On study days

Today I was on a full-day study day for work. Other than saying that it was better than I was expecting I’m not going to talk about the contents of the day, for I have more weighty (literally) matters to discuss.

I was amused that, just like when I was a health visitor in London, colleagues’ estimation of study days always seem to revolve round food. When I mentioned to one of my colleagues yesterday that I was going on this study day today, she asked where it was, and when I told her her first reply was “oh I’ve been on a study day there, they’ve got a great cafe!” (which I am delighted to report is true. They also served biscuits and pastries mid-morning and mid-afternoon which was a definite bonus). I remember in the past when we were asked to attend some boring meeting or other, the first question was almost never “how will this improve my practice/the service/etc” but instead almost always “will there be biscuits?”

It’s like I’ve been saying to my new colleagues. Health visiting is health visiting, wherever in the country you happen to do it

[In academia it was generally the 2nd topic of discussion. They did usually manage to say "interesting lecture" or somesuch before commenting on the standard of catering].

Burns Night vegetable dilemma

Are ‘neeps’ swedes or turnips?

I have no idea. I only live here.

Reasons to be thankful

Yesterday I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving with a few people from church (one of the hosts is Canadian, unsurprisingly). Sometimes it is really good to have eyes bigger than your stomach – the food was so good, but I packed it in anyway and just had to suffer later (it’s a hard life).

Today I am thankful that at long long long long last my Disclosure Scotland form arrived. This is the form that confirms that I am not an axe-murderer or otherwise unsuitable for working in the NHS, and was the one thing holding me up actually starting my job. Actually it transpires it’s not the only thing holding me up, as I have just discovered that the line manager is on holiday so HR are having to wait for someone else to confirm I can start. If I have any say in the matter I think I want to start in just under a fortnight, rather than next week – that way I can have a mad thesis frenzy before I start, and to be honest one more week’s debt isn’t going to make all that much difference after all this time.

I’m also thankful that some of my OU students are starting to make some tentative steps on using the discussion forum, which means I am not Jackie-no-mates in there any more and am not feeling like I’m totally useless at it. So that’s good.

OU

The induction day today reminded me all over again why I like the Open University so much (and that’s before we even got to the amazing – free! – lunch, which to be fair they did tell us not to get used to!). Sitting in a room full of interesting, motivated people (who were in the same boat as me, and all seemed equally daunted by it, but equally up for it too), supportive staff, supportive staff, did I say the staff are really supportive? The OU consistently comes in the top 2 or 3 in the national student survey for student satisfaction, in Scotland and (I think) in the UK as a whole, and I think it’s going to be a joy to work for them. Hooray! Now I just have to find the time to get though the absolute mountain of teaching materials and get my head round the tutoring forums etc.

I was interested to hear lots of people worrying about interacting online, and how different that would be from face-to-face. I had done a bit of that as a student already, for my final MSc module (which feels like a lifetime ago, though it was actually just 5 years), and of course I’ve had the occasional practice at online interaction (can’t think where ), so for me that feels like the least of my worries. The most of my worries is in finding the time to get through the course materials and have enough of a handle on it that I can best help my students. I have had a brainwave, which if I were God would make life so much easier to handle, but as I’m not will have to muddle on regardless. Basically I think that if time could be captured on an external hard drive (or whatever the time/life/existence equivalent to a computer would be) then I could do my thesis and day job* as normal, and have the extra OU time running concurrently but not get overburdened or go over-capacity. I’m not sure I’ve explained that very well, but it makes perfect sense to me. I expect the techies will be along soon enough to point out the flaws.

And as for the food – mmmmmmmmm. A sit down delicious buffet, we all felt like we were at a wedding reception (and in fact the venue was quite posh and there was a wedding reception going on down the corridor). With proper cloth napkins and everything! Makes a change from the curled up sandwiches and custard cream you usually get at these things.

* whenever that happens – no news yet.

Ode to blackberrying

So we picked blackberries today at Loch Lomond and had such fun, there’s nothing quite like it, you start off wondering if you’ll ever pick enough to fill your container* and then you see a bunch of really fat juicy ones and you can’t stop yourself from saying “You beAUty!” and then you get one that’s slightly too ripe that splats all over your hand and then you realise your arms are shredded but you don’t care and then you see a big bunch just out of reach and you put everything down so you can concentrate on stretching just enough to reach it and then you get a whole heap of them in one hand and then you get into a rhythm of using both hands to work the particular bramble and then you think that maybe wearing a white Tshirt wasn’t the most sensible thing for blackberrying and then you realise that your husband who had agreed to pick blackberries to humour you but who would rather have been walking a bit faster has *got it* and has that same look on his face that you do when you see a good bunch and then he asks why I’m not panicking out here and I ask him what he means and he says with all these spiders and I say what spiders I’ve seen webs but no spiders and we laugh and I think phew I’m glad the spiders are just coming out for him not me and then you realise that you have enough blackberries for a crumble after all but there’s still loads more to pick and when we get back to the picnic area where the car’s parked there’s that bush with the really big ones that we saw but didn’t want to pick in front of other people but now we’re so hooked and high on blackberrying that we don’t care any more and you’re really enjoying the thought of planning to make blackberry crumble even though you don’t normally like cooking puddings that much and you’re out with the best guy in the world and remembering the first time he came to Scotland to stay and we did this same walk and saw the blackberries and thought we should have brought something to put them in but let’s just come back some time and pick blackberries and here we are and the sun is shining and the water is lapping against the shore and how brilliant is this.

What a great day. Who needs a Wii?!

Here’s some photos:

* the Tupperware of blessed wib-memory

Wibmeet by proxy

As I’m not at Greenbelt this weekend, but am doing more mundane things (washing, finishing my book chapter, doing a recce for my interview on Monday, that sort of thing) I thought I would do something to cheer me up and help me get over the fact that I won’t be meeting lots of lovely wibloggers this weekend. And what better way than this (out of the oven half an hour ago – lovely!):

A week of stuff

I haven’t blogged for a week, which has been due to a combination of being too busy doing interesting things or having large chunks of boringness when there’s been nothing to write about. Anyway, things worth telling you about:

* weekend in York. Our best man had his annual birthday walk (his walk 3 years ago was our second date). This year (unlike last year) we didn’t get drenched, so that was good. We started at a village, the name of which I have forgotten (West something-beginning-with-T), and walked about 7 miles mostly along a river through fields and woods, to another village called Masham which has famous breweries (Theakstons, Black Sheep). We had a meal at a hotel next to the Black Sheep brewery when we finished the walk, and I made the mistake of ordering Guinness (my usual beer of choice) instead of something made by Theakstons. I sent the first one back as I thought they’d given me a pint of Coke by mistake as it had no head, and the second one only had about a millimetre of head which had disappeared after a couple of sips, and it didn’t taste as good as usual. I think they were having an off day. Anyway, the walk was good, we got to see lots of friends, and our best man and his wife recently bought a new house with a lovely garden so we got to nose at that too. A lovely weekend.

* interviews. HD has had a couple down south this week and last, we’re still waiting to hear. He thinks one went well, the other not so. Everything is being thoroughly crossed, as it’s getting a bit crucial that we get something soon as I’m about to get my final pay packet from the university. I have an interview lined up at the end of the month for a health visiting job here which I’m not desperate to do but if there’s nothing else going I’m glad I can fall back on it. Still waiting to hear from the part-time jobs I applied for, which I’d prefer if HD gets a job down south as it means I could still be around here a couple of days a week which will be helpful for seeing supervisors/going to the library/sorting out the flat/etc.

* shipmeet. Actually it was also a mini-wibmeet, as 4 of the 10 people who met last night at Ad Lib were also wibloggers. Smudgie and Smudgelet are up for a visit this week, so we had a meal in the evening – unfortunately due to thesis commitments I couldn’t share in their afternoon adventure. It was good to see Smudgie, and also fellow bloggers Surfing and Tractor Girl, and to see some familiar and unfamiliar shippies as well. I was particularly impressed with my pudding – I had a chocolate brownie (which was really really something else, it was gorgeous), but I figured that as it had a strawberry on my plate *and* I declined the accompanying ice-cream, that meant that it was virtually calorie-neutral.

* thesis. Argh. If I could just get my current chapter out of the way then I could get on with something fun (I always think that when I’m at this point in a chapter). Hopefully it will be finished by the end of the week, but only if I step up the drama queen histrionics act. One good thing is that due to the worrying about jobs and money, I really am not remotely fussed about the uncertainty about my thesis extension. I’ve got more important things to worry about.

That is all, I think.

Various

Life has been distinctly unblogworthy of late – that was going to change this weekend as we were due to go to York for a friend’s birthday party, but having foregone our Saturday lie-in this morning we got ourselves all packed and ready only to discover that Dudley (the Saab) wasn’t too well – a belt has snapped (I know *that* feeling!) and something else has jammed, and can’t be looked at until Monday at the earliest, and last-minute train fares were far too expensive, so I had my lie-in this afternoon instead, and instead of going to York the main excitement was going to our local Lidl for the first time (it opened 2 days ago). When I moved here and found that the local supermarket was a Somerfield I was a bit disappointed as I was used to the marginally more up-market Sainsburys/Tescos. Our Somerfield though closed 3-4 months ago and has only now re-emerged as a Lidl, and I’m now at the point where I feel that Somerfield is the height of sophistication in comparison, though to give Lidl its due, I do really appreciate that I can get pasta for 25p rather than £1.something and (hopefully – haven’t tried it yet but just about to) some reasonable-tasting wine for under a fiver.

What about other news? Work-wise, now that I’ve looked at the comments of the peer reviewers I’m at a bit of a loss to know where to start. They only have minimal suggestions for the substance of the article (that’s good), but also want to know a ton of information about my methodology. Having already just about hit the word limit for the article, I’m not entirely sure how to also include information that took 10K words when I wrote my methodology chapter. Sigh, I’m sure it will all work out, but it will require some creativity.

Also work-wise, I have seen a few jobs to apply for (one in the same town as a job HD has applied for, but mostly not, which is a bit of a stress). Today I saw one in Shetland. Which is kind of tempting, though I suspect the weather would be a bit “character-building”.

Finally, this made me laugh today, it reminded me of me and HD. Well, the “lack of hot abs” mainly reminded me of me, if I’m honest, but anyway:

see more dog and puppy pictures

A walk in the park

This evening we thought we’d take advantage of the blue sky (and lack of rain!) to check on the baby coots in the park and have an ice-cream. We only managed to see one of the coots (once again my photos are too rubbish for public consumption!), it’s quite a bruiser now! There wasn’t any sign of any ducklings or cygnets though – actually I haven’t seen an obvious swan nest so maybe they haven’t bred this year, I don’t know.

We did have a bit of a show from this thrush – it was swooping again and again trying to chase away a rook that was sat by the edge of the pond, presumably near the nest of the thrush. Eventually the rook got a bit fed up and sauntered off, and then the thrush started on us! (though a bit less dramatically, as obviously it could see we were a bit bigger! We definitely got a ‘look’ from it though!).

The ice-cream situation was a bit disappointing. I had a Feast all planned in my head, but unfortunately the van only did cornets with vanilla ice-cream, which neither of us like that much. I suppose it was better for our waistline, but I really was a bit disappointed – what a let-down!

Irony

Last week while we were away HD was browsing through a book on vinegar. I know, whoever would have thought such a thing existed. But hey.

Anyway, one of the things it said was that if you add a spoonful of apple cider vinegar to the saucepan when you are cooking up a pan of beans, it will reduce the flatulent effect. So we’re currently trying that, as both being vegetarians it has been known to get quite musical round here.

The irony of it all though is that the entire flat now reeks of vinegar (one of my least favourite smells in the world) – worse than if we’d just let nature take its course.