Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky Translated by Sandra Smith Vintage 2007 (2006) 431 pages Fiction Paris, June 1940. Word is spreading like a stain that the Germans are only days away from invading the city. It takes a while for the people to believe it, and still longer for them to pack - slinging mattresses on top of their cars, storing linens and tableware in trunks -...

I love before and after shots almost as much as I love checking out Mum's Flickr photostream (which I do regularly), to see what's going on back home and all that, and today I had a nice surprise. My parents built their house themselves - literally - on a corner of the farm back around the time I was born. It was a rock pile with some very tall pine trees that creaked in the wind (they were gradually...

Sundays at Tiffany's by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet Grand Central 2009 (2008) 309 pages Fiction; magical realism I'm leery of writers as prolific as Patterson, because it shouts of quantity over quality and I'm suspicious of someone who can churn out books that fast: doesn't seem like they can be anything more than poorly-written fluff. I saw this one at Christmas and...

Three assignments down, eight to go. I watched most of the Oscars last night, including a bit of the red-carpet show-down. Am I confusing Anne Hathaway's white dress with everyone else's or did she change into a white-and-brown number once inside? I could have sworn she was wearing a wedding dress-like white number when she first arrived, I distinctly remember the bodice, but later it looked completely...

A have a moment or two to update and then I have to get back to work. I'm absolutely swamped and have no time - a nasty combination! Thursday and Friday we all had orientation at our second practicum schools. Mine is great, the kids are wonderful - a mix of socio-economic levels and race and ability, but probably predominantly Chinese - they're very friendly, quite precocious, very endearing. The...

Spanish Fly by Will Ferguson Penguin 2007 387 pages Historical fiction Growing up in Texas during the Great Depression, Jack McGreary is a very bright young man with an erratic father who's fallen hard for the Drake Gold scam. His father's dreams of a building a house have gone up with the dust of topsoil that blows across the once-fertile prairies all the way into Canada. There's...

I went to a workshop last night on critical thinking and how to embed it in curriculum teaching (stuff we've been going over in the history instruction class), put together by a consultant for The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2) - most of it was a refresher for me but there were some new examples and things we did as a group, and this one really stuck with me. This is a clip of James Blunt's...

I know I'm not alone in wanting to see more photos of koalas, so when my sister sent me an email with all these photos, naturally my first thought was "I must post these for my LJ friends!!" What with the heat wave, it's not surprising these koalas are coming out of the bush in search of a drop... Some Very Thirsty Koalas! ...

I am supposed to be in my Ed Psych class right now but after nearly two hours of it (with two more to go), I just couldn't take it anymore. Seriously. You had to have been there. It was either leave or throw a wobbly. I have a bit of dignity so I came here to the computer lab, to kill time before a workshop thingy I've got at 5:30. Wait, don't go, I did actually have something I wanted to post about...

I had several people asking me recently whether my family was okay, and I have to admit I didn't at first know what they were talking about. Seems I really need to keep abreast of the news better, because when my mother-in-law mentioned bushfires back home I didn't think much of it (we get bushfires all the time), but apparently this was a Big One. My family is okay because they live in Tassie, and...