School doings

Another month has come and gone. September was a tough month, and October has brought some challenges as well. Thankfully I seem to have recovered fairly well from the dengue. It has taken time, and I still feel like I'm trying to catch up on two weeks of doing little more than I absolutely had to do. We've finally made it to the "holiday season". During October and November I have a total of eleven public holidays, which is something of a relief after just one in the last nine weeks (and that was only two weeks ago). Including the weekend I've got six days off now, followed by one school day then another weekend. The next week we get a holiday on the Friday, and the week after that we get one on the Thursday. I then get a full week, followed by another three day weekend and a four day week. One more full week, plus a Monday and then it's another six day break for Water Festival. After that it's only 3 weeks to our Winter Break (Christmas & New Year), the middle one of which has a holiday on the Thursday!

All those holidays were going to be my sanity preservation for getting my university studies completed, but with dengue on top of no assistant and the chaotic start to the school year I made a difficult decision to withdraw from my studies for this semester. So now, instead of madly trying to catch up on readings and write my second assignment I'm planning a two day mini-holiday, plus some days to catch up on stuff at school.

To help me stay focussed, and to give me the pleasure of crossing things off as I get them done I made a new "To Do" list this morning. Here's what it looks like. Some of these will be fairly quick to do, and others will take longer. Others won't be finished before the break is up, and that's OK too. It will be good to see just how much I can get done.

The list as it was at the start of today's working session.

I didn't take a photo of it when I finished today, so I've marked them off in the photo. 
The green lines represent jobs that are partially completed, or will be completed before I go to bed tonight. It may not seem like a lot of progress, but it is definitely progress.
You'll notice I've actually added more jobs to the list. That happens!

If  you look closely, you'll see that one of the jobs I have to do is to Review Conference Notes & Forward. We had Parent-Teacher Conferences from 2.30 pm to 5.00 pm on Wednesday and Thursday this week, which meant that this list was longer than it would have been on an ordinary week. Life's like that. It is good to meet the parents, and to share some things they can do to help their children make progress. 85% attendance was very satisfying, if tiring. I was grateful for Mr Vichheka's help with translation for those parents who don't speak English.

Tomorrow, after church and lunch, I'm heading a short distance from home to a hotel with a swimming pool where I'm going to stay for two nights. After all that has happened in the past 10 weeks, I feel in need of a real holiday, so I'm having a two day mini-break. Since I dislike travelling out of town on Cambodia's roads I've found a place very close to home that isn't costing a fortune, but which will be very comfortable, and give me the break I need. I'm taking a jigsaw puzzle and some cross-stitch as well as books to read so I won't be bored!