This week has been a story of preparation of a course. Friday I had to give a course on NVivo. The thing being that I was getting more and more dischuffed with the course we already had which was anyway for an earlier version of the software. The earlier version I had adopted a document from another university and then written the course around it. This time I was writing the document myself from scratch. I had to decide what went into it. I had to plan the presentation. I scrapped the exercises.
Well I had three days to write it, then one to give it. Actually that is not quite fair. I had the document half written last week, but it had taken me four days to get half way through and I had three days to write the rest. Its manageable but only just. On top of this last Sunday evening I discovered that my lounge heater had given up the ghost. It had done this sometime previously but I had put it down to the plug not being properly in and given it a good thump. This time I decided to investigate and the first thing I discovered was the plug was not properly in because it was a timer device and at a point when the plug was half in that had melted and stuck the plug half in. I could not get the plug in or out. I went to change the plug but the heater did not spring miraculously into life when I did so. Now I am not a hundred percent sure this was due to the heater being faulty. It could be any of the three following. Firstly me not quite establishing contact when rewiring the plug. Secondly a faulty plug got off a hair drier that has not been used for ages. Thirdly a faulty 13 amp fuse as it was got from a 2 plug adapter my grandfather made over twenty years ago. My grandfather made it so the adapter is perfectly safe, please don't worry about that. My grandfather was both very safety concious and a precision engineer. This is more than I can say for the factory that put the plug onto the hair-drier. I am going to buy myself a couple of new plugs and some new 13 amp fuses and try again some day, but in the mean time I ordered a new heater for the lounge. I went to Argos.
Monday I went to writers group, it went well again, with not a lot of corrections, the writing was also going smoothly. Tuesday was another story. My brain decided to throw a migraine about mid day. I presume from running on nerves, I took pain killers and continued on writing as it needed to be finished by that evening as someone else had to format the document. I got it done, went to Herringthorpe for Bible study, its amazing what paracetamol and caffeine can do. I got through feeling okay although more irritable than usual now I look back on it and not as quick at responding to situations. Got home safely although my brain was fantasising nightmares on the way home. I knew it was my brain and just ignored it. I do not mean hallucinations but seriously daft ideas seemed to occur to it, the sort that a tenth of a seconds thought show as being obviously stupid and dangerous.
I awoke the next morning to feeling sick and nauseous. Fortunately it was my day off, unfortunately it was the day the heater was supposed to arrive and I also wanted to get up to date with my diary. Argos turned up with the heater just after 9:00 a.m. and I spent most of the rest of the day in bed and went to bed early, but despite that was still feeling groggy the day after. However it had cleared enough about 12:30 a.m. for me to feel that it was worth getting up. So I got up and made myself the best clearer of migraines I know which is scrambled eggs on toast followed by coffee. The net result was that I was firing on all cylinders despite the fact that I sort of knew the migraine wasn't quite gone.
The course went well on Friday, although some of them found it too intense. They wanted to have their hands held while they did exercises. The problem being that the exercises that they were likely to do would not be particularly illuminating. This course actually worked really well for the two people who had spent some time with NVivo already and bought their own laptops. They were able to make connections between the course material and the things that they wanted to do. This was for them a big break through, because they were getting the how to, for questions they asked. One of the questions both of them had was about rearranging nodes. So I will write that bit to the end of the document.
On the evening I went to see Jean and James Dickson. They are as busy as ever and this week have had a host of early morning meetings with James getting the scaffolding in to change the light bulbs at the church. Also he had been PAT testing the electrical equipment in the church. There is some problem with the sound equipment so Cliff will have to come down and have a look at it. They have lots of holidays planned for this coming year, to such an extent that it was difficult to find dates for me to have supper with them.
Yesterday I was supposed to go to York for a Ship of Fools meet. However, despite having organised it, my migraine returned, and I felt safer in bed in the morning. In the afternoon I got up and did some web design for the website Morag and I are working on. My big problem at the moment is my printer is refusing to scan and the one at work will scan but will not then send it to my email account, or would not when I last tried it. I will try again as it kept saying server down and that just might be the case. The webdesign is very absorbing. I did two three hour sessions on it without realising how the time was passing. It is like a jigsaw puzzle, you get one bit right then you turn to the next bit and see if that is getting right. However I have realised that what I am really doing is designing the look of a content management system. So I am now looking at Joomla to see if I can adapt the website to work with that content management system. If I can it will ease things for both Morag and myself. No real hurry, as I need a photo I can only get in May when I go up.
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