What a week it has been! I have been ill, my annual sinusitis, yeeugh, I have been stressed - way too much work to do, but I have actually scrapped a page with paper, hooray!!!!
This course is driving me nuts - the amount of work involved is incredible and I have been very bad temepred and stressed as a result. Poor Gordon, I think if I said I was quitting he would be so relieved. What's worse is that having dragged myself out to Jordanhill on Saturday for a very looooong and boring day - I was greeted with essay number 2!!!!!!!!!!!!
At that point I nearly did quit. I had sat all Friday sweating over various acts of parliament and huge tomes of very dry literature about said acts - none of which I have retained (a lesson learned about learning styles there) to the point where I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. I did take a few hours off to scrap one whole page though but I can't show you it yet as I haven't had time to takes a pic of it. I did manage to escape for a wee while yesterday to take some pics of my grandchildren's halloween party, which was good fun.
Tomorrow is Jordanhill again, straight after school but hopefully I survive. The worst part is that essay 2 is way easier to do than essay 1 - that's life I suppose. Hopefully the next time I post the essay will be done, or almost done and I may even have managed to scrap another page. Until then, take care x x x
If you ever get the chance to visit the Enchanted Forest at Faskally woods near Pitlochry - grab it and go! It is wonderful and suitable for all ages. Sara-Jane and I had a great time and spent hours on site taking photos. Thank you SJ for your company and a fab weekend. I am absolutely shattered and fighting to keep a cold and a bout of sinusitis at bay so I am off to bed with lots of pills and a book. I will leave you with a few pics from Faskally to whet your appetites. Take care x x x
At this moment in time everything in my life seems to be a work in progress. My craft room is partly sorted and although I am desperate to scrap with paper I won't let myself until it is all sorted so that's a work in progress. I am also in the process of reorganising my digi files to make them easier to use - another work in progress. Sadly the essay is a non starter - I almost wish it was a work in progress because then I might just bite the bullet and get it finished!
I have read several books, walked for miles and taken masses of photos - all waiting to be uploaded and sorted. I have been to Perthshire, North Berwick and Glasgow over the past few days and although I am having fun on my holiday I know I will regret not having started the essay sooner when the deadline looms nearer.
Tomorrow is a long put off visit to the hairdresser and a visit to my kids and Friday I am going back to the caravan with Sara-Jane for a photo weekend. We have tickets for Faskally on Friday and then it's whatever we fancy before back to work on Monday.
I will leave you with a few digi pages I have managed to squeeze in - total work avoidance I know. The Katy one just captures that moment in every young girl's life when they discover make-up though I would have thought not quite 3 was a bit young still, lol. The others are of pics taken at the caravan over last weekend - I am hoping to put together an album of my photos that I wouldn't perhaps otherwise scrap and digi is the perfect solution. Take care x x x
Well the good news the expected phone call asking me to teach on Thursday and Friday didn't come. I am amazed
that the teacher in question managed to get into school and actually teach as she was very ill, then again maybe she didn't and they just didn't want me!
So what did I do instead? Well, I managed to visit all of my children who are having a period of very mixed fortunes at the moment. One good thing about all this is my oldest son is finally starting to do the things I have been hoping he wopuld do for such a long time. For the first time in ages I feel I can simply be proud of him rather than have an awful feeling of dread about what will happen to him next. I won't go into details here as he wouldn't like that.
I also continued with the tidy/sort of my craft room. I have way too much of some stuff and I had sorted it so neatly that I forgot half of what I had. Those who know me as a scrapper will know how obsessive I am about having my stash sorted and organised but I have taken it too far and need to be a bit less strict about this and then maybe I will be able to find things and putting stuff away won't be such a mission! I haven't finished and it is nowhere near ready to be used but I can see an end to it now.
Then the realisation struck that I haven't scrapped in any form since the start of the month so I did a few quick digi pages yesterday which prompted me to start organising my digi files too, lol. I use ACDSEE to keep my digi bits in order and make sure I know who created them.
At the moment they are all in folders according to who made them but that's not easy to use unless you use all the same persons stuff on a page and I am trying to get away from that a bit. So a rethink is in order which means I cannot buy or download anything until I have it all sorted so I have been gathering a few goodies before I start.
I am now off to the caravan for a few days to try and get the main part of my essay written and hopefully get some fab photos. I am home on Tuesday and then away again on Friday. If I didn't have to work I could happily spend all my time scrapping and taking photos - I am sure I have enough stash to keep me going for a year or so, lol. Take care x x x x
P.S. I will post credits for the stuff I used as soon as I get a chance.
Isn't if funny that sometimes, no matter how hard you try to do the right thing you still get it wrong. Such has been my week. School is as hectic as ever, in fact more so with having been away for a week. I came back and so much had changed! Anyway I got all the things I needed to do done before my first lessons on monday, which I was worried about resulting in a sleepless night on Sunday. Monday at the end of the day I had a meeting with my boss and which was where I first got into trouble.
For possibly the first time in my life I got a row for working too hard! I was stunned. Apparently I am doing way too much for others and I need to cut back a bit. I know I have been working silly hours this term but it sort of goes with the job. I was strangely relieved though to be told to back off a bit and for the first time since June I left school tonight feeling as though I was on the brink of catching up rather than the brink of exhaustion, which is the norm. I am probably teaching tomorrow and Friday this week too as we have several staff off ill and another probable candidate tomorrow, hence my role as stand in. I won't know till the morning though so i better get myself off to bed. It is with a rather demanding P1 class with 3 children who have fairly challenging behaviour but it's only for a day and a half and I have taught more difficult classes.
Apart from that I am excited to be asked to take some photos as a 'proper photographer'. It is a forthcoming army parade and I am thrilled to be asked - I just hope I am up to the challenge. I handed in my first camera club competition entries tonight so that was a bit nerve wracking, I just hope I don;t get completely slated before I have to go to this other thing or I will be even more nervous. I will leave you with a pic I took at the weekend which I love the colours of. Take care x x x x
Oh it's good to be back home and some kind of, relative, normality. Glasgow was great fun but there were some stressful times. The course was hard going and I came away with a renewed faith in my own ability to teach but also a wad of printed paper that would fill more than one file box. I visited a great school and made some new friends and allies doing the same course as me. I saw some fab sights and had a few disasters but for all of this I am thankful.
I had one awful day where I got hopelessly lost and ended up with a flat tyre. The whole situation was made worse by the fact that my pay as go phone provider was having massive technical difficulties and hadn't credited my phone, despite me processing the payment many hours before. After forty minutes on the phone listening to some god awful music frequently punctuated by a very irritating woman telling me how hard everyone was working to help me and others like me and some one would answer the phone soon - I was ready to commit several unspeakable acts on her and anyone else daft enough to annoy me! I finally got the phone sorted and contacted the AA, who were very prompt in arriving.
However, me being me, things were not quite that straightforward. The road I was stranded on had two halves - a top and a bottom and were separated by a very steep hill. When I contacted the AA I told them I was at the top of the hill from where I watched the AA man drive past me along the bottom while I ran parallel to him waving my arms and shouting like a mad woman ( apt description by this time!) . He tried to phone me and I tried to phone him but somehow I kept disconnecting him - I don't do phones. Eventually he found me and sorted the tyre enough to get to a garage the following day where I spent a fortune getting the problem sorted for good.
Today I met up with friends that I studied with during my initial teacher training and we all had good news to share and spent many hours thinking about how our lives have changed in the time we have known each other. We are all happy with our lives but found ourselves thinking about how different things are now to how we imagined they would be. We all had some good news to share, which is a first as normally there is some trauma for one or more of us and I just wanted to say publicly that I am thankful for my life as it is and for the friends and family I have around me.
Sure there are niggles - I have a 3,000 word essay to write on the changes in educational inclusion in Scot's law over the past 30 years. Wednesday night is competition night at the camera club and I haven't a clue what to submit because despite last week being 'how to present pics for competitions' it never occured to me there would be one so soon, lol. I have no idea what I am going to be teaching on Monday as I was away all last week and I will probably havemy first hangover of the year tomorrow BUT - life is good and even if it all changed over night I have the personal strength and the support of people who I care about to get me through it. So on that note - take care x x x
