I had a very nice Christmas and New Year. They were both fairly quiet celebrations with family and friends. I had a week off work between Christmas and New Year (except for trying to fix a client’s WinNT4 computer). I’ll be having a few more days off here and there before school goes back at the start of February which is when I’ll begin teaching my computer classes again.

Now that my son is back living at home again I’m also looking forward to homeschooling him too. He’s doing year 11 this year and he chose home school himself, I didn’t put any pressure on him he just chose it. I’m thrilled!

I’m now co-regional director of Teen Challenge Murray Bridge with Jenny Kay. We work well together, I’m really looking forward to this year!!!! There are new programs I’d like to run, new courses to teach, it’s all good!

I love craft so once again I’m making Christmas presents! The kids and I cook gingerbread and caramel popcorn often too for presents but it’s a little harder now that a lot of my family have diabetes. We’ll have to stick to crafty things this year I think.

Other years I’ve also made vouchers for people. For my Mum I did “tea and cake at a cafe”, “Linux lessons”, “a craft and antique shop crawl”, and “a mystery trip”. I think the mystery trip was the most successful. Mum does embroidery and lace and I found out that there was an exhibition at Victor Harbour (which is also a lovely tourist spot too) so we had lunch, looked in all the shops and went to the exhibition where Mum ran into one of her old sewing teachers who she’d lost touch with. It was lovely.

At craft camp in October I learnt how to make decorative buttons

So I’ve been going a bit button crazy and making heaps. They’re made from shrink plastic. You trace the picture on the plastic, colour it in with ordinary coloured pencils, cut it out, punch holes in it and shrink it in the oven. The kids have been making them too. I’ve even made some Tuxes. I’ll take a photo of the Tuxes and post it soon. They don’t just have to be buttons you can make name tags for bags or cases, glue them onto Christmas or birthday cards, Christmas decorations, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, sun catchers I guess just about anything. I also stuck some of glass jars which I had painted.

It’s great fun and doesn’t cost much. I’ve done some for a fundraising garage sale and also I’ll be putting some in our Teen Challenge op-shop to help raise money for TC.

Genealogy has been a big online craze for a long time but I’ve never really been into it until now. One of my students came across www.familyhistorysa.info This site has information about people who settled in South Australia. The database search only works with Internet Explorer and even then it sometimes crashes it. From there though I went to the National Archives Of Australia. www.naa.gov.au Here I found family service records and records of businesses they’d owned and their naturalisation certificates too. My family came from Berlin to South Australia. I passed the URLs on to my Mum and Aunty for them to look up family too. It’s great. I’ve been showing all my students. I’m finding it very fascinating!!!

I worked out how to do it! Yay! Have a look in the top left hand corner of the screen. I worked out how to put the Make Poverty History banner link on my blog! Yay!

I really like Courtney Murphy from last year’s Australian Idol. I love his singing and his songs. He’s a great musician and songwriter. I love the piano and he plays well.

I bought one of his band, Murphy’s Lore’s, cds – “The Universe Conspires”. I loved it so much I posted a message on their website’s forum. I was blown away yesterday to get a response from the man himself Courtney. I was all star struck 🙂 It was so funny! I’m not usually bothered. If you like pop music check out www.courtneymurphymp3.com for stuff from Australian Idol or www.murphyslore.com for the band Courtney formed with his brothers a number of years ago.

Phil posted this to the Open Office Education list. It’s a great use of a blog! I’ll be getting Jessica to post some of her drawings there.

“hi everyone –

to help my elementary school students learn openoffice.org draw, i’ve
created a blog where the students are challenged to create some simple drawings
using the drawing tools. am happy to invite anyone else here on this list into
this blog who would like to contribute simple openoffice.org drawings for
students (and adults) to make.

http://openofficedraw.blogspot.com/

– phil shapiro
takoma park, maryland”