This week is our faculty review week. It’s where our department gets the rubber glove treatment to make sure we’re working properly. No OFSTED involved though.

I was observed first thing this morning -my cunning plan being to get it done with as soon as possible. Plus, who is awake at that time in the morning anyway?

The kids were 15 minutes late because of assembly, but it wasn’t a problem and I just cut out some stuff I was going to do.

My lesson was graded “good with some elements working towards outstanding”
Nice one
In another lesson there was a bit of a commotion as a small mouse ran around the classroom. Fortunately I wasn’t being observed then!

My pet mouse has done it again. This time the little bleeder climbed up its water bottle and managed to push the lid open. I only noticed because Amy’s dog was oddly interested in the corner of my room. Capture was swift and efficient, with the escapee recontained.

It was work’s curry night again tonight. This month’s wasn’t the best place we’ve been to, the food being alright but nothing special - mine seeming to mostly contain onions and a few bits of meat.

Finding the place was hard, with the building being located off the main road, with a giant row of trees between it and the road, up a hill on an unlit road. The way to it involved driving through a housing estate and round the back of a supermarket. I bet they keep their menus in a locked filing cabinet in a basement with a sign saying “beware of the tiger” on it too.

I think some sort of reverse TARDIS thing has happened during our office move. It seems smaller than our old one now everything is in there. We’ve thrown away four boxes of paper for recycling, three large bins of general crap and have not imported any new things… and yet the place seems full. There is more storage available and the room is three times the size of the old one. It’s not the extra office furniture that is causing this, but the sheer amount of books, papers and boxes we appear to have. All this stuff fitted in our old office and somehow seems to have tripled in volume during the move.

It’s crazy, everyone that visits comments that it looks full and walks out slightly confused.

I’m liking my new desk though, next to a window I could jump out of. The sink is behind me with the vital tea making supplies and a water boiler. They say the average British person drinks 3 cups of tea a day… I think I managed at least five this morning. We traditionally have one at break and one at dinner. I had one before break, then one at break and the same at dinner. And then two after school and one in the morning.

Our old office

For those of you who read this regularly, you’ll know I’m an ICT teacher in a local secondary school. The ICT department I am part of contains five people, and we’re possibly one of the smallest departments in the school. English, for example have about 30 members of staff. Since ever, we’ve been crammed into a small office next door to the IT technicians in their giant office.

Ignoring the fact there’s five of us jammed into this room, the day after our monthly curry meetings is enough to warrant a move to a larger office. And fortunately for us, the IT technicians have moved into another office, meaning we get theirs. The desks have been moved, shelving put up and the floor cleaned. Tomorrow we’ll move our crap in there.

Opposite corner of our old office

The important corner of our new office

The other corner of our new office

Tesco Value Lager

Are you an aspiring chav or wannabe alcoholic? Do you wish you could drink as much beer as your friends, but are actually a bit of a lightweight? Or has your giro not come through this week and you need a quick beer fix and only have 97p left? Well fear not, Tesco to the rescue!

Witness the curious stuff known as ‘Tesco Value Lager’ which comes in can form, four of, for 97p. Yes, 97p for for cans of lager. And as soon as you open one the reason for its insanely cheap price will become obvious.

It has a whole 2% alcohol content per can. Yes, that’s 0.9 UK Units per can. It is lager, it just doesn’t have much of a kick to it. You will have drunk stronger shandy when you were a kid.

While roaming the Meadowhall Centre looking for the way out, I found this slightly odd display for some Durex sex lube. The lube itself wasn’t the odd thing, more the sticker saying “try me” on the tester bottle.

So… are we supposed to get naked and smear it on ourselves and give it a test first? Or what? It is cherry flavoured, so maybe it’s something to suck on if you’re hungry.

Try now, buy later. Satisfaction guaranteed.

This weekend I’m at Amy’s to have a BBQ and visit the Meadowhall Shopping Centre to re-enact Dead Rising take my MacBook back to the Apple store to be repaired. After sorting out my house for the coming week I set off and due to some accidentally good timing arrived in time to collect Jonny and Vikki from the bus station.

Beer now, Meadowhell tomorrow.

My car is fixed. Today was like learning to drive all over again, but compressed into half an hour. The courtesy car had insanely sharp brakes, and weirdly slow acceleration which took some getting used to. Also the size was a little weird, I’d not quite worked out where the corners were and how small a gap I could squeeze into so driving around today felt a little weird. Eventually though I’d worked out how lightly I needed to tap the brakes, and when was best to change gear. All in time to hand back the car and collect mine. And then it was back to the start all over again. I must have spent a whole three minutes in the garage collecting my car and dropping the old one off. Not long enough for my brain to register that I was driving a different car…

So, like a learner driver I wheelspan away from the garage, careened around a corner on what felt like two wheels and then came to a slow and gradual, if jerky halt at some traffic lights. Then pressed the brake harder until the car actually stopped moving. The lights went to green and I jerked away from the lights and had a small bout of kangaroo action on a roundabout before my brain reloaded its driving settings and things went smoothly.

Despite me apparently forgetting how to drive, my car is happy again. The whirring noises are gone, it being amazing what gearbox oil does to a car, and the oil seal has been replaced so the oil should stay where it is meant to belong. The garage tried to sell me some new wiper blades because the existing ones are supposedly split and not very good; I’ve checked them and they seem fine.

The customer service at the garage was good though, they’ve done a complete check on my car and there’s nothing wrong with it at all now. The brakes are good, the tyres aren’t worn, and the lights all work properly. This makes a change from little garages I’ve been to before where half your car could be hanging off and they’d ignore it because it wasn’t on their job sheet.

I can now add “gearbox with no oil in it” to my list of bad things I never want to hear in my car. It’s been added to my list of “take car to garage immediately” list, somewhere above “Your CV joints are about to fail” which I learnt from my last car. And even though I can’t do it, I know how to check the oil level in the gearbox now.

Well then, that’s that explained then. Those random spots of oil on my driveway weren’t from the engine, they were out of the gearbox, and the reason they stopped was because the oil had all run out. This is because the oil seal around one of the drive shafts had split. I guess it must have properly split when I came home at the weekend, sending the rest of the oil in the gearbox out onto the road.

I took my car to the Fiat garage where a mechanic and me went for a test drive. After that it went into their garage and was looked at, while I sat and played on my iPod and drank funny vending machine tea. After a while the happy smily salesman came out and invited me in to have a look. It was quite interesting being able to see under my car properly, and now I know where the gearbox oil level hole is and what to do with it… shame I need to jack the car six foot off the ground to use this knowledge.

They’ve now got my car and are fitting the new seal, filling the gearbox with oil and will then take it out for a test. Hopefully they’ll have sorted it and it won’t need the gearbox dismantling and fixing.

I’ve got a coutesy car to use until then, it’s a brand new 08 reg Fiat Punto, and compared to my boxy Panda it’s like piloting a battleship. I think I like it, maybe they’ll want to give it to me and keep my car instead. Quite glad I got a courtesy car, I was all set for walking home but because it was warm, had left my jacket at home. The minute I got into the car to come back, it started raining very hard.

Rang the local Fiat dealer, they said to bring my car in for a road test to see what’s wrong with it. This sounds quite promising since then they’ll be able to hear all the noises, rather than me handing the car over and awaiting the bill.