Author Archives: claire

I Have a Migraine

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I have a migraine.

Two things happen when I have a migraine. My vision goes, and I get a delightful shimmery effect on my sight. (I am typing this by lifting my chin up so my undisturbed optical nerve can see). It is called an aura, and it affects the same part of the brain as schizophrenics and their visions. Just goes to show how strange the brain is.

Secondly, I feel the need to tell every one about it. Lucky people you.

I’ll keep going till lunch and if I don’t feel any better then I’ll go home and crash. Blurgh.

It’s the glamour that gets me.

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Last night little man woke up, after 4am. Not too surprising, he is still getting used to a new bed. I gave him milk to sooth him and put him back. He got back up. I put him back. He got back up. I put him back. This time, though, I stood there in his room, keeping him in his bed. This was also great fun. So he would get up, and run behind his bed instead of running out of the room.

Aha. Hilarious.

And no, he didn’t eventually nod off. What happened was I looked at my phone to see the time. I thought it must be close to 5 am.

I was wrong.

It was close to 6am, It was 5.49am, and I was due up in ten minutes. Being up early is one thing but being denied rest you think you are going to get is just too hard.

I’m on cup number five of the hard stuff today, and there will be more before bed time. As I said, hilarious.

Write a blog post? Are you Crazy?

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I don’t have time to write a blog post! Have you seen the amount of laundry I have to do, the dirty windows I have to clean, the dishwasher that needs emptying, the floor to be washed? Have you seen the sink full of dishes, the bins that need emptying and then being brought back in?

I sure as heck won’t be writing this weekend, I can tell you. What, get up early and write? While the dawn is distant and the mist is heavy? Madness I tell you!

And it is not that I will be writing. Instead I will be letting the damn story out of my brain to fly free, to flutter wings it is banging inside my head, and to let it greet the air with the freedom I can’t give it yet.

Me? Write? Madness!

First Week of Term

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So, first week of term. That’s a short sentence but for all its brevity, it carries a lot of meaning. A first week of term for all the staff on campus here carries a lot of weight. Students, deliberately unknowing and rightly so, deserve nothing but the best attention and energy as they go about settling in and getting on with learning. Staff here try to really exert themselves when it comes to first week of term. That goes for all of us, from the highest authority down to the nice guy who polishes the floors in the gym (his name is Quan, he is from China and he’s working on his Bachelor in Computer Science while here).

 

So if you were to graph the demands of the first week of term, it would look not unlike a snake swallowing an elephant. This huge bubble of work arrives and everything long term has to be held off, so that the moment by moment day to day stuff is dealt with as soon as possible. Long term in this scenario means something occurring beyond ten days, though more likely a week. It isn’t really fair to say that we are fire fighting because nothing is wrong. Instead, merely dealing with what is coming in is what takes up time.

However, I have to realise that. I do, I have to realise that for this week and maybe most of this month everything else will take longer. Getting emails out, letters written, documents read, everything, it will take longer.  I am the type who happily refuses to cut myself some slack; I can be awake since 4.22 am (thanks kid) but still be ashamed that I’m tearful with exhaustion by the end of the day.

Yeah… first week of term. Here we go.