My little update

Wow, is it really the middle of May already? This year has been flying by so fast! I really must be getting old because I used to remember waiting for weekends to arrive- it felt like a month! The 6 week summer holidays felt like a whole year had gone by. Whatever happened to those days?

For the last couple of weeks I've been teaching at a local technology High School. I've previously taught at other schools, but have found this one quite demanding. I have 5 classes ranging from 8th-12th grade. Its been hard at times- some of the kids are pretty out of control. Fortunately, in previous teaching experiences, I have picked up a few tricks that tend to serve me well. Thought I'd share them, because I think they work well with anyone working around young adults. 1- Learn their names unnaturally fast, and use them. Do this with their interests as well. 2- Be authoritative, yet honest and vulnerable. Dont try to suck up to them & become their best friend overnight. But always have the view of establishing a genuine (appropriate!) relationship with them. 3- Share your stories. Use your experiences to make lasting examples- kids tend to remember these points much more. 4- Pick your battles and let go of the small stuff. 5- Dont take yourself too seriously! If youre the first one to laugh at yourself, they probably wont try to laugh at you!

I have just a few more days to go and have already (fortunately) received a wonderful report from my head teacher. I dont know how people manage to work full time with children- the last 4 weeks have taken their toll on us! Not just in all the physical things like cleaning, laundry, meal cooking etc, but emotionally- I have really struggled to be away from the kids- even if its just 6 hours a day! Im sad to say that they probably dont miss me as strongly as I miss them!

It was my birthday this week and although I was quite busy, it was a great day. My husband is the sweetest in the world- he treats me so very well...I am so thankful to have a husband who loves the Lord!

I am not big into gifts etc, but I did manage to *score* CS4! I havent had a decent go with it yet, but from what I've seen I like it! A friend of mine has recently purchased a program called ACDSee Pro, and I have been really impressed and was looking at getting it. The differences between pictures are mind blowing! But I have a feeling that CS4 is going to be just as good, if not better.

On the weekend we took the kids out to a local peninsula to see a 'shipwreck'. Despite it only being about 15 minutes away, we'd never gone out there before, mostly because it involves going over slippery rocks at low tide and we didnt know how the kids would handle it. But it was a great hike. Unfortunately, the shipwreck was fairly small (compared to how I had imagined it!) and I unknowingly managed to press a custom function on the camera and couldnt figure out why it wasnt working! I had all my settings in, no blinking lights, and then the camera would act like it was taking a photo, sound like it was taking a photo, and yet there was no photo. Auto modes were fine, but not in manual! I thought it might be the exposure lock but didnt know how to fix it! Since it was dusk I was running out of time and missed the good light. :( Another photographer was there (who I recognised from flickr oddly enough) and seeing that he was carrying an almighty 5D I asked him for advice. After a few minutes of looking and checking and scratching his head, he suspected it might be a custom function that needed cleared- and it was. I had cleared the camera settings, but not these. Yay for him! Got just a couple of shots-none very impressive- but at least I had something to play with in CS4. And a reminder that I need to re-read my manual and enroll in a photography course as soon as my degrees are done!

So far in CS4, I like a couple of things. It has an adjustment panel on the side which lets you do all the normal adjustments on a new layer, without you having to make a new layer and access them through the image menu. It also has a new adjustment feature called VIBRANCE, which basically will let you saturate particular colours etc, without oversaturating them. I havent tried it on a portrait yet, but I used it on the following image to enhance the reds in the sky, its kind of like a saturation tool, only its intelligent! No matter how far you zoom in, there's no evidence of oversaturation or pixel damage. And talk about zoom- you can zoom in by clicking with the mouse. You can also zoom RIGHT in to view individual pixels basically. Pretty cool. The other feature I messed around with which is also neat, is the content aware scaling. It will resize an image for you without disturbing the 'main' features. For example, I could make a landscape shot of this image, pretty much without altering the rocks etc. Difficult to describe, I'll have to make another post on this...one day...when I have time!

Not of the shipwreck- but of the rocks near the shipwreck. Where's Lance when you need him? He could really do a place like this some justice! We trekked back in the dark (I came home covered in sandfly bites) with Jayde and Levi 'sounding off' a la the Elephant Parade in the Jungle Book. Levi did most of his 'sounding off' while riding Jacks shoulders, and Jack also copped the backpack and water bottle. *guilty look*

There is something about walking up a steep hill, on a sandy track, in the dark, engulfed by the smell of fresh grass and salty spray, holding the hands of your loved ones, that makes you so so so glad to be alive, and thankful (so very thankful!) for God.