Spring Cleaning

It's the spring holidays and I'm looking at Anika's room and plotting all sorts of rearrangement there but it will have to wait until Reformation Day when school tests are over for the year. I love to rearrange and clean. Hubby is the exact opposite. When he sees me with a measuring tape looking thoughtfully at a room he groans and mutters, "Oh my poor aching back."

Mike was getting into the spring idea this morning. He picked up his toy fire hydrant and hose and asked me to open the pretend front door. He then pointed the hose at the hallway floor (pretend outside garden) and said, "Shhhh," followed by, "That flower is clean now." Silly me. I thought watering flowers had something to do with their nutrition.

Rearranging Anika's room shouldn't be too bad. The only heavy item is the piano and for the first time since it came through the door I'm thinking of shifting it to a different wall. We might need some big people in to help. I remember years ago helping my mother-in-law to move house. She'd organised for a company to come and pack as well as move furniture. Hubby and I watched a massive fellow with tree trunks for legs sitting on the floor wrapping up teensy crystal ornaments in paper. We wondered why they would employ such a fellow to wrap crystal. When it came time to load the truck though we realised why. He stood at the bottom of the ramp into the truck with one hand on the piano saying to his workmate, "It's okay mate, I've got it," and then pushed it up the ramp solo.

Two men who moved our piano in one of our moves were pretty hefty fellows too. One of them was so thick set that he had to come through the front door sideways. The other had to duck to fit through the normal sized door.

My favourite piano moving story is told by our minister. Apparently during the 1974 floods in Brisbane one lady was concerned about getting her piano out of her house as the muddy floods were ankle deep in the garden and were still rising. She called in the piano movers to take the piano to a higher location. This made a lot of sense. What didn't make sense though was that she forgot to tell the movers about the inground pool....

Forums

Forums can be really interesting and sometimes helpful. Take SOD for example. After I was diagnosed with this disease I did the normal thing anyone does with a disease no one's ever heard of, I just Googled it. Sure enough there are plenty of sufferers out there willing to discuss the gory details of what they've been through and how "thrilled" they are to find that someone else out there has the same problem. They're thrilled because at last someone has sympathy for sufferers of the real disease instead of a well-meaning but in-the-dark doctor patting them on the back and sending them off to a psychiatrist.

As anyone who reads Anika's blog knows, yesterday morning she broke her self-imposed rule number one i.e. no blogging until after graduation. One can sympathise though, considering that she was obviously feeling somewhat nervous before sitting the same test that around 31 000 other students in our state have to sit to be considered for an entrance score for tertiary study. Out of interest I put "QCS test 2008" into Google and yes, there's a forum out there for year 12 students all rather nervous pre-testing.

The QCS test papers consist of: writing task, multiple choice 1 (both done on 2 Sep) and short response and multiple choice 2 (both done 3 Sep). On the forum there was a lot of discussion about the writing task. How do people approach it? How did they do in the practice tests? One soul came up with the rumour that the task this year would be to write about the theme of "traffic". I thought this was amusing because the contents of the writing task and other papers are so carefully guarded that it would be like breaking into Fort Knox to find out the information beforehand. Another soul said the best approach would be to work out a short story and memorise it before the test, then just somehow work the theme into the story for the actual test.

After the writing task on Tuesday Anika emailed from the school library. The theme was "circles". I went to the forum and saw comments such as: "Circles. Ugh. One year the theme was shapes, now we just get circles." I'll have to warn everyone when the writing task will get marked this year. I can imagine the loud sound of groans from wherever they mark it as each marker comes across several essays beginning: Traffic lights are circles. They are red, yellow and green.....

BTW, Anika found the tests generally quite okay, except the MCQ2 which she said was "very evil". Thanks for your prayers.