Java - it stands for: Second Life Now Real Life Boyfriend. He and askye became acquainted over at Second Life, hit it off, have met up in meatspace and are all loved up. There's photographic evidence a while back in the thread - they make a cute couple!
Meanwhile - belated Anniversary wishes for HMS Jeeves!
You know, this has been the most unspooky Halloween I can remember! Last year the PTG at school organised a Halloween party which took place at school after schooltime. It was great fun - bouncy castle, spooky haunted room, candyfloss, fancydress, yada yada yada. This time around...they weren't up for organising it, apparently. And there was no way that the head was going to make us organise it all - given that we're writing reports, doing assessments, and being inspected by Mr Cheat'em this week.
The little little kids celebrated it in-class (I'd made Year One a huge picture of a witch on a broom a couple of weeks ago,at their teacher's request, as I'm a capable artist and love that kind of thing) but the rest of us? Nada.
In fact what we DID celebrate yesterday was Divali. So it was saris and sequins as far as the eye could see, and the PTG put on a Divali assembly.
We always have a Divali assembly, of course. But usually it's organised by teachers.
This time it was the Indian parents who organised it. And, unfortunately, it appears that they didn't have a scrap of directorial instinct or grasp of their audience's needs between them.
8 kids stood at the front holding little scripts and read out a very very dull description of what happens on various days of Divali. There was, apparently, no explanation of WHY there was a Divali festival in the first place. The vocab was pretty damn complex. I say apparently, because it was only audible to people at the front - you have to DRILL the kids into yelling like hell when they're in a big hall, otherwise they'll default, what with being shy, to speaking at only-slightly-louder-than normal. Alas, this had evidently not been something the PTG thought about.
And then there was a dance. It was, in fairness, very long and complicated. But because the dancers were aged 9-12, and mostly not all that GOOD at dancing, it mostly looked like badly synchronised epileptic fits - and it's a miracle that the tiny wee Nursery kids sitting at the front didn't get kicked in the heads.
So that was my Halloween.
On the bright side, though, the PTG did bring in yummy samosas and Indian sweets! And I pretty much ate my own body weight in them, having not had any breakfast. In fact, that's all I ate for breakfast and lunch - Indian sweets. Nom nom nom nom nom!