Valentine celebration?

Valentine’s day 2004 was landfall in Tala for me. I arrived hot and thirsty after an hour and something spent in Sister Pauline’s little Paugeot and was introduced to Kateka the weekend watchman:
“What’s his name?”
“Kateka”
“No, not his job, what’s his name”
“His name is Kateka”
“Ooh, I thought you were saying he’s the Care Taker”
(this works best if you can imagine a Nigerian accent)

I spent my first months teaching the Javascript class at college and wondering what to do with my time. In the evenings I cooked good food and wrote letters home listening to Frank Sinatra and feeling lonley.

This year I’m so busy: we just got asked to write and submit exam papers for the universtiy, each one with a marking scheme… and we’ve less than a week to do it. Thankfully I’m teaching Cisco so thats one less exam to write. I’m trying to make a good job of my exams too because those I have seen from the University in the past have been of poor quality. I think they are written in a hurry and without time for review — but now I’m here with the same problems as those guys who wrote the exams in the past. This makes me appreciate the fairly strict submission and review process that existed at De Montfort university when I was writing exams there — though, of course, at the time I resented it.

Its been a year away from Lindy Hop. I was teaching an extra class or two on Saturday morning and I wore my Brit Hop T-shirt.
“That’s a nice shirt”
“Thankyou. Are you saying that because it’s tight”
giggles: “yes” / “no” / “its too small for you”
…
“what does it mean?”
I explained about Charles Lindberg hopping the atlantic and about Brit Pop and the London Lindy Exchange and how I miss my dancing… Then I talked about Unix system administration for an hour. Sometimes this job seems very strange.