The lyf so short

So yesterday was the annual teachers' excursion. Unlike excursions so far (which were a low-key visit to some nearby destination - such as a bowling alley, farm or - last year - handcar treck, with a barbecue afterwards) this one was a bigger affair, including a bus trip to the Moselle, a boat tour on the Moselle, a castle visit, and a fancy dinner. Accordingly, it was a lot more expensive than usual teachers' trips, and also taking up a lot more of the day (all of it, in fact - we left at 10am and returned at 10pm).
And a lot more frustrating.

I had weighed the pros and cons of going along for a while - teambuilding, fun with the colleagues, enrichment (TM), visiting a town I, personally, didn't know yet vs. giving away yet another otherwise free afternoon, sitting on the bus for a long time, the tourist-trap destination, and above all, the cost. I decided to go because it always looks slightly bad to skip the social events (no matter how full the work week, which this week included parent-teacher conferences) and the last ones were fairly fun. I figured I'd be able to do some work on the long bus journey (3 hours one direction) so I could maybe have some unexpected free time on the weekend. And let's face it, I've become fairly stationary and need to kick myself out of my remaining comfort zone occasionally. So along I went.

The bus trip was a horror. I did in fact correct a whole set of geography exams, but that was done while trying to ignore the increasingly drunk crowd (all colleagues) at the back of the bus (I was sitting in one of the front rows with the other boring people who were not in fact on the trip in order to get drunk before the bus had even reached the Autobahn). I don't mind people having fun. I do hate drunk crowds though, even (or especially) if I know them and all they're doing is being noisy, playing loud Ibiza-style music while singing along very badly, and trying to get everyone to participate in their schlager music karaoke. One (normally reasonably nice) colleague kept yelling that he needed a smoking break and when the bus driver ignored him, said very loudly that this was the worst bus driver he'd ever encountered.

The funny (not ha-ha funny, the other funny) thing is that when the students asked where we were going, they all nodded knowingly and expected us to get drunk (the Moselle valley is one of Germany's wine-growing regions) but when they heard that the principal was coming along, assumed that the trip would be boring because we'd have to behave. Instead, he was among the heaviest party-ers, which doubtlessly encouraged the bad behaviour.
Anyway.

The schlager music singing continued while running up the steep streets of Cochem to reach the castle in time for the guided tour (the Autobahn was crowded and we also eventually did take a smoking break so we were late), and during the guided tour, which was therefore heavily abridged. I tried to enjoy the nice aspects of it (pretty castle, lovely weather, nice panorama) but it was hard. Some colleagues were displaying signs of alcohol-induced dementia and it was hard to remain patient. Eventually there was a chance to leave the crowd (which wanted to go to a pub) and have some ice-cream and window-shopping with the other uncool colleagues who also didn't think getting drunk constituted a good time. We met the others again for the boat trip, which despite of cold temperatures and strong winds was very pretty. At that point the drinkers started to grow tired and a little more quiet but it was still embarrassing to have them around.
The fancy dinner was nice (and most people managed to behave themselves) and I managed to sleep a little on the bus trip back.

What remains is the feeling of some nice sights but a day otherwise wasted, and my opinion of about 70% of my colleagues (+ the boss) damaged. We will see if the damage is repairable.

In order to be not just a Negative Nelly, here are some pretty-ish pictures from the trip.


Inside Cochem Castle


View from the castle across the valley


View from the boat through the valley (castle included)


High-water marks on the wall of the restaurant (2003, 2018 and 2021 missing).
Name has nothing to do with the God of Thunder but ye olde spelling of Tor ("gate") instead because it's next to one of the old city gates.


This is where we had our fancy dinner (before everybody crowded in).

Seriously, where is it going so fast?

Meant to make a very short post about how we attended the baptism of my niece in Cologne (my brother's baby daughter) and it was a very nice ceremony (Catholic, because my brother's wife is Catholic and my brother's religious feelings are very much on the agnostic side).

And then I realised I never wrote here about my brother's marriage. Or my sister-in-law's pregnancy. Or the fact that when she (then still being The Girlfriend) revealed her pregnancy, they told everyone they weren't planning to marry because they wanted to do it in secret during their winter holiday in Austria and come back with my brother bearing a new last name, SURPRISE!* only to get cold feet in October - no, not with regards to the marriage, but with regards to the SURPRISE - so they let us in on their plan after all so we could attend the ceremony, if we so desired, which we did.

Never posted about the Wedding/New Year holiday in Austria (well, very barely Austria. Just across the border.) that followed these news. Did you know that in Germany, selling and buying fireworks was officially forbidden even around New Year's, but you were allowed to use up fireworks that are still in your possession? Did you know that in Austria, selling and buying fireworks was officially permitted but you weren't allowed to fire them? (People, as usually, went hog wild.)

Actually I had a whole-ass post to sum up the past year prepared, but never got beyond September and at some point it became too embarrassing to post, even backdated. Now another year has come and almost gone.

Never wrote about the fact that while Baby Ida was expected in the middle of April, she ended up being born on the exact same day as Julian? He took it very well ("I got a little cousin for my birthday!") and keeps stressing that they may have been born on the same day but NOT in the same year. I've always had mixed feelings about sharing a birthday with my grandfather (who, as he aged, put more and more importance on the fact that it was HIS birthday being celebrated on the day itself) but I hope these two will have less trouble with it.

Anyway.

Last Sunday was my niece's baptism and I became one of her godmothers. It was a very nice ceremony with a very cheerful and ecumenically-minded priest who had some very astute things to say with regards to Going To Heaven that probably pissed off his superiors (the Earthly ones. The Heavenly ones, I think, are perfectly fine with it). The dinner afterwards was slightly awkward and uncomfortable because it was at the restaurant belonging to the Veedel's (Colognian town quarter) community centre and said community centre was hosting a Christmas party, so things were crowded, the door kept opening and closing as people were coming and going, and conversation was next to impossible. But on the way back to the car, we ran into a merriment of Santa Clauses on Vespa bikes who showered the kids with candy. Or rather, Julian. Felix didn't find the Santa Clauses trustworthy, so he hurried ahead with Jörg, who also doesn't entirely appreciate Colognian merriment. I sometimes do miss Cologne and its particular brand of irreverence though.

- - -
* My brother loves SURPRISEs. Back in the day he secretly took the driving exam while my parents were on vacation so he could surprise them by being the one to pick them up at the airport. And I only knew that he was getting ready to graduate from university because I got to proofread his master's thesis - our parents only found out when he casually gifted my mum with a copy of the finished thesis for her birthday. In retrospect I should've guessed that their hedging about the marriage question meant they were planning something but didn't want to tell anyone until after the fact. Thomas probably would've kept the baby a secret if babies didn't have a way of showing their growing.

and not made better by the fact that I had the worst case of exam nerves ever (unable to fall asleep for hours, sleeping about three hours net, too queasy to have breakfast, shaky hands, etc), two utterly stressful weeks feat. marital spats & tiffs, one very uncooperative class, and, just as a cherry on top, my period.

But I passed, and am now a fully qualified secondary level teacher (or will be come November, when we get our certificates). Not as well as I hoped, nor, frankly, as well as I felt I deserved just for the stress I went through. And it doesn't even matter because I don't have to find a job with that certificate like the baby university graduates do - my school is desperate to keep me, my principal already asked three times whether I really was staying with them. But it's just utterly annoying that I threw so much into this fucking process and the result is no more than mediocre. If I'd known that it'd go like this, I wouldn't have agonised over the effing lesson plans for two months. (Yeah, I know, I probably wouldn't have passed at all if I hadn't agonised like that.)

Am trying to tell myself that this is how so many of the students feel, practicing and practicing as much as they possibly can and then getting no better than [German equivalent of] C or D. So it's what they call a valuable experience (TM). Also trying to tell myself that C actually means "meets expectations" and anything above that is exceeding expectations. Still sucks though.

Am trying to focus on how when I finally left the school after the final colloquium was over and I'd gotten my results, one of the boys from the second exam class was leaning out of the science lab window calling "Ms S, is it over? did you pass?" and I called back "Yes, it's over, and yes, I did pass" and I could hear him tell his classmates "She did it!" and the class cheered. That was nice.

I guess that's what matters.

This night, I dreamt that I was driving the kids home, but we couldn't use the usual road, so I had to take exceedingly long deviations that all ended at another road block because of yet another mudslide or yet another damaged bridge. In the end, the latest deviation took us down to what looked like the seashore (although my rational mind decided that it must be the Great Dhünn reservoir because we don't have any seas around here), and the road along the shore was flooded, but there were cars going in front of me and I just anted to get home at last, so I figured it would be alright, and then suddenly the road broke away and we were underwater and, presumably, drowned, because that's when I woke up.

My region isn't actually that badly affected by the torrential rains and floods, although curiously some uphill suburbs have been affected (more than, say, downtown Cologne which is right along the River Rhine). Maybe those marsh areas were there for a reason and the city shouldn't have declassified them for building? Just a thought. The bridges down in the valley have, for the most part, been damaged (some have been clean swept away O.ó), but those are pedestrian bridges. On Sunday we did have to take a detour because one of the road bridges was blocked, and I expect that's where the dream took its inspiration from, but we didn't have to drive through actually flooded streets at any point.

Well, very briefly, while we were in Normandy. The rainstorm that later devastated parts of Belgium, the Netherlands and central Germany parked its ugly ass there first, probably to soak up some more sea water, but it also rained on us the first two days of our stay before it moved on north-east, leading to some flooded streets while the sewerage tried to catch up. BUT all water will eventually follow the call of gravity down into the adjacent sea, there's a reason why the towns and villages and fields sur mer are all raised above the roads, the fields can hold a lot of water if they have to, and it's a sparsely settled, rural region (Bayeux, the largest town, has one third of the inhabitants of my (small!) home town). Back home, more and more free fields (even the marshy ones) are getting sealed and built on, and that means that the water has nowhere to go. Which doesn't make the losses any less awful, but many of them are the results of decades of mismanagement and turning a blind eye on a) pre-existing weather conditions (WHY DO YOU THINK IT WAS A MARSH) and b) exciting new desasters brought to you by humanity.

It is also a problem when people still think that actively taking measures against the consequences of climate change is defeatism (or too expensive). Awareness and self-flagellation alone will not save us. Do we need to lower our CO₂ emissions? For sure. Do we need to invest in flood and heat protection etc. to deal with the damage that cannot be reversed anymore? Damn it, yes!

Some people complained that the reservoirs were "too full" even before the rainstorm, but after last summer was so arid, you can't be surprised when reservoir management holds on to every single drop of water. Now they overflowed (or in some cases dams were opened to let the water go in a controlled manner), which I understand is shitty for already soaked places downstream, but let's be honest, if the dam bursts, that's even shittier.

(By not entirely coincidence, climate change and the extreme/unpredictable weather conditions that result from it were the last topic I covered with my 10th graders in geography before they left school for good. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration, but somehow I can't be pleased.)

Anyway. It has been A Summer.

As it was, the dream wasn't really about the flood, of course. My final exam is now just a month away and I haven't gotten nearly the amount of prep work done for it that I wanted. In part, this is to blame on going to Normandy for a week, Erfurt for two days and the Black Forest for a long weekend. You're never away just the time you're travelling, there's also the packing and other preparations. All of these trips were much-needed breaks, but they did take away from my prep time. In between, a week was spent on restauring our wastewater wetland (NOT as a result of the rains, but because the rhizomes of the reeds were starting to push out the gravel after 10 years of growing), which also required my help and again tore me out of the core curricula and school laws brainspace. It doesn't help that the stuff I have to write is thoroughly boring and redundant, and I have to try and make it less redundant while still satisfying all the formal requirements, which may be an impossible task. And next week the new term will start, so all the remaining work will have to be juggled alongside regular school work. Joy.
It all adds up to, I guess, dreams about drowning.

The problem with such dreams is that the sense of doom and despair stays with me for hours after waking up, even when the whole thing has been safely identified as a dream, and I need to actively think myself back into the dream (which, for obvious reasons, I Do Not Want) and mentally continue the storyline in a way that leads to a safe ending just to exorcise the damned thing.

Meh.

... and while the Eurovision liveblogging on Tumblr is irresistible (one of the few things Tumblr is more suitable for than LJ/DW to be honest), I still feel obliged to subject you to the traditional Eurovision post here. Apologies in advance!

( Preliminaries )

Anyway, let the show begin!

( The Songs )

- - -

Europe, start voting now!

( Voting interval )

(found via ysilme)

cornerofmadness started the outdoors challenge for her Snowflake 2021. I'm not taking part in Snowflake, but I love the idea, so here's a picture I took just a few hours ago.

I'm asking those who love the outdoors to post a picture on your page. A picture that YOU took. Just a pic. No description. The goal is to regain peace and harmony without negativity. Please copy the text, put a picture on YOUR page, and let's look at these beautiful pictures.

... Julian's teacher has tested positive for Covid, so the entire class is in quarantine.
Felix' teacher is quarantined pre-emptively because direct contact.
As a result, Felix' class is back to distance learning until further notice. (Of course, due to his brother being quarantined, Felix would probably be quarantined anyway.)

What this means for Jörg and me is unclear. The health authorities will presumably get in touch and inform us whether we're quarantined or need to get tested or w/ever. (I just had my bi-weekly test - negative - last Wednesday, but that's clearly obsolete now.)

This is... interesting.

This year, thanks to the inscrutable workings of the German holiday system, my federal state has its fall holidays exactly between the end of the summer holidays and the start of the Christmas holidays, with eight weeks of regular school on either side. Well, eight weeks of regular school between summer and now, at my school, which is located in a blessed little city upon a blessed little hill where, apparently, the Rona doesn't really want to go. (There have been five confirmed cases - no casualties - between March and May, and none thereafter.) In cities all around, classes or entire schools have had to go into quarantine for a couple of weeks, but B-feld (no, not the conspiracy one) has been spared so far. Who knows how it'll go after the holidays. As our principal said meaningfully when he reminded everyone to remain cautious and stick to the rules, "Winter is coming."

Winter is coming. Already, our lessons start in the dark; and when the holidays are over, even the return to regular MET won't help the fact that the sun just doesn't rise before 8:30 in our latitudes, and soon it won't rise before the first recess. (For some reason, I have a really striking memory from back in grade 8, when we had an east-facing classroom and sat translating Caesar under a spectacular sunrise. The things our brain chooses to keep!) Moreover, the end of the decade is coming, so there are even more road constructions than usual. The Powers That Be have decided that, when there are major roadworks on one of the two connecting roads between the two towns I have to pass through on my way to work, it makes total sense to block the second road for construction, too. Then one week later, another road I need to take was blocked as well. It's hard not to feel targeted personally. I can now either take one of the official detours, which of course all the trucks are taking, or I can take three little detours of my own which, in spite of being longer, still get me there faster than the truck-infested official way. (Yes, yes, I know, until they can send goods via e-mail, I shall have to share the road with trucks.)

Winter is coming. One of the cornerstones of our COVID protection concept is that the windows are open as much as possible, ideally at all times. For a variety of reasons, it isn't possible even now - my classroom faces out to the school bus stop, so by 12, when the elementary school kids start gathering there, no lessons are possible when the windows are open. It's not even that they're playing and talking - which would be distracting enough - but that they keep rubbing their noses on our classroom window, waving, talking and even throwing things inside.I, the teacher, should be able to stop this with a few stern words. I am not. They don't care. All we can do is shut the window. We don't even have curtains that we can draw shut against the distraction. We don't even have those sticky foils that you can put on the windows to darken them. Talked to the janitor and he said "Well I'll have to ask the architect about that." Yeah, putting some darkening foil on the windows definitely sounds like something that's got to be cleared with the architect. Apparently, we aren't even allowed to stick window clings or other cafts stuff to the windows, let alone foil! (The frames, on the other hand, are made of metal, so I've been considering buying a set of neodymium magnets and hanging posters from the window frames. Daylight? What daylight? Winter is coming, anyway! Or maybe I'll use fabric?)

One positive effect of the open windows and the incoming cold season is that I'm no longer getting into trouble with colleagues for not telling my students to hang up their jackets in the corridor. "No jackets in the classroom" is one of those unwritten etiquette rules that I don't get, don't remember, and certainly don't care to enforce. I don't see the problem. That is, I don't understand why it's supposed to be a problem, and I also genuinely don't perceive the jackets unless I specifically pay attention to them, which I usually don't, because I don't remember the rule. I have jacket blindness. There can be a full classroom of 25-29 kids, all of them huddled in their jackets or using them to cushion their chairs, and my eyes will glide right over them. When other colleagues are in the classroom with me they'll immediately spot the students in the fourth row wearing their jackets and snap at them to take them outside. Then ten minutes later one of those students will notice another student having stealthily hung their jacket over the back of their chair and rat on them, so there's another student you have to send outside to hang up their jacket. And of course, a lot of students will argue for why they want to keep their jacket or why they shouldn't have to take it outside now. It's a self-made disruption and I don't see the point in the first place. I don't feel disrespected by students in jackets. IMO, it's a completely arbitrary rule. Besides, all the jackets right next to each other on the coatrack in the corridor seems like a surefire way of spreading lice or scabies, should someone have them! Not Worth It. But most of my colleagues are adamant about the "no jackets" rule - or were. Now that we have to keep the windows open most of the time, and many students forget to bring warm pullovers (or maybe they don't have one), we have been told to permit the wearing of jackets. That's a small blessing for the students and also for the jacket-blind, like me.

Another blessing! I've only been teaching there for two and a half years, so I've only heard it twice, but the "plastic building" is finally going to be demolished! The plastic building is one of those fugly 1970s modular container buildings that were used in schools all over the country for a couple of years until the cheap materials and the asbestos in the insulation made them unuseable. Our vice principal announced it during the last conference, starting with a little story. "When I started working here in 1984, the principal said, 'Oh, and don't worry about our plastic building down there, we don't use it anymore. In fact, it's going to be demolished any day now.'" General laughter. As we all know, it's 2020 and the damned thing is still there. Some students hate it because they're not allowed to play ball because too many hard kicks have damaged parts of the already damaged building (not all of it is plastic). Other students like it because they hide behind it for their illegal smoke. The teachers all hate it because we occasionally have to round up the secret smokers behind the building, which means climbing through a sizeable bramble and stinging nettle thicket first. Also, it's taking up a lot of space on what could otherwise be another nice part of the schoolyard. It's ugly and broken and sits in the way and is vandalised regularly, which is still technically a crime even though in this case, the building really is asking for it. But of course, it's not up to the school to decide to get it demolished; this has to be decided by the district council, and the district council always put it off. But now the state has announced that it won't be paying for the sins of the 70s after this decade is over, so the district council has finally signed the permit. The construction (or, in this case, destruction) company rolled in last Monday, started and will (hopefully) manage to get all the dangerous bits dismantled during the holidays and the whole thing gone by the new year. Oremus. After that, maybe we'll actually get an outdoor seating area? The kids aren't currently allowed to sit and eat in the cafeteria because it's too small for safe distancing, so they have to pick up their lunch (in plastic bowls or paper bags) and eat outside. The last two weeks were rainy and cold, and it's not like that's likely to get better in November. I hope our principal will finally allow the kids to go back into their classrooms, for lunch at least if not for all of lunch break. As usual, a few kids who couldn't behave have so far ruined this option for everybody. But we will see. After all, winter is - I may have mentioned this before - coming.

But first, I have two weeks of (theoretically) no school work, which (practically) will be used trying to tidy up and preparing for after the holidays. No rest for the teachers. And maybe I'll be able to look after the garden, which I've been forced to neglect since August? Jörg really wanted to go on another vacation AND start some major renovations (the fact that we now have two incomes is going to his head) but he ended up not booking as one option after the next turned into a high-risk zone. I'm a bit wistful - this time last year, we took the kids to London and Bristol during the fall holidays and it was fantastic - but also grateful, TBH. I just... don't want to have to go anywhere for a couple of days. Is that selfish? Maybe it is. But there's just so much to clean away and catch up with and prepare. The mere thought of going on a trip and leaving all that stuff for (yet) later is making me want to curl up and cry and threatening to start the self-loathing spiral (Why didn't I deal with this paperwork months ago? Why can't I stay on top of things for once?!?). And the long, dark tea-time of the soul hasn't even started yet.

... and wonder where it has disappeared: The author suddenly got cold feet and wanted me to delete the entry. So I turned it invisible. Maybe he'll change his mind. Or it'll stay invisible. At any rate, that's what happened!

I forgot to mention that this year, there were actually very few game and film lessons. Since the students have had five to seven school days since March 13, most teachers did real lessons until the very end. Because I am a big woobie and also because I have not yet found a way of motivating kids that know that their report cards are printed (and, in some cases, have actually received their report cards in the first lesson of the day), I went for a sort of compromise lesson. With the sixth graders, as I planned, I did a schoolyard letterboxing treasure hunt. Reactions varied. Some kids were happy, others whined that they had to walk. (Our schoolyard is not that large, although, thanks to its layout, it's possible to let three teams of children with different sets of directions walk around it without seeing each other for the most part.) In this heat! (The first half of the class started at around 8, at which time there were still plenty of shady spots.) With their masks on! (Yes, well.) But on the whole, it worked out OK.
The cheap keychain compasses that I had bought only worked if you held them exactly level, while being lucky enough for the sloppily suspended needle not to have got stuck. Only one group noticed. "That can't be right," I heard a voice from the bushes, "because it's pointing exactly where the sun is. The sun is never in the north!" Nobody believed him! They all learned this in geography in grade 5, and yet they wanted to trust a cheap plastic compass that they didn't even know how to use. Admittedly, this boy probably knew better not because he had paid better attention in geography (although he's an attentive student on the whole), but because he's a passionate boy scout and they still seem to learn things in the boy scouts in Dahl. "Trust the boy scout!" I shouted back at the bushes.
They remained unconvincced. "Well, we're not looking for north, we want to find south and then east."
"Yes," Boy Scout patiently said, "but a compass always points north. You sort of have to figure out the rest from there."
"The compass lies," I supplied, "think of it as Captain Jack Sparrow's compass, not a real one."
That worked better, and the boy scout managed to explain that the sun would be in the east at 8 am (south-east, technically, since it's midsummer and the damn thing rises at 3:30), which was good enough for their purpose.
But hey, they were outside, most of them managed to follow the English directions, and some of the stamps actually landed on the worksheet where they were supposed to land. I had written some directions in invisible ink and put UV pens in one of the letterboxes, which was (no pun intended) a highlight. They were also surprisingly excited about the magnifying glasses I had put in another box (for reading the small print); if I'd known that 12-year-olds are still enthused about cheap kindergarten-level magnifying glasses, I would've bought more of them.

For my 8th graders, I had prepared a geography crossword and grid, which was met with very little enthusiasm.
"We've had to actually learn things in all lessons today!" they told me. "No games or films at all!"
"Probably everybody thinks that all the other teachers are doing games or watching a film, so they want to do something else," I answered, because that had certainly been my reasoning behind doing something learning-related.
"You know what [Math Teacher] said when we asked if we could play games? 'How old do you think you are?' But then she made us do crafts! How old does she think we are?"
I was very much tempted to laugh now, both at their outrage and at [Math Teacher] not realising that they would associate crafts with preschool. (They had "crafted" a mini formulary.)
"So pleeeeease, can't we watch a movie now?"
"We only have 45 minutes. Besides, I don't have a movie with me."
Someone from the back row shouted, "YouTube is free!", while someone else sugested, "I'll give you my Netflix key!"
"No."
"Or my Disney+ key!"
"Tempting, but no."
"Are you watching The Mandalorian?"
"Only the first episode so far. Keeping the rest for the holidays."
"Let's start right now!" Big puppy eyes. "Don't you want to know what happens to Baby Yoda?"
"I do, but I also want you to learn earth geography. Come on, one last day."
Eventually, they did the quiz - with much grumbling. We went outside, though, so instead of their south-facing classroom (keep in mind that there's no air conditioning in German schools!), they could sit in whatever shady spots the school yard had to offer.

Yesterday, I got to teach one of the most challenging classes - during their very last lesson. After they'd already got their report cards. Initially, their class teacher had planned to hand out the report cards then, but then she decided he wanted to team-teach (or rather, team-hand out report cards) with the German teacher in an earlier lesson. So there I was, with a class that is hard to motivate at the best of times. Principles be damned; I watched a very old episode of The Simpsons with them. (In my defense, it was in English, it was at least tangentially related to next term's main focus in English, namely, Going To School In America, and it was about a situation they could relate to (we watched "Bart gets an F".) Even that was tough going. Only two or three of them were actually interested in watching; three more suffered in demonstrative boredom; the rest were acting up in more or less disruptive ways. Oh, and one girl declared that it was a "baby show" and beneath her dignity. -- Due to circumstances, I don't yet know what classes I'll teach next term, but since grades 5/6, 7/8 and 9/10 are generally treated as units, it's quite likely that I'll continue to teach this class next year. And like - I like these kids, individually. But getting them to learn something is like milking stones.
But that's a problem for next term.