drill, no a bigger drill or the screw won’t fit… oh what fun it was.

But anyways I digress, putting up a shed, the most manliest of manly pursuits, guaranteed to get you sweaty, annoyed and angry. I wonder if anyone can think of something that’s more many than that?

Getting Organised

As a teacher, organisation is incredibly important. Those who know me may be smirking right now (or perhaps wondering how I have therefore managed to hold onto my job for the past 4 years), but I’ll let you in on a little secret. I like organisation. I like knowing where things are and using time as efficiently as possible, but it does take effort. For example, I’m thinking of setting up a new system for 2009, every sheet used for a topic in History will be put into a presentation folder for said topic so that wherever I’m up to the sheet is accesible and won’t get lost on my desk. Sounds simple and logical right?

Wrong. Do you have any idea how many sheets I have? I started doing it today and as I was finding different sheets and putting them into folders I had this frightening thought, “Shoudn’t all the sheets be in chronological order?” Scary, but also necessary; my motivation for the job instantly shrunk to the size of an ant that gets paid out by other ants for being short.

You may now have some inkling as to why I’m not the most organised person in the world, it’s entirely dependent on motivation. I’m definitely someone who has to be ‘in the mood’ to do anything, a fact that has hampered such things in the past as my HSC and Uni results and the state of my bedroom. Mind you, when I’m in the mood, that room is clean. Sometimes I’m just in the mood to organise and clean, but more often I’m in the mood to create something. Problem is, in order to create something I need to be organised to some degree! So I thought I’d leave it to you, the reader to give me suggestions as to how I can fight the mood/motivation problems when it comes to organisation.  Perhaps even a suggestion as to how I can create systems of organisation that are relatively easy and hassle free… (good luck with that one). Last of all, here’s a short poll to find out about my readership’s organisation levels.

Human Nature

I love movies, not just watching them, but making them as well. I often make short promo videos, either for upcoming camps or events at Church or College. Usually they’re funny or taking the mickey and the best way of doing this is using trailers I’ve downloaded. The best examples of this can be found on my youtube channel ‘ooza84′ but I digress, I was just searching for trailers on Apple’s website and a new documentary caught my eye.

It’s called ‘Dear Zachary’ and came out of a chilling true story. When a young doctor called Andrew Bagby was found murdered in Pennsylavania, his sometime girlfriend Shirley Turner fled to St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada. She was arrested for his murder and extradition proceedings were started.  Andy’s boyhood friend, Kurt Kuenne, was a filmmaker and Andy had starred in every one of his films growing up. Kurt decided to travel around interviewing everybody who knew Andy.  However, in the process of doing this he recieved an astonishing phone call.

Shirley Turner was 4 months pregnant and claimed the baby was Andy’s. Paternity tests confirmed this news and Turner was released on bail. Andy’s parents moved to Newfoundland and actually interracted with the women allegedly responsible for their son’s murder in order to meet their grandchild. They also began proceedings to take custody of little boy, who was born Zachary Turner on 13th July 2002. Kurt now knew his documentary had a much greater purpose, it was perhaps the only way this little boy could meet his father. As I watched the little blond boy struggle onto his feet, my mind wandered.

The story is most definitely moving, shocking even, in its portrayal of human nature. The Bagby’s were dismayed by the methodical nature of thier son’s death. That a human being is capable of brutality is not particularly difficult, especially crimes of passion – emotions can be powerful things. To end a life in such a manner however, is beyond comprehension. It requires rational thought and therefore you have to ask certain questions, did they consider the consequences? The lives affected? The pain? Lost potential?

As a Christian I am not surprised that people are capable of such things, yet stories like this still shock and horrify me. I worry about those who claim people are basically good; they obviously live in a separate reality than mine. I worry that evil people will be allowed to continue causing pain and destruction. The blurb on the trailer ended with the phrase “What happened next no one could have foreseen…” I thought the trailer exhibited the best and worst of human nature; Shirley Turner’s selfish attitude in murdering her boyfriend and Kurt’s desire to honour his friend in the best way he knew how.  Perhaps that’s humanity’s saving grace, I thought, the ability for  moments of selflessness and brilliance. Can they make up for our capacity for pure evil?

I needed to know however, what couldn’t they have foreseen? In hindsight I wish it had been a fictional story, a moving script perhaps written by some hollywood genius and acted with brilliance and vigour by a cast of unknowns. For some reason, as wikipedia loaded I didn’t think of the possiblities, it was a trailer after all, it’s supposed to make you ask questions,  get you curious about the real story. 13 month old Zachary Turner was drowned in a murder suicide by his mother on the 17th of August 2003. US jurisdiction for the case had been  granted two months prior and it’s believed Turner murdered her child and ended her life rather than face life behind bars. My mind’s eye searched and once more found a seconds worth of footage from the trailer, a tiny hand grasping the single finger offered to it. 13 months old, there’s only one saving grace from such evil; that which is offered in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Awkward Moments

My wife hates awkward moments. I’m not a huge fan of them either, especially if you’re experiencing it in real life (as opposed to youtube or TV). It just seems as though there’s a set of rules that everbody just inherently takes on as a toddler or is somehow built into our genetic makeup. There are people out there, however, who din’t appear to have those rules, maybe they were sick for large chunks of preschool or their genetic is makeup is…. different. Regardless, there’s always that slight tension whenever you’re chatting with those people, especially if you’re with somebody that doesn’t know the other person very well.

Perhaps the best example of awkward moments is the comic genius Ricky Gervais’s ‘The Office’ series. While I did laugh heartily throughout the first season, upon later retrospection I realised there was an uneasiness to it, an edge so to speak. I decided to give the 2nd season a break for a while, that much tension can’t be good for you. Not that I haven’t ‘enjoyed’ some special awkward moments since then. One of my favourites has to be called the ‘slip up’, it usually occurs when somebody is complaining about something that another persons done and they forget that the person they’re talking to is either a) related to them   b) going out with them or c)did the exact same thing. In this situation back pedaling is really the only thing to do and it depends entirely on the skill of the person to think quickly as well as the social graces of the other as to how long the awkwardness last for.

In High School I never asked a girl out, not because I didn’t like any of them, but because I was terrified of the classic awkward ‘ask out’ moment. To counter this, I made sure that I was pretty much 100% sure that the girl liked me before asking them (hence me never asking anyone…) but there is another way. I’m not sure I recommend this way, it would surely bring the wrath of practically everyone that hears about it, but it would end what has to be the most awkward moment ever, when you ask somebody out and get the ‘no’ response. What do you do? What can you say?

I mean there’s always the classic “thank goodness cause I don’t like you either” or perhaps what I heard a comedian say once “Oh I think you misheard me, I said you’re (insert insult her)” but both of these aren’t as effective as my idea. In what would have to be a Most Inappropriate Moment for those who have read my previous post, the response “No” by the girl has to be followed a swift retribution, I suggest perhaps slapping her as hard as you can in the face and walking away. Now that’s got to stop an awkward moment. It should be repeated here as emphatically as possible that I don’t recommend this, or any phycial violence/mental abuse to girls or guys, I’m merely suggesting that it would be a way of getting out of an awkward moment. Come to think of it, perhaps waiting to find out for sure if she likes you back is the way to do it…