Good times

Happy days here with the company of friends.  No matter that it poured with rain for the open gardens, for we had a marvellous walk within spitting distance of home and were thankful that the rain makes everything so green and lush.

Needless to say, there's been plenty of activity on the cooking front, with assistance when it comes to those tricky clearing up times.

At least when I had to work today it was in a place with rather interesting things around.

There were distractions which were right up my street, after all, who doesn't like to play with coloured buttons and bits of string?

Sitting at home this afternoon, preparing some materials for a workshop for tomorrow is even more fun.  First time I've ever suggested to workshop participants that they "release their inner Gok"! 

Have you seen this?

I'm intrigued and have downloaded to give it a try.  Find out more and download here

Interesting week

A couple of days in Birmingham, where the benign weather made exploring the city on foot a pleasure.  We always enjoy being here and particularly like the area around the Gas Street Basin. 

 

We heard a great concert in Symphony Hall including a stunning performance of Vaughan-Williams 5th Symphony.  We'd gone to the fascinating pre-concert talk and identified a few points to listen out for  - see if you too can "hear the sun come out" in the clip Mark's uploaded.  Gorgeous!  But for the second concert in a row, some poor member of the audience sitting nearby fell ill and needed help during the most tranquil moment of the piece.  It's not an easy task to manage this situation but somehow the SH staff cope with the minimum of fuss.

The following night, we were at an awards dinner at the National Motorcycle Museum where one generous sponsor had arranged a fantastic firework display to celebrate Guy Fawkes.  We oohed and aaahed with the best and enjoyed a fun evening with great entertainment.  The thing is, we've been to this venue several times now and have yet to see a motorcycle of any kind!

I finished the week in Gloucester with a couple of meetings.  Yesterday afternoon, however, I'd booked a place with my County Council colleagues on a photography course.  Absolutely fascinating!  Like most people, I've never been taught to take a photograph but have simply picked it up as I went along.  But Leigh Preston's workshop was so useful and hopefully I'll be able to put his advice to good use.  I've been trying hard to take more thoughfully composed photographs recently, doing my best to resist the temptation to take hundreds of pictures in the hope that one will be ok.  My self-imposed rule to post only unedited photographs on my 365 blog has given me good reason to take time to think and compose and the workshop emphasised how far I've come but also how much more there is to learn.

 

We focused (!) on taking photographs of people and I hope my colleague Jane, who sat opposite me and proved an excellent model* won't mind my posting this thoughtful portrait of her here.  I took Leigh's suggestion of transforming it into black and white once I got home - the only tweak made, since I resisted Jane's request to do a bit of wrinkle removal! 

*excellent model until I tried to use the "smile detect" feature on my camera - her sudden seriousness meant that it would not work!

Update on Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 2:54PM by Gill Thomas

Whilst testing the links in the post above, I had difficulty getting the link to a clip of Vaughan Williams 5th Symphony to play and only after a bit of detective work did we discover that a recent update of Windows knocked out some file associations.  If it doesn't play for you, then perhaps you need to go into your Control Panel and reset a few - in this particular instance, assign a program to play your .mp3 and .m3u files easily.

Another interesting place to work

Perhaps this one gets the prize?

    

Look a little more closely and the view is even better...

  

 Sorry, it was very hard to overcome distractions such as the team practice taking place ;-)   There were fine views in the other direction too - what a great venue to teach a workshop!

 The funding for this project had come from something entitled CaMeL and doing our best to intrigue and encourage tutors to come along to the event, we established a theme...

Two of our belly dancing tutors provided entertainment at lunchtime, we enjoyed a delicious middle-eastern menu for lunch and tried not to overindulge in too much turkish delight with our coffee.

Oh and somewhere in between, I think we were reasonably successful in inspiring one or two new bloggers, Flickr users and e-learning afficionados.