Thursday 23rd February

At 2.30am this morning I was wide awake and it didn’t matter how much I wanted to, I was not getting back to sleep. I must be a bit run down as aswell as the head cold I started with yesterday, I now have started with a cough. I got up at 6am as I was going over to one of the teachers apartments round the corner from me at 6.30am to use their shower as I still didn’t have any hot water. It felt so good to finally be able to wash my hair! I got a lift to school at 7.45am and went to see Imelda about my hot water and other bits I needed to do.
At 8.30am the handyman and one of the admin staff (the handyman doesn’t speak English so she was a translator) went back to my apartment and I realised that he had turned the gas off at the mains which was why I had no hot water. We then went to register me at the police station and then it was back to school.
It was nice being back and saying hello to the teachers that weren’t out the other night and a few of the Chinese staff that I had become friendly with were really pleased to see me which was nice. I went to my new office on the fourth floor and got talking to James about my new role as his TA/PA.
The first job of the day was to get the office into some sort of order, I opened one of the filing cabinets and instead of there being rows of files in there, paper had just been dumped in all of the 8 drawers! The same went for all of the cabinets and you couldn’t even see the surface of the conference table it was covered in that much paperwork! I honestly didn’t know where to start. I ended up pulling all the paper out of the filing cabinets and putting them into piles and one big pile of paperwork for James to sort through. I made folders for all of the kids in his class for him to keep their work in and folders for other stuff aswell, then I sat James down and we went through the big pile of paper work of what was to be kept and what was to be binned, there were report cards in there from two years ago! The attitude of the day was to be ruthless! By 4pm we had made pretty good progress and there were a few bin bags of stuff to be thrown out, so a good first day!
Throughout the day I had been feeling rough still with this head cold so after school instead of going out for dinner with a few of the girls, I just went home, ordered a pizza and went to bed to try and shift this bug.