Argh! Uni stress

Why I even thought I'd be able to do this is beyond me at the moment. My high school English teacher is probably to blame, she always told the rest of the class that if they didn't know how to write an essay they should just look at mine because, according to her, I'm very good at blathering on about nothing while making sense at the same time. However high school was literally half my life ago and the essays were much less than 2500 words with a life to distract me and a minimum of 6 discovered references apart from the required reading though. Interestingly my ways of avoiding works are somewhat similar, my bedroom was never as tidy as when I was doing my Higher School Certificate and my house is cleaner than it has been in years. The difference of course is that I have to clean a larger area, which means more time spent avoiding work.

I can probably get it done before the due date and time of midnight Perth time tomorrow, but it won't be up to the standard I know I'm capable of. One of the many parts of my life that disappoint me is the fact that rather than work at something frustrating me I will deflect, procrastinate and excuse myself. Tonight's deflection involved watching School of Rock for the first time and my excuse is that my sons have used up all of my monthly broadband download limit watching YouTube vidoes so all my searched pages load so slowly it seems hardly worth waiting for them.

This is of course all a nonsense. The truth is that I should have started this essay earlier in the study period. There is no excuse for my procrastination and it is definitely something I need to work on if I am going to be both studying this university course and learning MYOB for a potential income stream during the next part of my life.

Swimming lessons, aka the military don't love children

One of the more interesting parts of moving to Darwin was that our house is on a Defence base. There aren't too many Australian Defence bases that have housing and this is very likely to be the last time we get to live on a base, but it's a kind of cool place. The housing itself is pretty shoddy, despite our actual house having won design awards about 15 years ago, but the community on base is good and the fact that we know we will not have to worry about someone breaking into our house is great.

For the first month or so after we moved here, my oldest son's head was pretty much on a swivel looking out for people wearing camouflage, people carrying guns, APCs driving down the road - you name it, he loved it. Then it all became a bit passe as he gradually realised that he was seeing stuff like this pretty much every day. What he hasn't experienced before today was swimming lessons run by an actual Navy PTI (physical training instructor). The usual swimming teacher is on holidays this week and this guy is filling in for her. He assured me he is AustSwim qualified but it was very obvious that even though he is qualified, he's very underexperienced.

So although Olly was great and he does know his stuff, lessons for the toddlers this week was a bit hit and miss because he didn't quite know what he wanted to achieve or how to get them to listen. Lessons for the bigger boys were more constructive, although the slight case of hero-worship my boys had for him probably meant they weren't listening as well as they should either.