Bank Holiday Bells and Baking

There’s something that goes hand in hand with bells and baking really. Many a #bellringing meeting takes place after some actually bellringing, but more importantly what is known as a Bellringers Tea.

A bellringers tea consists of a mountain of sandwiches, savouries, the rare sighting of a salad, but the most important ingredient, and one that teas are often, silently judged on, is cake. Lots and lots of cake. Preferably homemade cake at that.

I’m not sure what came first for me, bellringing or baking? Probably baking actually. Watching my grandad bake and mum having a Sunday afternoon bake up. I do remember a sibling competition on who could make the best choux buns. I seem to remember winning that one!

Anyway, today I did a bit of both.

As usual for Friday mornings, I joined my sister’s group as we practiced some more Wells Surprise Minor and Cambridge Surprise Major, the methods of the month for my Thursday night sessions, that she wants some extra goes at.

As part of the BakedIn baking club, I sent off for the Chocolate Orange Hot Cross Bun kit, and they really had to be made today for the Easter weekend. They were quite straightforward to make, and I cheated by using the kneading hook on my Kenwood rather than busting a wrist trying to knead the dough. C and I decided to go whole hog and add the chocolate chips AND the raisins that were part of the kit as an alternative.

Whilst the buns were on their second prove, I attended a virtual bellringing meeting with the survival and recovery steering group. Lots of good things coming. During the middle of that I had to check on the buns, so before I muted my mic and video, I declared that the answer to everything whilst I was away was “no”, just in case they had any funny ideas about giving a load of actions whilst I wasn’t there to defend myself.

Buns were now in the oven and meeting resumed. Lots more good things discussed and planned. Then I had to rescue the buns from the oven and glaze them, so made another hasty disappearing act. I was quite disappointed that the buns had spread rather than risen too much. They looked ok. They smelled ok. And when we taste tested them, they tasted ok too.

Someone suggested toasting them and slathering butter all over them. That sounds quite disgusting, but then I don’t like butter, or similar, anyway.

Can’t be in 2 places at once

Last night had a clash of #bellringing diaries. I should have been at an advanced district practice but also needed to be at a Central Council exec meeting.

This clash now happens very month. Last year it wasn’t a problem because we weren’t running the advanced practices. However we decided to put them back on the virtual agenda this year and try them out. Last month was the first one and as I set up the Zoom I kinda needed to be there so sent my apologies to the CC meeting.

This month though I needed to be at the CC meeting as I was on the Agenda. I did set up the advanced practice zoom session but needed to hand it over to someone else to run.

It was an interesting experiment. C attended the advanced practice on the PC next to me on my laptop attending the CC meeting. We both glanced over at the other several times and at one point were both talking to our respective meetings at the same time.

I missed out on practicing Little Bob Major and Yorkshire Surprise Major and the fact that they finished soon after 9pm. My meeting went on until 10:20pm.

Next month I’ll probably go to the advanced practice and give apologies to the CC meeting. I’ll probably end up alternating.

Staring at a screen too long

With meetings, #bellringing, family gatherings, talks, plus the usual social media, emails, work etc, I find that I’m currently spending roughly 12 hours a day staring at a screen. Small wonder my eyes are dried out at the end of the evening.

I work a 9.5hr day Monday to Friday and most evenings am either on a Zoom meeting, or a virtual #bellringing session. On my non-working day I have, one, sometimes two virtual #bellringing sessions and more often than not a meeting in the afternoon on Zoom as well. Then every other Sunday there’s the family Skype gathering.

Apparently, there’s a name for it now ‘digital eye strain’ or ‘computer vision syndrome’. However, help it at hand with some top tips on how to reduce eye strain from All About Vision:

Get an eye test and tell the optician how much time you spend on the computer or devices.
Reduce excessive bright light. Close blinds or curtains, use lower intensity light bulbs, and position the computer so that windows are at the side, not in front or behind.
Consider an anti-glare screen for your monitor and have a more muted coloured wall to reduce glare from reflective surfaces.
Upgrade your monitor with a flat-panel LED screen in anti-reflective surface.
Adjust the brightness, text size and contrast, colour temperature or your screen.
Blink. When staring at a screen, people blink less frequently — only about one-third as often as they normally do. Blinking moistens your eyes to prevent dryness and irritation.
Exercise your eyes by frequently looking away from the screen at a distant object and focus on it for at least 20 seconds.
Take frequent breaks to help reduce neck, shoulder and back pain. Get up and move around for 10 minutes every hour.
Modify your workstation. Check your posture and ensure that your chair is the right height with your feet comfortably on the floor. Make sure that your screen is 20-24 inches away from your eyes with the centre of the screen 10-15 degrees below your eye level.
Consider computer glasses. Customised glasses which photochromic lenses.

I am conscious that my eyes are tired at the end of the day, and that I do probably need to get up and move about a bit more.

Maybe I will also try a digital detox day as well. A day without any screen time at all. Hmmmm!

A different frame of mind

I think I’ve probably mentioned this before, but how we choose to respond to outside stimuli, pressures and events is entirely within our own undertaking. We can choose to get wound up by things, or we can choose to let it go.

My first day back at work this week was horrid. By the end of the day I was absolutely sure that the conversation when I got home was going to be around how much longer I would have to put up with this. C was his usual stoic self and confirmed my worst fear that I would have to stick it out for a few more years yet. Damn. I felt exhausted after just 1 day back in the office. I felt dejected. I felt well and truly fed up. This has a physical impact as well. I was unmotivated to do anything else and I stuffed my face with crisps and chocolate. I felt physically sick at the prospect of having to go back the next day and deal with it all, all over again.

Fast forward a few days and I’m in a much better frame of mind. The plans I put in place on Monday have had a positive result and things are looking ok for the coming week. I’ve also made the conscious observation, out loud to others, about what I am currently employed to do versus what I get dragged back in to, through necessity, but that I shouldn’t really, and the impact that is having both on trying to deliver what it is I’m supposed to be doing, but also providing the right kind of support to those in the department. A fuller conversation as to how that plays out is happening later this week.

My point being, my mind-set had changed. I had chosen to not allow the frustrations at the beginning of the week to overshadow the rest of the week. I packed that day away and moved on. I’m not pretending it was an easy transition. I still woke up on the Tuesday really not wanting to go to work.

According to the Mayo Clinic (https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/positive-thinking/art-20043950), whether you are a pessimist or an optimist can have an effect on your longer term mental health, but also has physical manifestations too. Being more positive doesn’t mean that you gloss over the difficult things but that by approaching them in a more positive way can be more productive. Making the best out of a bad situation. Thinking positively can improve life span, reduce depression and distress, provide greater resistance to colds and better psychological and physical wellbeing, cardiovascular health and general better coping skills.

By focusing on positive thinking we can identify areas of life that may need changing, stopping to check on our thinking and finding ways to put a positive spin on it. By being open to allowing yourself to have a laugh during difficult times can help you feel less stressed. Following a healthy lifestyle is often cited, and probably the one I do least of. Surrounding yourself with positivity will rub off on you and practicing positive self-talk will help you realise that you have a lot to be thankful for.

I’m heading to the end of this week with a much more positive outlook that I had at the beginning.

Lost Emails

I wondered whether it had all gone quiet, I was being ignored, or something was amiss. I usually get about 20 emails a day to my various “home” accounts, excluding spam. By that I mean my own email address, my Association emails addresses and my Central Council addresses. For the last few weeks I’ve had significantly fewer.

Needing to be on a Zoom meeting I was concerned that 24 hours before the meeting I hadn’t had the Agenda and supporting papers, nor the link to the Zoom meeting. A quick fire email to the right person and it seems that my name had dropped off of the email group so I hadn’t received what had been sent out.

Because I was using my laptop, not the main PC with the main email stuff in, I had to log into my Gmail account, but the email that had been sent with the meeting information wasn’t there. I was frantically trying to log into everything. Outlook, Gmail, Office 365. Depending on which of the aliases used, depends on where the email ends up. Ended up having to email it to myself from the home PC to the Gmail account. Eventually got in, but not without some angst.

Whilst I was logging into various emails boxes, I also came across a couple of other emails that seemed to have been sitting in a Spam folder for one account but were not showing in any of the other redirected accounts. They were quite important emails too. I thought that all the email redirects were supposed to find their way into at least one of the 3 main email address locations.

Apart from my work email address, of which I have 2, I have 6 other alias email addresses for various roles. The majority of them get redirected via our main location but with the recent addition of Office 365 for some ringing activity, that seems to have thrown a spanner in the works. Sometimes I get duplicates, sometimes I get none. Sometimes I get someone else’s reply before I get the original message. Sometimes it takes 2 days for them to come through.

I’m reasonably IT literate, but this gets so confusing.

Lost and found

You know when you know you have something, and you know where you last saw/used it, but for the life of you can’t find it when you need it next? That was me and a set of colouring pens.

Now, we’re not talking anything deep and philosophical or anything like that. We’re talking a set of colouring pens that I wanted, because I wanted to use a different colour, other than blue or black biro, to mark something off so that it was more visible.

I’ve had a set of colouring pens for ages, and I kept them with the squared paper that I used to write out #bellringing methods when I was learning something new. Every bell was assigned its own colour and I would draw out each lead end so I could see when a different place bell started. I’ve kind of moved on from doing that so much these days and use other methods for learning new methods that seem to work.

The pens however, were last seen with the squared paper, on the pile of books and magazines that are in the cubby hole to the left of where I sit on the sofa. That’s where they’ve always been and had no need to be moved anywhere else.

I have a nice new set up in our study with a new desk, chair, my laptop set up and my Holhem gimble ready and poised, and a nice shiny new stationery holder. The stationery holder currently has my post it notes, my favourite couple of writing pens, a calculator, my business card holder safely ensconced. There’s any empty slot shouting out for something to fill it. The colouring pens would do marvellously, and then they would be at hand for me to mark off things on my events calendar. But where the heck are they?

Having decided to look for said colouring pens two minutes before a video conference meeting was due to start, and not finding them instantly, I sat wondering for a while as the attendees for the meeting arrived. Hmmmph!

Meeting over, I then had several actions as a result and some other things to immediately attend to, so the search for the illusive colouring pens dropped out of my mind for a while. Then I went to sit down in my spot on the sofa and suddenly remembered that I had a mission to accomplish. Find those ruddy colouring pens. They’ve got to be there somewhere.

Books and magazines start to get launched out of the way. They can’t be far. They shouldn’t be anywhere else. They shouldn’t be this far down the heap. After a full on three minutes of frustration, I flopped back in my sofa seat. Grrrr. Where are those blasted pens?

Oh, hang on. There’s a couple of books in the pile that have fallen over. I’ll just put them upright again. Oh, and hallelujah! There are the prodigal pens. Hiding in the blackness of under the small coffee table that nestles amongst all these books and magazines. Hoorah!

I happily skip (well, more like lumber) off back to the study, tip the pens out of their zipped, plastic casing and decide upon which colour to use as my marker. Then, rather satisfyingly, plop them all into the waiting vacant slot in my stationery holder. Having used the red pen to mark off my events calendar, I add that to the collection, then sit back to admire my handy work.

The simple pleasures!

Adrenaline Junky

Nothing like a crisis to get the adrenaline going. Its all going a bit Pete Tong at the moment with former colleagues dying due to Covid-19 and staff off with either positive results or self-isolating, meaning that the service is about to fall on its knees. However, a few strategically placed phone calls and lots of toing and froing has resulted in a bit of a plan that should help the situation a bit. Also some positive clinical engagement, which was fantastic.

I’m not usually one that responds very well to instant and urgent changes, and trying to solve immediate problems. I like to ruminate over things, check all the facts, formulate a plan, get everyone involved. Time was not on our side so this week, and today in particular, have been very much making things up on the hoof, last minute conversations and plans, no time to overly consult, only with those that are critical, put a series of actions together and BAM! I can head in to the weekend slightly more relaxed about the prospects of the week ahead.

I feel surprisingly buzzy about it all to be honest. The time has flown by, I’ve not been wondering what task to do next. I’ve jumped from one conversation to the next, to the next and to the next. I don’t think I could sustain that level of activity or focus for too long, and admire those that do and those that work in environments that require that fast paced thinking and problem solving.

When adrenaline kicks in it stimulates our “flight or fight” responses. When the body is flooded with adrenaline it helps focus and engages the brain, improving cognitive responses. A bit like a massive caffeine hit. Apparently, it can improve your eye sight as the pupils dilate, and improves respiration. Even after the triggering event there can be a residual feeling of high vigilance and excitement and can intensify those feelings. As well as a burst of energy and strength the immune system gets a little boost too. (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/71144/8-reasons-little-adrenaline-can-be-very-good-thing)

So, having started the day with the sad news of another colleague dying and not feeling like I wanted to really do much, at the end of the working day, I’m now bursting with energy and enthusiasm. Just as well as I’m hosting a virtual #bellringing session tonight and had better be on my A game.

Travelling all over the Country

Today was an epic day of activity for me on Ringing Room. This time of year we would ordinarily be #bellringing with a group of friends that we meet up with twice a year. Without being able to meet up for real we decided to try holding a virtual tower grab through the wonders of Ringing Room. On Saturday we had five towers to log in and out of that virtually had us travelling from Oxfordshire to Essex and back again. There are more towers on Sunday from Essex, Portsmouth and Nottingham. We may also try some quarter peals on Sunday morning as well.

So having spent an hour and a half in and out of various towers ringing all sorts of random methods, I then had a Cast of 1000 session for an hour and a half, where I was one of the students practicing spliced Cambridge, Yorkshire and Superlative Surprise Major, and some Lessness and Bristol Surprise Major.

Bearing in mind I’m nursing a stinking cold now as well, my brain was well and truly fried by the end of it. There was very little time between my Cast of 1000 ringing and the evening social Zoom event as part of the ringing weekend, so we cheated and C grabbed a chinese takeaway whilst I was ringing. Just about had enough time to eat it before logging back in to Zoom again.

There were nearly 20 of us on a Zoom chat, catching up as we missed out on the summer tour. We had a short business meeting as well just to think about plans for the year ahead, although its still unlikely that we’ll be able to have the summer tour this year either.

Its quite marvellous how we are all able to continue to ring and meet up with with people, albeit virtually.

Opening doors

When I get asked to give talks its one of the scariest things and takes me on a roller coaster ride.

My first question is why have they asked me? And the cynic in me replies “because they need to fill a slot and you’re an easy ask“. But maybe, just maybe, its because its a topic I know about and the person that’s asked knows that I can do a half decent job of it.

My first real worry then is what on earth have I got to say that anyone would want to listen to. I’m no one special. I haven’t done anything earth shattering brilliant or enlightening or entertaining. No one is going to want to hear me spout on about xyz when there are far more interesting and entertaining people who could do it.

Then there’s the “what am I actually going to talk about“. The latest ask hasn’t been too specific yet so I’ve asked the question. I could redo a talk I’ve given on a specific topic before, so I won’t have to prepare anything new, or do they want something different?

Then there’s the “how long have I got”? This is where, once I’ve written my talk I’ll time it to make sure it fits and I get all the main points across. I’ll read and re-read through it multiple times, including immediately before delivering it.

Then there’s the “oh my god, how many people will turn up? Supposing no one does?” Well, that’s not really under my control to do anything about. The one good thing about doing talks over Zoom is that you can change the view so you don’t have to see everyone’s faces and therefore don’t know if there’s one or one hundred people watching. Of course the trouble with doing that is then you miss out on any visual cues from the audience, like wanting to ask a question or wanting you to get a move on and shut up.

I generally don’t get nervous about giving talks, its the bit afterwards. Whilst I’m talking I know what I’m going to say, I’m well prepared, I’m in control. I’ve been to the loo, I’ve got a glass of water handy. But at the end when the facilitator opens things up to questions, that’s when I start getting nervous. What if someone asks a question I don’t know the answer to? Or worse still, I don’t even understand the question? The former can be resolved quite easily with a straight forward ,”you know, I don’t know the answer to that but I’m going to go away and find out, then I’ll let you know”. That’s all good if you actually do that, which I always make a point of on the rare occasions it happens. If I don’t even understand the question I’m not beyond asking them to rephrase it. Particularly if its quite a technical question, I’ll make a joke of it and ask them to dumb it down for those like me who are not technically minded.

The thing about giving talks is that they can open doors to lots of opportunity. An opportunity to meet new people, to listen to their questions and think about things from their perspective, to get involved in something else as a spin off, to be heard by someone who wants you to give your talk to a different group and start opening doors again with another different audience.

As much as I dread doing it for all the reasons above and want to say no, the chance of more doors opening and more new experiences happening is too great an attraction, however flattering the ask was in the first place.

Questions, questions

This coming week is going to be a week full of asking questions. As part of my new role I need to understand the detail of what I’m being asked to deliver and how what else is going on will impact, or vice versa.

I will be asking a LOT of silly questions I’m sure. But a silly question is not a silly question if it has to be asked. It is because there might be no immediate, obvious answer to the questioner. One might learn a lot through observation but in this time where we are barely meeting in person, it makes it difficult to observe.

Google provides many an answer and I’m not afraid to put that to good use. Then there’s the stuff that I already know or have some familiarity with. By targeting questions from a How? or Who? starting point, I’m more likely to get a better answer, or even framing it as a suggestion “I thought I might …” It might be off the mark a bit, but at least it would show some thought process. Framing a question correctly will make the question seem a little less silly.

Most colleagues are really helpful and are happy to give advice and support. Some are even willing to help further. It doesn’t matter how far you climb you won’t know everything and at some point, will need to ask that silly question.

Today I shall fully embrace that.