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Tea Room the Nineteenth

1000 replies

amberlight · 02/11/2010 10:44

All in need of a restful break and a chat are more than welcome to the nineteenth Tea Room.

We find ourselves in the South of France, where the warm sunshine is just the thing for those who are missing the summer. The tea room has its aga and its distressed chintz sofa...and its potted plants. The usual fictional tea room inhabitants are here, as ever: Mellors, the gardener/handyperson with the handy ways with massage; the collection of tea room animals including the horses, camel, bison, guineapigs and sundry others; the Bishops and other faith leaders who joined us a while back and potter in for the occasional cuppa. It may not make sense, but that's not important. What matters is the lovely people here and the chance to just relax.

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teafortwo · 04/11/2010 18:01

scout - Angry for you!!! Grrrr!!!!

Mary - ouch Sad

I had a very upie and downie sorta day... I texted DH and told him it is probably best to bring wine home with him tonight Grin!!!!

Scout19075 · 04/11/2010 18:47

I'm sorry my rant sounded so selfish. I am, really, very worried about my SiL and her children. My BiL does, and does not do, a lot of things in the name of religion, to the point of detriment. He calls his neurosis "religion" but no where in the Bible does his issues have root. He never seemed to have a concept of how much hard work babies and children are and how much they cost.

I am very Sad for them.

ASmallBunchofFlowers · 04/11/2010 19:31

You're right to be worried, Scout. I've burbled on a bit over there, but really don't know what you can do. Except wait nervously and see.

Oh, Mary, not again. How upsetting.

Would anyone like some of the Veuve Clicquot? There's still plenty left and, this being the tea room, it is only intoxicating for people who want it to be.

Scout19075 · 04/11/2010 19:34

Thanks, Small. I've burbled back. Grin

ohhh, yes please to the Veuve Clicquot. I could use a bit of a buzz -- it's been years and I'm just really feeling like I could do with a bit of lightness.

MrScout has just left work, 90 minutes late. Am taking this time to restock the nappy bag and get everything ready for our London adventure tomorrow.

ASmallBunchofFlowers · 04/11/2010 19:36

Mary - I'm being very shallow, but I wondered whether this (I have to say) very beauteous sight would cheer you up.

MaryBS · 04/11/2010 20:04

Thanks Small. That pensive look in his eyes is clearly when he was thinking of me! :o

ASmallBunchofFlowers · 04/11/2010 20:07

Mary - I have to say that the Mr Darcy thing passed me by at the time, but he does look very handsome there. And he seems to be a lovely man in real life.

Scout19075 · 04/11/2010 20:10

All of those that know the Victoria station -- are there any baby friendly eateries in the area that aren't fast food?

ASmallBunchofFlowers · 04/11/2010 20:16

The Marks and Spencer at the station end of Victoria Street (in a shopping mall, to the right of and across the road from the theatre [can't think of its name] where Billy Eliott is playing) has a cafe. And there are some other cafes - Zizzi, Nando, Le Tasca, and I think some more - there too.

Scout19075 · 04/11/2010 20:21

Thanks Small! While I'm not adverse to the odd MickeyD's, I'm not keen to let BabyScout have any quite yet. He's a good little eater and will eat from my plate.

CMOTdibbler · 04/11/2010 20:42

Theres a Yo Sushi - which ds always considered to be baby friendly.

Los Angeles to Heathrow in economy on a full flight is Not Fun. But it was a lovely week in spite of working my bum off 10 hours a day. Very touched by peoples concern for me, and how some can make doing things to help me seem so natural and unobtrusive

Donki · 04/11/2010 20:47

Thank God I'm part-time, I do NOT know how the full time staff at the school cope... indeed somedays neither do they. Tomorrow is, well not a day off because I have to do the shopping and the housework, but at least it's not as full on as at school. I can sit down with a cup of tea for 5 minutes without world war 3 breaking out - and go to the loo if I need to, or just switch off for a while, and vacuum on auto-pilot.

At school, break tends to be sorting out practical equipment for after break (if I am not on duty), and lunch is the only time I have to talk to other staff about students/schemes of work/whatever, and also run detentions for lack of homework, and spend time with students who need extra help. Or meet with sales reps whose stuff I need to look at for the department. Oh and sorting out equipment for the afternoon or trying to wash up the glassware from the morning.

Lunch? Did someone mention lunch? I manage a banana most days, and am lucky to have time to get a cup of tea. Sometimes I just have to bolt a cup of cold water.

At least my observed lesson went well - a mixture of 1s and 2s, and some helpful comments on teaching the Deaf :)

Donki · 04/11/2010 20:47

Sorry, Blush that was a bit of a mega-winge!

Donki · 04/11/2010 20:47

Hot chocolate anyone?

ASmallBunchofFlowers · 04/11/2010 21:02

Hmm. I'm not sure that it mixes well with Veuve Clicquot. But would you like a slice of carrot cake?

What a day you've had. What's morale like at this school?

MaryBS · 04/11/2010 21:05

Perhaps a brandy mel would be good...

Donki · 04/11/2010 21:22

Carrot cake
Perfect.

Small: Morale is generally quite good - because the staff support each other really well. But people do get frazzled by the work load, and sometimes more than frazzled by behaviour. The behaviour is generally very good - but most of the students are deaf with additional needs, some of which are complex and include behavioural problems, and one or two cannot manage their anger/frustration at all. I have three times had to remove most of a class from the room to keep them safe from another student who has completely lost it!

However, if you send for assistance it will always arrive (unlike some schools I have known), and if you have had a major incident, the help offered to you will include (if at all possible) time out in the staffroom with a cup of tea, and a friendly ear if needed, whilst someone else takes the class.

SLT are trying to support me, too - they have suggested that one of the LSA's could help with clearing equipment. But if they don't know where it goes, or what was in the glassware (because unlike a technician they didn't get the chemicals out), or indeed for some chemicals how to dispose of them safely, then without giving them an awful lot of homework reading the CLEAPS manual, it's a bit difficult because there would be H&S issues. Real ones.

I think that the teacher who is off on maternity leave coped by doing less practical work - but most of these students are exactly the ones who benefit most from hand-on learning. And science should be a practical subject.

Mind you I can't organise 3 practicals every day, as I did today.... or I will collapse in small heap or run away screaming.

UnSerpentQuiCourt · 04/11/2010 21:24

Donki, that's absolutely true. Exactly the same in primary. But tomorrow we are having our termly ... baked potato lunch. Which will mean getting to school an hour earlier so that everything is laid up for the morning and the afternoon. So more like soon after 7 than soon after 8. So why am I loungeing about in the tea room and not finishing my French lesson for tomorrow? Especially as SnoopingSneakyTwoFacedMum will be checking up how I am interacting with the children during their free play.

Donki · 04/11/2010 21:24

Mmmm

That is very good cake Small - may I have the recipe?

(I still think of you as P....)

Donki · 04/11/2010 21:28

RS, I have the utmost respect for Primary teachers - and note that the most successful teachers where I am now are Primary Trained...

As for why you are on here - I hope that you haven't caught my procrastination... I didn't know it was contagious

ASmallBunchofFlowers · 04/11/2010 21:29

P? I've had so many names I can't even remember which that one was. But don't tell me, I'll go and research myself!

Eat more cake.

JBsmama · 05/11/2010 06:31

I don't remember Small as being a P? So if you were a P, please refresh my memory.

Warning: absolutely mahooooooosive rant to follow, with, quite likely, a lot of swearing.

I have had the most incredible day. As in, absolutely un-fucking-believable that anyone could be so incredibly stupid and actually be able to stand up unassisted and cross a street without help.

So my day started quite nicely, laughing out loud at Mary's tale of "fuck me with a coathanger, where has the earth gone". Too bad it didn't continue that way, but, Mary, I think I have adopted "fuck me with a coathanger" as the expression du jour.

As I said on the other site, you can always count on JM to be inappropriate. And as I've had the best part of a bottle of wine, I'll most likely be even more so.

Just to digress a tiny bit, when people say "I've had the best part of a bottle of wine, what do they actually mean??? They left the crappy part for someone else? Wow, that's nice. Jerks.
And... there are crappy parts to a bottle of wine?????? This is the part that really boggles my mind. :o

So, my day.
Got ready for work, drove JB to G-ma's. (Grandma's :o. She always signs cards "G-ma", out of sheer laziness, she says. So G-ma has stuck. Pronounced "Ji-ma" which tends to confuse people. They tend to think it means something terribly exotic.)
Drove to work. Arrived at work, to find the front door unlocked, lights on, fan/ heat going, fountain going... and not a single solitary soul in the office. (Note: our office does not have a receptionist. DH owns the trademarked logo for our wellness centre, and is the primary renter for the space, and we all rent space from him and book our own appointments, keep whatever hours we choose, and all pitch in to clean up/ close up the office at the end of the day.)

I am still absolutely gobsmacked writing this down, but what happened was this: the only people working yesterday were DH and the utter fucking moron who rents the front-most room in the office, and she assumed DH was still working when she was done and left the office, waltzing out completely oblivious, leaving our office open, lit, and unlocked overnight, in fact, FOR SIXTEEN HOURS, from 6 pm last night to 10 am this morning when I got there.

This is by no means the first screw-up she's committed, but it's an unbelievable one.

What clued me in was that DH had mentioned that when he left, C was still working, and that he had left her a note on our in/out board, saying "bye C, have a good weekend, see you next week". Which she clearly failed to look at, never mind marking herself as "out" on the board, as she blithely sailed out and left our office unlocked overnight.

In case you're not getting the scope of the full case of the horrors I had: our office is on the street level of a professional building, however, accessible by anybody passing by on the street, and our area, while by no means the worst in the city, has, unfortunately, become a little less safe and nice than when we first got the space. Drug dealers and the homeless are generally a more or less visible issue in our area.

So here's JM, having walked into an office that I suddenly realized had been completely open and vulnerable overnight... you can probably imagine the utter, arse-freezing panic that hit me. I got as far as my office, which is the second from the back (DH has the back office), when I suddenly thought, wait, there's no-one here... WTF!!!!!! Because having the office unlocked and lit when I get there is not unusual, we all start at different hours, and whoever gets there first turns on all the lights and the fountain etc... so walking into an open office was not unusual... only the absence of another living soul.

Ok, so let's fast-forward past my utter case of the hysterics as I'm trying to phone DH who, after he came home last night, packed his stuff and decamped for Vancouver for a continuing education class for four days... the message I left him was, apparently, as incoherent and hysterical as he's ever heard me. I don't lose my cool easily. Yes, I can be a little excitable. DH is, of the two of us, much the calmer and laid-back person. (He's also much nicer than I am.) But the thoughts of "what-could-have-happened" nearly did me in. We could have been robbed blind. Everyone's printers, radios, iPods, clinical equipment, the phones, VISA machine... anything portable could have been stolen. Our gorgeous fountain, which is a waterfall cascading over a piece of hand-carved glass (made by the husband of someone who used to work with us) could have been wrecked. Fortunately no cash is kept on the premises. The homeless in the area could have had a fucking party in our office. Same with the druggies. ANYONE could have been hiding as the first person walked in for the day. I'm pretty good at self-defense... but that means nothing when you're unawares and some psycho jumps out at you. And what if it hadn't been me? What if it had been our tiny psychologist, who's nearly six months pregnant????

I'd like to fast-forward past all of this, but all day, the "what-might-have-happeneds" kept hitting me at odd moments. I've felt on the thin edge of near-hysteria several times today.

I really don't mean to be a drama queen, but this is incredibly serious. Our office could have been trashed, and any one of us could have been in serious danger.

When I finally got through to DH, he was as livid as I've ever known him. At our first conversation, he wasn't terribly supportive, he just said "I'm going to phone C and fire her arse", and hung up. He phoned back a little while later and said he didn't actually fire her, but reamed her out and left her sobbing (good, I hope she cried all day), and that she'd just had nothing but stupid excuses. Simply put, she never checked whether she was the last one out, and simply left. She did realize the enormity of what she did... or did not do... at least.

If you've gotten this far... thank you. I'm still shaken. I picked up JB at G-ma's and he fell asleep on the way home and is peacefully snoozing. I've had way too much wine. I'm going to have such a hangover tomorrow. Can't be helped though, it was either that or give in to the screaming meemies.

Night all. I'm going to be up reading for a while, I'm way to wired to sleep... but I hope you all had a good nights.
xxx JM

MaryBS · 05/11/2010 07:07

WOW JB!!!! I completely understand! What on earth possessed her... thank God it had a happy ending! I had a bit of that last week with the car accident, every time I thought what COULD have happened I freaked out. Focus on the what DID happen, and that she is unlikely EVER to do that again, so a lesson learned...

I still have toothache... and a sermon to write today...

JBsmama · 05/11/2010 07:12

Booo on the toothache Mary. :( Any news on the leaving-vicar front?
Just chatted with Scout on FB. It's just after midnight here and I think I just hit the wall so I'm off to bed now.

MaryBS · 05/11/2010 07:40

Not really news. He will leave in January, we will probably be without a vicar for a while so will have to get 'supply priests' in, and I will probably be doing more services. I'll also start taking funerals. I'm qualified to do so, just not had the chance as yet (Can I admit to taking great pleasure in thinking when someone p*ssed me off, "I could bury you"? Blush). Seriously though, it will be very demanding, and it will cause a lot of upheaval, am just hoping there won't be some sort of power struggle as people try to get their say on how things will be, and who our next vicar will be.

Sleep tight...

Anyone for a full cooked breakfast? Coffee/tea is on the side, plus some champagne cocktails...

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