Summer holidays day 1 - paperwork and birthday parties....

Day 1 of the 6 week holiday. We all got up late, had a lazy breakfast and settled down for a first day catchup sort of day.

Louise is currently downstairs sorting through a pile of cookery mags taking out interesting recipes, Molly's very excited and waiting impatiently for later on when her advance birthday party happens. And I'm (thinking about) catching up with school paperwork.

At work I have many, many systems for keeping track of what they hell I'm meant to be doing. All the staff know by now that something has to be written down somewhere to have a chance of me doing it - not that I'm pedantic about it, just that my poor, pathetic memory is such that I shall immediately forget something if it's just told to me in passing one day in the corridor.

So the two main systems are a clipboard with a regularly changing DO TODAY list. Then there's the invaluable REMEMBER THE MILK, a computer application I just couldn't do without.

And then there's the piles of paperwork. Again, these have a hieracrhy. First there's the pile of things under the clipboard. That's must do or needs doing today. Then there's a slightly bigger pile sitting on top of the computer next to the admin laptop. And then there's the boxfile.

The big boxfile with all the things I really need to look at - AT SOME POINT. Things that aren't necessary for either day to day or term to term. Similarly there's also a Remember The Milk tab labelled TO LOOK AT, which I routinely add websites and applications that should be really good if only I/the teachers ever had a moment to look at them.

The big boxfile was my final day job. Instead, what happened was that, as usual, I finished with no time to spare, grabbed all of the paperwork outstanding and threw it all into the boxfile and took it home. Which, if the holidays go exactly like last year and the year before, it will sit on a shelf until it's time to go back, unopened and unlooked at.

Well not this year, this year I shall do things differently. This year I have the boxfile on the desk. This year I shall be opening it up and working through it (using the paper bin a lot I imagine).

Or at least I intend to. Right after I finish blogging about it. Then I may make a cup of coffee. Thn I think the office could do with a dust. Then it's probably around lunchtime.