Jo cuts her hair

Well how wonderful is all this weather at the moment!! Usually the start of the Show means miserable wet stuff, but it's been fantastic. My little tomato plants are flourishing so much, this weekend I had to go out and buy them some new homes. They were getting abit crowded with the four of them in one pot so I got three more pots and a bunch of soil and now they each have their own home. Apparently I am supposed to "stake" them too, so I wandered across to the parklands and found some "stakes" (aka fallen gumtree twigs) and now the tomato plants are going great guns. Probably I have committed some major gardening faux pas by using gumtree bits as stakes, probably it's going to kill my plants, but frankly I couldn't see the point of spending money on some bits of wood when I could just grab some off the ground for free. Plus, I already had to buy potting mix - which is essentially dirt, exactly what I should able able to find anywhere in even my tiny back garden - but it seems that there are plenty of different kinds of dirt and the kind that is found beneath my weed patch is not the right one. Anyway, according to the little tag that came with my toms, they will take 12 weeks to mature so now I just wait...

Friday arvo was quite pleasantly warm too and it inspired me to walk into the nearest hairdresser and spend way too much money on having someone I don't know from a bar of soap cut my hair off. It's always a gamble going to a new hairdresser, or as in my case, going to a hairdresser at all since I don't have one that is 'mine'. But I think I was lucky because she seems to have done a good job. The best part was that she didn't want to talk to me! The whole cut was done in complete silence except for when she needed to ask me something haircut related. How fantastic! I will definitely go back there. Having just decided that I was NOT going to Syders for APEC (BOOOO), I was feeling quite reckless with my pennies since anything I bought would be a saving on what I would have spent had I gone to Sydney. And just as well too - $78 later I have short hair. SEVENTY EIGHT DOLLARS. I reckon that's about twenty cents a hair because my hair is so thin. At first I was quite a fan of the new 'do, but now... I washed it and what do you know! I can't get it back the way they did it over there. And I was watching him SO carefully too - all he did was dry it a little, and rub some cream into it - why can't I do that?? Grr. Maybe I just need practice.

Meanwhile in the real world - I have assignments that need doing. This week I design a unit of work for a class. Yeah, it is as dull as it sounds. If anyone knows any good activities for teaching the present perfect continuous tense just let me know, it'd be greatly appreciated! It's seriously concerning how little I know about English grammar. To me it just seems irrelevant to language learning. I mean, we can all speak English and probably use the present perfect continuous everyday without knowing the rules of its construction - why do we suddenly need to know the names and rules for everything when we learn a second language? I guess I learnt a few grammatical rules and so on when I did Jap, but I didn't remember "OK, now this is how you make the present perfect, this is how you make the past participle", but just recognised patterns and used them myself in contexts that felt appropriate. Seemed to work. In fact, that is exactly the idea the folks who designed the English curriculum I was taught under in primary school had since that is why I grew up not knowing any grammatical rules to begin with. But whether I think I need to know this stuff or not, the fact is that the students at my prac placement, the Asian students in particular, are obsessed with knowing why??. You can't just say to them, "That's just a set phrase, there's no rule, you just have to memorise it". You can sure try though - and that's what I have to do!

Anyway - English is a stupid langauge, we all know that. Better get back to pretending to explain it to some internationals...