The top news today is not necessarily the state of my throat following the tonsillectomy, but I’ll provide an update anyway. It’s continuing to be less sore, but I still have significant pain when trying to move my tongue around or—as I discovered today—when trying to suppress a sneeze. I was eating breakfast and had some residual cereal and milk in my mouth that I hadn’t been able to flush clean with dextrous tongue movements between mouthfuls, when I suddenly had to sneeze. I ended up having to clean up splatters of cereal and milk off the carpet.
My wife and I took Scully on a big walk today, getting our lockdown exercise time out of the house. We met a little puppy, just 9 weeks old, whose owners still hadn’t even decided what name to call him, thought they said they were thinking Winchester. Scully and possibly-Winchester had some fun playing a bit. She likes playing with little dogs, especially any smaller than her.
But the main thing I did today was complete the application for that casual teaching position at the University of Technology, Sydney, that I mentioned two days ago. I didn’t complete it then because I got to page 3 of the online form, after filing in simple things like my name and contact details, and found that it asked for a full curriculum vitae, including things like my philosophy of education, evidence of sensitivity when teaching students of diverse cultural backgrounds and identity, and experience teaching in a university context with feedback from students! So I deferred that to today, and spent some time sprucing up a CV and composing answers to the various questions.
I finished that just after lunch and submitted my responses and uploaded my CV, and then discovered that page 4 of the online application form requested a 5 minute video with myself answering questions about what practices are important for teachers to engage students, give a “rich example” of a teaching method I have used, give an example of when I have adapted to student feedback in my teaching strategy, and talk about why I want to teach and what benefits I would bring to the faculty!! Holy cow!
So I spent much of the afternoon writing a script and then recording a video of myself. Hilariously, the first take went perfectly… except that I thought I’d started recording when I actually hadn’t, and when I hit the record button again after I’d finished in order to stop the recording, it actually began recording. So I had to do the whole thing again from scratch.
Eventually I completed the video, uploaded that, and completed the application. Here’s hoping that after all this effort I get the job!
I intended to do some comics work in the afternoon, but I was so mentally worn out, and it was getting late in the afternoon and time to think about what to make for dinner, that I never got into it.
I’m now trying a larger fraction of Seedlip Spice 94 (mentioned yesterday) in an alcohol-free drink with some lemon juice and soda. I’m still not getting it. On a more careful sniff with more of the product in a glass, the aroma of the Seedlip is subtly attractive, with warm spicy notes of cloves and cinnamon, but the flavour is, well… pretty flavourless. It has a hint of citrus on the palate, but the spice doesn’t really come through very much at all. I’m going to persist trying it in various combinations until I empty this bottle I bought, but honestly I can’t see myself ever buying it again. In my opinion, it’s a complete debacle for the $50 a bottle price tag.
New content today: