Old Friends

We had a nice dinner last night with some old friends from Mali. They both happened to be in the country, so we invited them over. Finally got my meatless burgers to the point I was hoping for. Hard to tell them apart from the real thing!

I also built up the cages for the tomatoes. They have doubled in height these last couple weeks. Now it has cooled off for the next few days at least, so that will slow them down. We have our first green one out front!

I haven't been waking up quite as early. Was hoping that trend would continue. Things have been quite busy, so maybe that is it.

This week was a bit disappointing at work. For my business, I had an install that didn't go well. Ran out of time and made some measuring mistakes. Will have to go back. The clients seem happy, but I am not.

At school things didn't work out so well either. I was given two large tasks to focus on by the management team a couple months ago - developing a new math program in the first three years, and helping to develop/coach the new project based learning program. When I met with my team leader about the hours I would get for these tasks next year, she said she would have to check with the director about the math development, and for PBL I would have nothing.

There are a lot of teachers involved with PBL, and I was basically in the #2 position as a decision maker, advisor, coach, etc. When I told the #1 guy that I wasn't going to have a position next year, he went to the team leader and said that if this was the case, he wouldn't do it either. They can't afford to lose him, so chances are I will get some hours. Rather demotivating to have to fight for something the school wants us to do though, so we are both losing a bit of steam with this task, because of this and many other reasons. We will see how things go.

In other news, we got our fourth front door this week. It is, once again, sadly made. Sharp ends of staples sticking out, large gap in some trim, jamming in the heat, paint drips, etc. We can't understand how this keeps happening. We said that we don't want a 5th one this time, we want them to fix this one and give us a partial refund. It is taking up a lot of our (mostly Naomi's) time to deal with all of this. We will see how things go.

Abigail's first birthday party! She went without Amélie.

New tomato cages.