I live in the most ridiculous country!

Obviously had to go and have the standard pre-holiday haircut. All was fine took in a pic from a mag and told the nice Chinese woman 'same same' a very important phrase. Sat down to have my hair washed and the water was boiling. Cold water in this country tends to be stored on the roof, it is over 40 degrees outside. I ended up having my hair washed with Evian! Needless to say, it is now super shiny and uber healthy looking, all down to the water i'm sure.

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Carbon Neutral

Yo Peeps,

This website is great. It's amazing how cheap it is to be carbon neutral. I urge you all to do it. Me and the cons have been concerned about our carbon footprint since we arrived in Bahrain; no recycling, no public transport, lots of AC. I have discovered one little imperfection, I entered our monthly electricity consumption in pounds, converted from dinar, but we pay much less for our electricity, so I am actually using more electricity than it thinks. Oh well, nothing is perfect.

Go figure out your carbon usage and offset it.

http://www.carbonneutral.com/

A liddlebidofpolitics, ladies and gents

Tim:

Would this make you vote?

M x

Back on top

Glad to see the blog is back to form guys. Good work!

We can kill the facebook if we all work together!

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British Summer Update

As you may or may not have heard, thanks to El Nina (the miserable cow) we in Blighty are currently enduring a summer of frankly depressing rain and cloud, with a few precious moments of sunshine to remind us what we are missing. And depressing is indeed the word, as this is apparently due to persistent periods of low pressure smack bang over Birmingham, which the Gulf Stream would normally shove up towards Iceland. According to predictions at the beginning of this month, this year's summer was due to last one day, on 15th July.

Well, they weren't far wrong, as yesterday brought unprecedented levels of sunshine (i.e. a few hours), and today the mercury shot up to a sultry 26C, albeit accompanied by a great deal of cloud and a serious amount of humidity. And someone appears to have told the insect world. For the stage was set for one of the British Summer's particular annual events. Hottest day of the year? Swamp-like atmospheric conditions? It must be time for... Flying Ant Day!

As I trudged through the fetid air of East London this afternoon, listening to the distant rumble of thunder, I found myself swatting away quite a few of the little blighters, buzzing fatly through Lewis's gated development and no doubt wondering where the fields had gone. It wasn't on the scale of previous gatherings, but Flying Ant Day was definitely brewing. Twenty minutes later the heavens opened and the puddles were filled with ants sadly trying to employ their useless cumbersome wings as flippers. The dolphins and the polar bears might get all the media attention, but the ants were victims of climate change all the same.

So there you are: just the sort of milestone event I thought you shouldn't miss out on simply by dint of living several thousand miles away.

Making up for lost blogs

Hello, sorry I haven't blogged for ages I have been too busy trying to mend the 2 years neglect that the English department has suffered from. I am feeling quite pleased with myself at the moment as I have done all 9 schemes of work, the handbook, mapped the whole year to the national curriculum and moderated the coursework marks! I ended up working a week later than everyone else, but at least it is done. I am trying not to worry about it too much until we get back from holiday.

We are flying out to Amman on Friday and I am very excited, I will be fulfilling some lifelong ambitions, 1. Petra, 2. The Dead Sea and 3. Syria. As usual I have the tour all planned out with 'factored in' rest days. Timmy is very happy about this, I am off the belief that you should need a holiday when you get back but Timmy is more laid back about the whole thing.

With the water being full of jellyfish, like it is in Bahrain at the moment, there will be no beach action for us, apart from the Dead Sea, no one has told Cons this... Also visiting Muslim countries means there is no need for a last minute bikini diet either as I will have to be of modest apparel.

Working in an international school has its benefits as we are going to stay with my Syrian friend from work Hiba in Damascus and then staying with Lawahid, another friend in Homs. We might try to hook up with Hashim in Jordan as well. The hospitality is amazing and we need to pay it back some how, so we have signed you up to be tour guides around lesser known London.

Life in Bahrain is great although a little quieter as everyone has disappeared for the summer and probably won't be back until late August early September. We won 50BD at the MegaMart raffle, very exciting.

We are making the most of drinking opportunities at the moment as there is less than two months until Ramadan. Tes we are counting down... We are already planning our annual iftar buffet and trying to convince our Bahraini friends to invite us over to their families at least once. This year Ramadan should be a bit more fun as we have more friends and should get some more iftar invites.

The catses are doing well, although Arthur is going on a diet when we get back because he has dandruff caused by being overweight. I am planning on taking him for a run up and down the stairs each day. You can buy these cat leads from Al Jazeera so I am going to get him one of those.

We are back on the 10th and I am looking forward to blogging and putting all the photos up on flickr. Have a lovely summer guys. Eat lots of ice-cream.

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