Wide angle photography
You may remember that my colleagues from my last school very kindly bought me a wide angle lens as a leaving present when I moved on from there. I spent some of my time over the summer playing with it to see what kind of results I got. I told you that I would be showing you some for the bad shots I managed to take along with some of the not quite so bad ones.I think that some of the indoor shots that I took were quite reasonable, but I have noticed that the lens produces shots which are considerably darker than any other of my lenses and that vignetting (a darkness around the edge of the photograph) is a constant problem with it.I have come up with a couple more pr

Are we ever going to do any real work this year?
This has been a strange year so far. We arrived in Qatar on the night of the 1st of September and have had precious little work to do since then! A decision was made by the school last year (before I joined) that we would not start teaching during the Holy month of Ramadan this year but would instead start after Eid al Fitr. Fair enough, the decision is made and that is fine. To be honest, Eid seems to have dragged on a little longer than it used to in Dubai but the kids are due to start tomorrow. Or to be more exact they were due to start tomorrow.Then, as reported in today's

Everything, including the kitchen sink
When we left Dubai on the 26th of June, we had the opportunity of shipping all our worldly goods to Greece without incurring the wrath of the Greek taxman - so we did. And while we were about it we bought a complete new kitchen including a huge fridge, a dishwasher, a huge gas cooker, a load of units, a new washing machine and a new kitchen sink! The lot arrived about 2 days before Mrs QB's brother and sister-in-law arrived to stay with us for three weeks. 197 boxes of our personal effects and 2 days to unpack them all, three weeks after we were promised them by the movers who shall remain nameless but whose name rhymes with brown and describes a kings best hat. What a ball'

Visiting Friends
We arrived in Qatar twenty-one days ago and this weekend we had some friends from Dubai over to stay with us. What a super weekend! Bob and Carol (no, of course that isn't their real names, but I'm not going to tell you who they really are, am I) arrived on Thursday evening and left today (Monday) - we dropped them at the airport at about 5pm.Bob and Carol are very good friends of ours and it was absolutely great to see them again. On the Friday evening we had a dinner party - Me and Mrs QB, Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice and Steve and Shirley (no, none of those are real names either) spent the evening eating, drinking, chatting and generally enjoying ourselves and a lovely eve

The summer modifications
Over the summer we did some modifications to our beautiful home in Skopelos which, we think, make it more beautiful than ever. Two of the major modifications were the opening up of the top floor and the fitting of the kitchen.Our top floor was two separate rooms and a corridor between them leading to one of the balconies. The rooms were bedrooms and each had a huge, homemade cupboard built into them. The rooms were small enough, but the cupboards took up way to much room in both of them and one of them was just too small to be used properly. Mrs QB and I decided to have the walls taken down, have the cupboards removed and turn the space into one open plan lounge with absolut