Earth stood hard as iron

Bloody freezing today. Just being outside made me all wheezy – really must be more adept at keeping my inhaler with me, infact I could do with finding it at all really as I’m still quite wheezy now.

The internet had indeed speeded back up again overnight. A said it slowed down again around lunchtime but it seems fine now, so no real idea what that was all about. Pretty dreadful though, couldn’t bear that to happen regularly.

Ady stayed home with the children this morning and my Dad was here this afternoon. They did lots of arty stuff – painting and drawing, so I was greeted with great piles of artwork to have explained to me and coo over when I got home. Scarlett had managed to fall onto a pen and is sporting what looks uncannily like a bullet wound in her back and apparently made her scream louder than A had ever heard and Davies run to fetch her dummies for her. She is utterly recovered now but I do hate it when things like that happen and I’m not around. Not that I think for one moment I’d have prevented it, or made her feel better faster – far from it, she often doesn’t want me to comfort her when she’s hurt anyway. I just hate knowing that it all happened and I wasn’t aware of it at the time. My issue, I know.

I was off to Worthing library for a course. It’s nearing the end of my set of courses for new starters and due to a restructuring earlier this year in which several posts were made redundant there are some of the courses which are without personnel holding the jobs to do the training and this was one of them – displays. So the council had got in an outside body to run training courses as an experiment so see how it would be recieved. I’ve commended them on an excellent and admirable committment to training before but mentioned that it falls down from not having staff who can deliver the training in an efficient and well executed manner so this was an interesting one for me. Before we started the management who had come along to attend aswell said once again how valuable our feedback would be and as the training session was very expensive they would be keen to know whether it was beneficial or useful or not.

I’d walked in from the carpark with another woman who I’ve met on various courses and then got chatting to someone else who looked and indeed was really interesting and quirky and sat next to her for the training session but the bloke running the course came over to chat and took something of a shine to me. He started off as merely friendly but having cornered me twice, just before the lunch break and again at the afternoon tea break and moving from general banter and chit chat to outright leching, telling me about his first marriage breakdown, being rather critical of his current wife (who was there with him, doing the training) and asking rather more personal questions than I was comfortable with, having twice established that I didn’t mind him ‘having a laugh’ with me (he’d picked me out several times infront of the rest of the group to make lewd comments) I had started to feel a bit unnerved by the whole thing, which probably rather coloured my view of what was really very good training. I certainly didn’t encourage his attention – he was a 60 year old, not particularly attractive man with grandchildren the same age as D and S and two daughters my age, there with his wife to deliver a training session. I’ve gone back over my general behaviour and responses to him throughout the day and can’t see I did anything different to how I would normally act really. I had cleavage out as usual and was probably a bit loud and confident as usual but as neither of those factors normally make me the recipient of unwanted attention I can’t really put it down to that. Maybe it’s just the way he operates but I certainly don’t think it did him any favours in terms of being professional or credible really. I was slightly relieved that the woman I’d walked in with tapped me on the shoulder before the end of the session to say our car park tickets were about to run out and we’d been given permission to leave early so we dashed off before the end.

The actual training itself was pretty good – all done with very low budget stuff like ribbon, paper, posters and material and stapled up. At the end of the morning session we were split into teams and set loose with materials to create our own displays in ten minutes. My team chose some Wallace and Gromit posters and did a great display with them using the ideas we’d been shown. It was fun :). As always with these training sessions there are things which look and sound great but are not particularly feasible to ‘try at home’ such as storing up all sorts of household waste to use as props in displays (we simply don’t have the storage space at the library) or rummaging at car boots sales and charity shops for ‘treasures’ – which admittedly is something we do ourselves but something that won’t be that easily done for the library unless I’m prepared to fund and store my own treasure chest of props.

I spent the lunchbreak sitting upstairs in the library reading. I did try and sneakily eat my sandwiches too but I got told off 😳 :lol:- it was way too cold to venture out.

The afternoon session was more of the same really -arty ways with props, staple guns and ribbons. The company specialise in ‘dressing and staging’ really – window displays and in house retail stuff although they have started these training sessions as an offshoot which they are taking to schools, libraries etc. I certainly got a few ideas and clever tricks from it although a half day could possibly have been sufficient and I could have done without quite such a ‘friendly’ delivery.

Came home to feed the children before running Davies round to Beavers – it was the Christmas party held with the cubs, so no uniform and utter bedlam apparently. Ady went to collect him and it overran by half an hour and was chaos so Ady said. Scarlett draped me with jewels and put many hair decorations in my hair while he was gone.

Tomorrow is an at home day – I have Elmlea and value chocolate gifts to craft 😆