I had a course today, whenever I have my PDR I always say I’ll do whatever training is on offer and a couple of computer courses had come up, I’d been put forward for them and accepted so along I went. We were doing seat-of-our-pants childcare again and Ady took Davies and Scarlett out with him for the day.
I waved them all off before 8am, got dressed, ate breakfast, sorted the chickens out and then spent about 15 minutes wobbling about not having worked through the manual in advance of the course.
I drove there and found parking nice and easily and walked to the building which used to be a Southern Water HQ but is now shared by Worthing Police and West Sussex County Council. I got a drink and introduced myself to some other attendees – there were 8 of us from all around WSCC services including Children and Family Centres, Libraries, Working with Adults with Learning Difficulties and so on. The guy running the course reminded me of Bill Bailey with his delivery and he was very funny. By the afternoon he was putting me more in mind of Chris Tarrant somehow and I couldn’t see Bill Bailey in him anymore…
I’ve never had any formal training on computers, all I do know is self taught so I liked the idea of some proper training. The course was Word – in the morning we did formatting text and paragraphs, find and replace and other such stuff. I knew some and learnt some. We had a short lunch break and then four of us returned to do using pictures in Word including clip art, pictures from file, watermarks, captions, wordart, drawing tools including graphs and charts. Again I learnt some and knew some already.
If I’m honest I don’t know that WSCC will really get their moneys worth out of me being training as I’m not really doing much in the way of working with Word in my job anyway although I guess I’ll be doing a report of Chatterbooks so I’ll be sure to add in plenty of pictures and charts etc.
The course finished at 430pm so I drove home through all the coming home traffic which is dreadful on that 4 miles stretch. The course was held very near to where I went to sixth form so it felt odd to be sitting in rush hour traffic both ways nearly 20 years on from when I used to drive to and from sixth form in my little yellow mini when I first passed my driving test.
I beat Ady, Davies and Scarlett home by about half an hour so dealt with the chickens, chopped up some firewood and got a fire lit and put the kettle on before they arrived home. After lots of debate we’ve bought a little netbook for me and my laptop will become Davies’. One of the things we wanted to buy with the bonus as Davies is getting more able and keen on the computer so I wanted to give him more access to one, mine is starting to run slower and has been much loved and well used so is an ideal first laptop for him. Ady had done lots of checking and finally found a good one on special offer at Asda so came home with that. I’m very happy with it, it perfectly meets my online wants :). So I’ve spent most of the evening setting it up and moving across email addresses and rss feeds etc.
More Lambing Live before very tired children went to bed (will no doubt jinx it by mentioning but Scarlett had been much better the last week or so about bedtime generally and sleeping through. Fingers crossed for it continuing, I know extreme tiredness has helped ;)). We had a late dinner and watched Stephen Fry in America which we’ve been very much enjoying.
I woke with a bit of a cough which has worsened through the day and am hoping won’t develop into anything further. I suspect sleep would help…