1998, now for some reason this year felt the longest, I don't know why but the idea of 1998 it just seems that year went on forever.
At this point in my story I had entered second class, the new group in first class were placed back in with Ms. McGuiness and for a time it was only two classes in our classroom, second and third.
Now second class wasn't the most eventful year in the world. It was pretty much as normal as they come even. There was nobody coming into our class and nobody leaving. It wasn't till the next few years that would happen.
Back then were the glory years however. Lunch time was as fun as a cat in kittens. We played all sorts of games from catch to tip the can, every once in awhile we'd get a football out and play on this triangular piece of grass that you could barely run across without reaching the end of it. There was this big dark shelter behind the school we'd play little games in. There were also a lot of crazy stories floating around about that shelter. Apparently our Principle hated dogs and he'd just go around hunting down dogs to lock them up in there. Though sometimes on rainy days you actually would hear squealing coming from the locked door, scary stuff.
The birthday parties in second class got out of control. It seemed Patrick and Stephen were constantly trying to one up each other, one would invite us all to a fun factory and the other would bring us paint balling. Hell I wasn't complaining as it was mad amounts of fun but it kinda dampened my birthdays when it was all "lol you wanna go cinema?".
Now I'm pretty sure this was the year we started dabbling in long division, I can tell you now, I despise long division. It's just something I can't do. I mean even when I repeated in the Marist it was my one weakness. But yet again tale for another day. Now everyone around me seemed to get the hang of long division while it drove me insane. Where do I take the numbers from that was my problem, I'll never understand it.
Now my teacher in second class was Mrs. Duffy. I've been over this before but I did not like her. This one time in class we were discussing natural disasters. "Call out some natural disasters guys" she called from atop the classroom. "Hurricane", "tornado", "earthquake" all these words flung out at blistering paces. I however bided my time as I knew I could blow away all their silly little answers for you see back in the day I had this awesome encyclopedia. It had drawings of all this crazy stuff and I must have learnt it off by heart. One of the sections of this encyclopedia was natural disasters, so I had answers for this question that I knew nobody else would know.
As the answers began fading into murmurs of "avulunch" (sic). I chimed in loudly with a waterspout. I proudly sat back and watched my peers confused faces but alas my moment was cut short. "Stop being such an idiot Mark, you think that's funny, stand up immediately." My face dropped. Now I was gobsmacked. What the hell did I do wrong I wondered. Waterspouts were serious threats for boats and what not, they were like water bound tornadoes. Tornado was on the blackboard so why the hell was I made look like an idiot. Well apparently Mrs. Duffy being the master of the universe thought I was talking about some variation of a teapot. What a brilliant teacher.
But my second class tussles with Mrs. Duffy don't end there, oh no I could go on for hours. One time we were practising for a choir. Three of us were tired of it all and just wanted to quit. So we asked Mrs. Duffy if we could stop taking part in the choir. Now Mrs. Duffy was taken back by this request. She begged and pleaded with Patrick to return to the choir, she talked about how it will benefit him and how everyone will be ever so proud of his amazing voice. I can't remember who the other person was but I remember she spent a good few minutes convincing them to return as well.
Now she had these two people back in the choir she just stared down at me with her protruding jaw. I thought to myself, oh here we go, don't try and convince me too hard Mrs I might just cave in. Well I didn't have to worry about that. She just looked down at me and sighed. "You can just take a seat over there till we're done". Now I know I was the one to quit but what the hell! You're going to make me stand there and listen to you compliment everyone else and then you just look at me and sigh?! As Eric once said "I didn't wanna go to the dance, I just wanted to be asked".
I think those two events sum up how I got along with Mrs. Duffy. She was a bitch to me and an angel to most of the others. Though I remember there were others she didn't take to kindly to either.
Okay one last small story about her!
One time whilst playing basketball round the back of the school I fell on my knee. Blood streaming down my leg I rushed to find a teacher to get me a bandage. Well guess who was on duty, yep herself. As I walked up to her she had the biggest shit eating grin on her face I'd ever seen. "What's the problem Mark?" she splurted out as she attempted to contain her laughter. Like c'mon why laugh at a kid pumping blood unless you have some sort of sadistic problems.
I tire of talking of her so let's move onto fun times. BADMINTON! Now my last meeting with these people was one of Patrick's mother (the leader of the badminton club) telling me she no babysit, badminton r srs bsns.
When I entered in second class though things were a lot better. That sport was the sport of kings I tell ya! Each day we'd do these silly little routines to help our power and accuracy. As strange as it was it eventually paid off as we could soon land shuttles into a bucket from the other end of the court.
Good times, though I never did get along with Barney one of the owners. He was constantly barking orders and shouting out "Don't do this and you won't be back next week!". He was just annoying. Anybody went into the toilet he'd be in three minutes later "What are you doing, why are you taking so long, you think this is a game". He was mainly just there to run everyones good time. Though in his defense we kinda brought it on ourselves. I remember one time one of the people in the club stood up on a toilet (god knows why) and shattered the toilet into pieces. Funny for me, not for Barney.
While the badminton club was fun it wasn't without its problems. For one thing the club had the biggest load of nepotism I had ever seen. The club was owned by three of my classmates parents. Now there were always only four places on the team. Guess who got three of them?! Yep, every single time the children of those three got the team, not only that but the neighbour of one of the three got the final place, every single time. Now what are the odds of that happening?!
Seeing as I lived in the middle of nowhere, socializing outside of school was always a pain. For me whenever summer hit it was adventure time. I got a bike this year and by howdy did I make use of it. I'd go adventuring around the local area. They were fun times. I remember there was this one place were daisy like flowers grew to be bigger than me, it was awesome, felt like a world were everything grew to be massive!
I climbed Croagh Patrick this year. That was scary as shit. The start of it is grand, you got this little stream accompanying you up the route but eventually it starts getting cliffy. There's parts of the main path were you only have room for one foot as you move across, always got paranoid I'd fall down those. The worst bit was when you got to the end though. Now I don't know why but the final third of the mountain is completely rocky. Every single step you take is on stones which are constantly moving, constantly going from under your feet. The worst part is that there are always old people taking up the parts where you can cling onto stuff so you literally have to get down on all fours and crawl your way up the boulders and stones. Worst part is if you slip and fall, bam, you're falling a long way down. All of this is not fun for a seven or eight year old believe me.
Well that's about it for today's edition. Not much else to talk about. I got a N64 that year which combined with my exploring covers most of my summer. They were a simple time.
Okay, yeah, so tune in next time when it's onto third class, it's not the most interesting class, so I'll probably use it talk about life at Darver in general. But there were a few awesome things like Pokémon and part time teachers.
Ciao.
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