The sicky that I am

I will start out my update by saying that once again I am sick. :) I think my body has just shut down for the time being. It will check back in in a few weeks, but until then I have strep throat. Yeah. I know, I know. Some of you are probably thinking, “But Julya, how can you get strep throat without tonsils?” Well, you can; it just goes into the back of your throat. It isn’t that bad this time around because I actually took it easy and rested in my house. I didn’t even go for a long bike ride or anything.

So, this last week has been a lot of fighting off ailments and various sicknesses. In my last blog entry I mentioned that I had taken the day off on Monday to get one last day of rest before the week. It was needed because Monday’s are my busiest days with the most classes.

Tuesday I gave my last CAT and they are all finally over for the year. No more trying to figure out when I am going to be able to give them, what time periods will work, asking teachers to switch classes… at least until next year. Now we are getting ready for finals and the exams that Year 12 and 13 take to go to the next level. For Year 12 that is qualifying to take the classes they want as year 13; for the year 13 students that means qualifying to get into a university, namely NUS (National University of Samoa) where a few other PC teachers teach. I am still busy in my year 13 class because I saved all the IA’s (Internal Assessments) until the last minute. Next year I will spread them out over the year to make my last term a little less stressful. I still have 3 more of them, but they are less work on me and more on my students. It is crunch time for them. I never thought that I would be looking forward to the school break as much as the students, but it’s true, teachers look forward to it just as much.

On Wednesday, my main computer in my lab stopped working. I was doing work on it Tuesday night and it started beeping at me and shut down. It hasn’t turned on since. I called another fellow PC for suggestions on what I should try since I have never been the best at hardware troubleshooting, and he suggested it was the video card. The problem with that is that it’s internal and not really replaceable here. So, since within the last week a few other of my computers have also died I searched them to see if maybe they had external video cards and maybe I could just install one of them and hope that it worked. None of my 4 other broken computers had one. That means that I have to transfer all of the data from my hard drive on my computer to another computer. Since the computer I use was also the one that past PC computer teachers have kept the last 3 years worth of pictures from my school on it, I want to save the information. I am a little nervous to poke around in this computer just because it’s my school and work computer, but this week I will have to give it a shot. I am getting a little more familiar and comfortable with hardware and figuring out what I need to do, so hopefully I will get this fixed. I also have to re-install the Operating system on 2 of my computers. I don’t know what happened this week, but it wasn’t a good week for computers either. Sometimes there are bad power surges on Savai'i and even with a UPS it can affect the computers. It might have been one of those power surges.

On Wednesday evening one of my fellow teachers stopped by to chat. We ended up sitting outside on my porch type area and talked about a lot of things: faith, families, traveling, singing, we even sang a few songs. He wanted to hear some music that I liked to listen to back home so I sang a few choruses to some of them. Then he brought me a blank CD the next day and wanted to know if I could burn some of the songs I sang for him onto the CD. :) It was fun to get to know another one of my teachers a little better. I don’t always get the chance to chat outside of school with the teachers who don’t live on the compound with me.

This weekend I had a ton of plans. I was going to go to the wharf and make some photocopies at the library for school (it was closed). I have to make copies at the library because our school photocopier is temporarily down again. I wanted to sew up a whole in one of my puletasi’s, I wanted to sew a skirt, and I had to type up my tests for my classes since they were due last weekend (I successfully typed up one of them). BUT, Friday night I was sitting by myself in my house watching a movie and I felt absolutely freezing. I had on socks, a long sleeve shirt, long pants and I was wrapped in a big blanket (thankfully I have one here). I thought maybe being so cold in this country was wrong, so I took my temperature and go figure I had a fever. I decided to go to bed early and see how I felt in the morning. Once again I woke up in the morning feeling rocked. My throat was hurting very similar to what strep feels like. After a phone call to my PC doctor, she figured the same thing. So, when I thought I was getting over one thing, I ended up getting another.

Last weekend I had a bit of homesickness hit me. It doesn’t come as much as it used to. In fact, sometimes I think of going home and want to stay here. I miss aspects of home, like friends and family, but there are aspects of here that I will miss and I am definitely not ready to leave yet… good thing I have another year left. :) Anyways, I was sitting at my computer listening to some of my music. A song came on that I used to listen to a lot before I left Vashon. I remember listenging to it as I drove to one of the many houses I used to housesit for before I left, singing the song in my car at the top of my lungs and I missed that feeling. I thought of driving in my car and heading home to sit in front of the heater at my parents house. Walking upstairs to my bedroom freezing cold because the window is open for the cats to come in and out and crawling into a ton of warm covers with my cat sitting on top of my legs. It was a nice thought of home and I missed it for a bit. I am sure when I am back home I will have thoughts of missing things about here as well.

Now I am in Apia for a few appointments I have to take care of and a few people are leaving that I really want to say goodbye to. But to my friends back home that worry about me, I promise to not go out every night. :)

Until next time…