The weather has taken quite a turn, its wetter, windy and cooler. I have retrieved some of my autumn/winter clothes from the depths of the wardrobe and vacuum packed some of the summer clothes away for storage.
I do love winter food. I’m not a great salad eater and I don’t like fruit of any kind in any format so summer eating does get a bit tedious. But now we’re heading for warm, comfort eating. Stews, soups and stodge. Sunday lunch provided the first chance to indulge in custard. Slathered all over a hot chocolate pudding 😋
This weeks food menus include hunters chicken, cajun pork, Thai Red beef curry, parmesan crusted chicken with combinations of rice or potatoes or butternut squash and accompanying vegetables.
After this coming week I’ll start making soups to take to work for lunches instead of cold meats and ryvita. The benefits of having a soup maker means you can just shove all the ingredients in and 20 minutes later you have either chunky or smooth soup depending which setting you used. That, together with C’s homemade multigrain bread would be rather lush.
I’m still going to have to be careful about what I eat though. I’ve lost 2lb this week by really sticking to plan (except for the wine) so I don’t want to undo all that effort but so long as I stick to the SW philosophy I won’t go too far wrong.
I’m generally a creature of habit with regard to televisual viewing. When I get home from work we watch reruns of Task Master followed by reruns of NCIS that we’ve seen several times, then reruns of Law & Order SVU. And then I’m usually asleep on the sofa.
I was given a Netflix account last Christmas and I’ve watched a few series and the odd film and generally only watch things on Netflix on a Sunday when I’m doing the ironing. The trouble is, it gives you recommendations based on your previous viewing without consideringthat you might not have actuallyenjoyed that, and you might want to trysomethingelse. I also hate spending time scrolling through options trying to find something to watch. Maybe I have a limited understanding of how it works. I’ve watched some things that a few people have recommended. I also hate it when I’ve finished watching a series and the new series hasn’t been loaded yet. I want to watch the whole thing from start to end.
What I want to watch really depends on what kind of mood I’m in but the preprogrammed recommendations don’t necessarily reflect that. I like comedy, supernatural, drama, history and occasionally anything random.
Does anyone have any other recommendations worth watching that doesn’t require ages scrolling through stuff I’m not sure of? Thank you in advance.
One of my #bellringing friends started “a thing” on Facebook last year, or maybe earlier but I only caught up with it then, about wearing funky socks on Fridays and posting photos of said socks on her timeline.
I don’t think she necessarily thought it was a competition with her friends, just a way of spreading a little fun. However, clearly her friends, including me, decided that this was a new club to join in with, not a competition as to who had the funkiest socks, but just joining in the silliness.
Obviously during the summer the wearing of socks was somewhat reduced and therefore Funky Friday Feet petered out. But I’m pleased to say, now that the weather has turned colder and wetter, the wearing of socks of the silly kind it very much back.
Yesterday, as I was about to put on a pair of socks, I grabbed the next pair in line in my neatly Mari Kondo’d sock drawer. I had almost put the first sock on and suddenly realised that they were the perfect candidate for Funky Friday Feet. I put them back and selected the next, rather boring pair of plain black ones.
So, it is now Friday and I’m pleased to announce my entry into todays silly sock selection. Happy Friday. 😁
Every month I download a copy of the Action for Happiness Calendar. I don’t always do what it suggests but sometimes things are relevant or a good reminder to do something positive. As today is the 1st October, todays new month starts with writing down your most important goals for this month.
OK, where to start….
1. Get new job description – I am aware that a secondment opportunity is in the offing and its something that appeals to me. I know that the JD is being authorised, so the job should be being advertised soon. Need to sharpen up my Expression of Interest notes.
2. Find more ways to spend quality time with C and R – there has been an awful lot of things going on at the moment with work, ringing meetings, talks etc that sometimes it feels that C and I don’t spend any real time being together. Getting to see R now is more difficult too as her working patterns have changed so her days off no longer coincide with mine. I need to give some priority to finding things that we can do together that mean we spend actual time with each other to the exclusion of it being perfunctory, like putting in a new front door. Sure, we will spend time together to do that but it’s a job that needs doing, not something that is necessarily spending quality time together.
3. Focus on some PR activities – as you know I’m the PRO for both my local #bellringing association and the Central Council of Church Bellringers and we need to get some more good news out in the public domain.
4. Bake – I want to carry on with the weekly baking challenge of making something from the collection of magazines that I’ve accumulated.
5. Lose weight – probably counter intuitive given #4, but I really must put more effort into this area instead of just playing at it. My overall health will thank me for it.
There are probably many more smaller ticket things to focus on too, but by spending more time on each of these bigger areas, my whole wellbeing should be much improved and I will feel more resilient and ready to tackle most things.
I was assisting on the panel for some interviews for another department and it really interested me how different people respond to the same question.
One of the questions asked the candidates to give an example of how they would modify their communication tactics to fit their audience. This got me thinking about who was the audience, what was their preferred method of receiving communication, what level of detail do they need, or should they need, what information is it I’m trying to share?
I was thinking all this because of the talk I’m giving this evening. The who is my audience is anyone that registered for the talk, so the assumption is that they have an interest in the topic in the first place. What their preferred method of communication, as well as my preferred method of delivery are moot points, as due to gathrring restrictions, it is being delivered by video conference and inevitably includes death by powerpoint. What level of detail do they need? Given that the audience is a mixed bag of individuals, tower, district or association officers it needs to encompass all levels and they’ll just have to pick out the bits that are relevant to what they need. What information am I trying to communicate again, is a broad spectrum across different levels of interest. I’m not pretending to be an expert, I have some knowledge about the subject and have some experience at it. That doesn’t mean that I have all the answers, or that if you follow everything I say, all your worries will be over.
Apparently there are nearly 50 signed up to come and listen to my talk this evening. I hope they find it interesting and informative and some people might learn something new. I’m sure I’ll get some form of feedback afterwards.
Monday night is the only evening this week when I haven’t got something in the diary. As well as a full time day job, I have 3 #bellringing meetings on Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday, one presentation to deliver on Wednesday and 2 RingingRoom sessions on Thursday and Friday. Everything has come at once. Thankfully its not like that every week otherwise my head would explode.
Considering that there’s very little actual ringing being done, there’s still a lot of work to do.
In order to be able to get to a point when ringing can return to anything like it was previously an awful lot of things are bring planned and delivered behind the scenes. Some people are saying “what’s the point if we can’t actually ring?” To me, the point is that if we don’t do all of these things now, there may not be ringing to go back to.
I fear that we will have lost an awful lot of ringers during this hiatus. Some due to age or infirmity but others who were only just setting out on their learning may find other things have tempted them away.
Within our own Association I see that some districts have been really good at getting people together virtually having district quiz nights, even having their scheduled meeting by video conference. Some have even managed to meet up where social distancing can be maintained and before the Rule of Six came in. Others have barely tried. It demonstrates the variety of leadership styles and levels of expectation rather starkly. I’ve done my bit in our district by holding a virtual district practice on the evenings when we would have been holding a proper district practice but attendance hasn’t been overwhelming, but then it never was at the real thing anyway. The district meeting and training day that we should have had didn’t place. There has been no discussion about plans for next year yet.
One of the meetings, on Saturday, is the Association management committee meeting. All districts are required to report on activities since the last meeting and I am looking forward to hearing about what’s been going on in other districts. I’m hoping that there will be some direction on how we should approach next year, particularly with the Annual District Meetings that take place in January and how they can successfully be conducted.
I will keep doing my little bit to keep things going as long as I am able.
My team are holding a socially distanced MacMillan coffee morning on Monday to raise funds. We do this every year in memory of a colleague who died a few years ago. I’ve done my bit by baking some chocolate and lemon cupcakes.
Its going to be a little strange holding the event this year, when we can’t gather all together. The team is split across two shifts in order to maintain social distancing. That means we’ll get to do it twice though. A coffee morning and a coffee afternoon. We usually hold a raffle as well to augment our fundraising.
For all the cake scoffing and prize winning of course the point is to raise funds to help support MacMillan cancer support. Lets hope we can raise a good amount.
We’d decided in the middle of the week that the weather would be slightly improved on Saturday, so that would be our nominated day out. Mr had filled his car up with petrol, booked our tickets for visiting Audley End and all was good.
When I drove to work on Thursday an engine warning light came on in my car. Now, given that my car had only just had its service and MOT the week before I thought that a bit odd. Mr took a look at it on Friday and managed to do something that got rid of the light and suggested that I drove to Audley End to give it a good run as I only usually drive to work and back.
So, we set off with pack up lunch ready, camera, tickets, walking boots and rain coats. We drove a little further on than Audley End and pulled up alongside a little church down a side road and had our lunch in the car as the weather wasn’t as pleasant as we’d hoped. Actually it was quite fun sitting in the car trying to remember the last time we came here. We both remember coming with SD#2 and her French exchange student, bizarrely we can both remember her name was Alice. But we couldn’t remember having been back since. That must have been about 20 years ago.
Lunch scoffed, I drove back round the perimeter wall and down the track to the car park. Not many people about but that’s probably because you had to book in advance and they were limiting numbers.
We wandered around the formal gardens which still had some lovely bright blooms. Then round to the front of the house to go in. We didn’t have to wait long. They were limiting the number of people in each room to 6 so we had to wait for the previous groups to move on. They only had a few of the rooms open and you’re not allowed to take photos. It didn’t take very long to wander round the house before we were back outside again.
We had a look around some of the out buildings, found a little refreshment outlet, the main cafe wasn’t open, got a hot chocolate and an oversized custard cream, then headed back to the car. Sadly, it was too cold and windy to go for much of a walk and rain had threatened again. We probably spent about 2 hours there and it took the best part of an hour to get there, and the same back home again.
On the way home we decided to take a detour around a new housing estate being built. Some of the houses look very odd with very sharp pointy roofs and bits on the side. I expect they probably cost an absolute fortune.
We were home again by 4pm. Time for a cuppa. Although not as nice a day as we’d hoped, it was still good to get out in the fresh air and do something other than sit in front of the computer. Mr checked the photo catalogue on the computer and apparently we did go there about 20 years ago with SD#2 and Alice, the French exchange student then back in 2010 with R. It seems we go every 10 years or so. So in 2030 guess where we’ll probably end up?
So the weekly baking magazine fest continues. This week it was decorated chocolate cookies. The magazine always has a freebie stuck to the front and this weeks was plastic lettering cutters.
Mr was making bread at yhe same time so oven space had to be negotiated. His bread needed to prove and then bake at a higher temperature than my cookies need. Precision planning mode kicked in. He could prove his bread whilst I made the cookie dough. He could then bake his bread whilst my dough rested in the fridge. Then he could bake his bread whilst I roll and cut my dough, then turn the oven down to bake my cookies.
All sounds feasible. Until he gets side tracked by writing a report and doesn’t put his bread in the oven. My dough is still sitting in the fridge and getting harder. When he does put the bread in, my dough is almost too hard to roll out so I have to knead it more to warm it up enough to roll out. Then I cut out the cookies and put them back in the fridge to wait while his bread finishes and the oven temperature cools down enough for my bake.
Eventually get my first batch in the oven but they only take 10 minutes and his bread is on the cooling rack. Fighting for space on the cooker top to put the hot trays.
Then I start rolling out some fondant icing for the decorations and cutting out the shapes. They take up more space. Then I start using the plastic lettering cutters to cut out enough of our initials to go on each cookie. More space needed. Then the second batch need to come out of the oven. I now have decoration bits precariously balanced on the edge of the sink.
Fortunately the cookies cool down pretty quickly so I can start applying the decoration and our initials. We have 19 cookies each. There will be no secret cheating and snuffling of cookies.
Tested one with a cuppa before boxing the rest up. Just to be sure 😋
Someone at work gave me a thank you gift yesterday morning. Another team that my boss manages is going through consultation and Wednesday was interview day for the top jobs. One of the candidates came to see me last week and asked if I could help her with some interview preparation as she’d never applied for a post this high up before. Interestingly, the post is higher banding than what I’m on.
Anyway, I spent over an hour with her last week talking about the sorts of questions she might be asked and I said that she would need to pay particular attention to management skills rather than purely technical knowledge. A role on that level is more about strategy and managing other people rather than doing the graft work and knowing all the ins and outs. Its a little bit more of understanding office politics and dealing with very senior management, liaison and so on. Stuff I have done and do do in my current role anyway, I’m just on a lower pay band, but let’s not go there.
So, having spent some time with this person, we’d talked about the sorts of questions she might be asked, and the questions she should ask back. The interview happened but she didn’t get the job.
Apparently she’d spent all night worrying about it that she’d hardly slept, she had been worrying about the minutiae of detailed technical things instead of the strategic level things, so she didn’t perform well on the day. Of course they’d asked her some technical questions but wanted to know more about her and her ability to think laterally and outside of their own current structure. Precisely some of these things we’d been over. She was disappointed but mainly with herself as she knew that she had not performed her best because she hadn’t slept. She also said that her heart wasn’t really in it because it would take her away from what she knows and felt that she applied because she was expected to.
She was profusely thankful for the time that I’d spent with her and had bought me a gift by way of thanks. I did say that I wasn’t sure I deserved it as she didn’t get the job, but she said that she was appreciative of my support nonetheless.
Bells, Bakes & Bettering Myself 