A trickster manipulates words
I’ll collect them in my box
Register them with internal affairs
And see what it unlocks

Adding a twist of lemon
They become spat-out sour
More honest than the saccharine
Used to give them power

Everything already said
Is gonna get said once more
A constant strive for meaning
Makes a profit to explore

27th Sep 2024 – Submitted to Ragtag Daily Prompt – lips

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Today I’m feeling:

Calm and relaxed.

Today I’m grateful for:

The delicious perfume of this candle that Amy brought from Australia for me. No matter how much you try to save money when buying perfumed candles the more you spend the better the smell and its lasting effect.

The best thing about today was:

Feeling in a great mood in the morning, chatting with students and spending time with them without any rush, then spending about three hours drinking coffee and updating the blog (1983 diary entries completed) and then back to school again for more chat and some play before shopping and home.

After eating dinner though I’ve run out of steam and ready for bed before the sun has even set.

What was out of your control today and how did you handle it?

I was excited to get a call from FedEx as it meant they would deliver the SSD I needed which will hopefully upgrade my iMac and get it running again.

Unfortunately, when the delivery guy arrived he needed almost 800 baht in import tax before handing it over, adding another 40 bucks to the cost. What can I do?

I hope this all works in the end otherwise I’ll just have ended up with an expensive SSD drive and still no desktop computer.

Something I learned today?

I’ve made some lessons that require audio input from myself and the students and I went to record this afternoon but it sounds really odd when played back. There’s an option to upload mp3s so that seemed like the way to go except there is no simple way to do that without downloading new software. You can record to m4a files and then hopefully (I haven’t tested yet) can convert them in Apple Music.

I forgot how simple things can be once they’ve been set up, such as I had on my main computer and then just ran and worked forever. Now I’m back to fiddling around again to do this initial setup.

What is something I can do today to improve my well-being?

That would be the exercise I did this morning and the early night I’m about to get this evening so I can catch up on some sleep.

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Woke up to thunder, or was it a truck? I couldn’t hear any rain, must’ve been a truck. Wait, there it is again, must be thunder. Where’s the damn rain?
Soon my alarm goes off and even though I’ve only had six hours of sleep and feel a little achy, I’m feeling good and do my little exercises and then, finally, a little rain falls though not enough to mean I don’t need to water the garden still.
It’s still misty and hazy with low clouds too, so it’s difficult to tell if the rain has had much impact on the air quality yet.
I drive to school without rush for a change and hang out with the few kids who still bothered to come, particularly enjoying catching up with my old students, Aon, Aomsin and Wan, who fill me in with the latest classroom gossip.
It’s fascinating to see the changes in these kids over the three years I’ve known them and to get some idea of the direction they would like to head in.
Aomsin told me how the class dynamics had changed and I mentioned another class that were all good friends in grades 7 and 8 and then all split into different factions in grade 9. Aomsin said, ‘Of course because we are all growing up.’ It made me question why, when we grow up, we lose that forgiveness for our friends?