Today was a busy one, with me back in work on my holiday teaching pupils who have coursework due soon. I'll be in throughout the rest of this week on and off, much to Judy's annoyance. It's sad that I feel compelled to give up holiday and family time for work, but these days results are everything and nobody holds the pupils responsible for their grades anymore - it's always the teachers who get the blame. It's just one of the many things that might lead to me quitting soon - like so many others already have. I'm one of the ones who hung on, hoping that we could change things, and I am waking up to the fact that it just gets worse. The latest cuts to budgets are putting so much at risk and it is heartbreaking to see how just this alone drags everything down with it. It's not just that we can't afford books, paper or pens. Or text books. Or heating. Or... etc. But it isn't in isolation - over a decade of cuts and interference have seen education in decline. The public have no idea - why would they? - and offer helpful but useless suggestions such as reusing textbooks and lesson plans, not realising that government changes things in most subjects every year, and most subjects don't get to keep the same syllabus longer than a year or two these days. Most of our old books are bursting with content that we are now prevented from teaching. Those wonderful politicians can't help but change things each year. It's a shame that they don't give us any fresh training or budget to support the changes. Ah, but listen to me! I sound like 
I loved writing today. I managed to write 799 words in one sitting, capturing a scene from beginning to end. It felt good to be writing fiction again. Overall too, I wrote a lot more - I managed a total of four posts today on Steemit (including this one). I'm happy to let that stand as a record for a long time to come :-) as it was quite exhausting to do, but I loved doing it. As a general observation, although writing can be a vexatious activity, I find that I am a lot happier on days when I do it, and prone to feeling frustrated and down on days that I don't. That alone should tell me what I shoud be focusing on for good mental health! (And by 'doing it' I mean just writing a mere few hundred words per day, too. Nothing really taxing, just an exercise of the mind.) I have set my current WiP goal to be 50,000 words. This is equal to one NaNo project, which I would get done in a month most years. So very doable indeed.
I walked a lot more today despite not taking the dogs out. Mainly it was because I was in work (on my holidays too!) and I always end up walking a lot while I am teaching. In the usual non-stop rush I didn't go to fill up my water bottle and fell into the old habit of getting one of the students to bring me back a latte when they went to get provisions. One of the things I want to switch up is my water intake. I'm setting my goal at 2.2 litres of water per day from now on. I have a suspicion that my migraine yesterday was partly down to dehydration, although I could never prove that! I'm looking forward to the big expedition walk tomorrow - Frankie and I will take Hector the whippet out for a nice 10 mile walk so that I can check the route for Day 2 of our upcoming Duke of Edinburgh Bronze expedition. Risk assessment walk followed by a cup of tea or an ice cream, depending on whether the sun or the rain are in the sky.
I am enjoying posting more on Steemit now that I have persuaded myself to just post and be damned. Yet the real buzz is coming to me from reading and commenting on other people's posts. Some of the people that I am meeting here on Steemit are absolute stars, and I am really delighting in networking on here and making their acquaintances. My focus going forwards is still to post what I like when I like, and also to post more comments to as I read more and more of what others are posting. There are some really great posts going on all of the time and some absolutely first rate networks of people.
I'm getting there anyways, and today was just one more step in that right direction. I'll be charting my progress as I go and we'll see what works and what does not work for me. And hopefully, some of what I learn along the way will be useful to some of you, too.
Peace be with you all xxxx
