Monthly Archives: July 2009

Kuroshio Sea Aquarium

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The aquarium is a part of the Ocean Expo Commemorative National Government Park located in Motobu, Okinawa. The main tank called the ‘Kuroshio Sea’ holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters.

Imagine cleaning the glass on that! I think I need to sort my own aquarium out, it contains two fish and quite a lot of snails. The new filter seems to be running nicely, so I’ll pull out the old under-gravel filter out and restock it with fish again.

Weird things on Freecycle

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My local FreeCycle list occasionally contains some weird or highly specific items. Here’s the current crop…

  • Offered – Magic Pants. I wonder what makes them so magic?
  • Offered – Stair Lift, hardly used. A stairlift? The thing screwed to the side of stairs that makes it easy for people to get upstairs? Don’t they require professional installation and what if your stairs are the wrong size?
  • Wanted – One piece of wood 6 to 8 inches wide by approx 8 foot 6 inches long. Err… is there something wrong with the wood in B&Q? This is FreeCycle, not some sort of mail-order company.

No requests for plasma TVs or XBox 360s this week though, and it’s been at least a month since someone offered a bag of coathangers. Speaking of which, does anyone want some? I have a few too many ;)

Moving on up

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Today the current year 9 students went to meet their new year 10 form tutors. In our school students have a form tutor in year 7, then they go into year 8 and have a new form tutor who they keep until year 9. Then for years 10 and 11 they stay with a different tutor.

There’s a bit of a change of mental gears required when the students enter year 10. Some of them are quite sensible, but others don’t understand the importance of the next two years. Several of the more challenging students have already been in their new head of year’s office, having the workings of life explained to them. This is upper school, we do not tolerate lower school silly behaviour.

I’m going to be “sharing” a tutor group with another teacher, so while he welcomed our new group I was covering for a new year 10 tutor who will be joining us in September. She’s got a nice tutor group with no real problem kids.

Welcome to year 10, the world as you know it is over, welcome to the new world order. Strap yourselves in, it’s going to be a rollercoaster and some of you will fall off.