I'm so tired...My mind is on the blink...

 

Well today my schedule caught up with me.  Normally I set two alarms - one on my crappy Nokia phone and one on my very loud cheapo alarm clock.  Most days I wake up and turn off the loud one right away.  Then sometimes when I'm being lazy I hit the snooze on my phone a few more times so I can do the gradual wake-up.  This was my plan today.  Phone alarm rang, I hit snooze and turned off the other alarm.  Then I awoke again to the sound of drilling.  This caused instant panic, because the construction guys have been drilling in our building for at least two months now and they never start until at least 9.  It was 9:30.  I have a class at 10.  It's about a 40 minute commute.  Even I can tell there's something very wrong with that math. 

Yeah, awesome way to start the day.  So I threw on some clothes, put in a ponytail and took off.  I called Beth on the way to the bus and luckily she was able to cover for me.  (Please, everyone, send a little happy thought out to Beth on my behalf.)  Turned out fine - I was 20 minutes late and still had time for the most important parts of the lesson I had planned.  Could have been much worse and it gave the students a good excuse to taunt me in their journals.  (I have one question which asks if they were on time and prepared for class each day.  Some of them took the opportunity to say "I was on time, but you were late! HAHA!")  I'm glad someone thinks it's funny.  Still don't know what happened with the phone.  When I woke up for real, the little bell icon was moving around as though it were ringing, but there was no sound.  It wasn't on Silent either.  Stupid phone.

The rest of the day was fairly pleasant except for the fact that I felt like a total grungebucket.  Couldn't concentrate worth a darn either, so eventually I just gave up and started catching up on personal things.  I hope it's better tomorrow because I have a lot of work to do.

Beth suggested we walk home from school.  We've been contemplating this idea for some time, but since it means walking across the bridge that the buses take and the sidewalk is only about two feet wide, we were a little hesitant.  But she'd decided today was the day and we even talked Angie into coming with us.  It was a lovely evening to walk and we made it home in good time.  I think we could have done it easily in an hour, but we stopped a lot to shop.  There's a gala dinner next weekend to celebrate the 30th anniversary of UMAC and Beth and Angie are both looking for things to wear.  Luckily I brought my little black dress, so all I had to get was a shawl. 

But let me back up.  Before we even got across the bridge, we walked past one of the many junkyard/jungle compounds you see in Macau.  I think homeless people may live there.  But I stopped because we noticed bananas growing.  I'm not sure why this impressed me so much, I guess I just never expected to live anywhere that bananas could grow.  Cool huh?

Here we are starting off across the bridge. That's Macau Tower on the left and some of the bigger casino-hotels on the right.

This is looking back toward our school.  The buildings on the left side are UMAC, and the ones on the right side are another crappy casino and an apartment complex.

The beach right next to the road is always full of trash.  Kind of sad and seems unnecessary since there are workers constantly patrolling the streets and picking up trash.  You could send them down here for a couple hours and it would be taken care of.

I just thought this shot midway across looked cool.  Kind of reminds me of something out of Star Wars.

After our long walk home we heated up some dinner and then Beth and I went to get pedicures.  Angie met another friend for dinner - she's not into the pedicure scene.  At least not yet - I'm workin' on her.  Then I came home and tried to clean up the disaster I'd left my room in from this morning.  Amazing how quickly I can turn it inside out when I'm in a hurry.  Then I still couldn't bring myself to work, so I made chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.  Yum.

We got access to the photos from the English Festival this week.  Here are a few shots of my talks. 

I dressed casually to illustrate the preferred fashion of MN - jeans and t-shirts.  I'm also wearing my new red docs - nice huh?

Last slide - showin' off the fam.  This came under the "Nice People" heading of MN.

And here's one of my talks the next day in the computer lab.  This is what my normal teacher attire looks like.  

Ok, back to bed, and this time I'm going sans alarm on purpose.  :)  The drillers won't let me sleep too late.