Catching Breath before I dive into another week

Right lets see about news for this last week. Writers was on again last Monday, at the moment they are running a bit of money raising drive, so I took in Minerva and books in case anyone wanted me to make an Amigurumi and came back with an order for one hippopotamus and one lamb, the hippo is a standard amigurumi and I have half made it already this weekend, the lamb I have to make safe for a child so rather than using dolls eyes and such I will be embroidering (possibly with wool as John Lewis’ was out of black embroidery thread and I really can tell the difference between their darkest navy and black).

I also managed a week ago on Saturday to hand in the material for the cushion cover I was making to show off Cait’s embroidery that she did for me at Christmas. Cait’s work was very well done given that she is largely at nine working on her own with respect to embroidery, I help her when I am up but most of the time there is no-one around to help, her mum has never to my knowledge done anything but the stuff she had to do at school. So I wanted to do something to boost her moral. I got the material to include it into a cushion cover, and actually got it put together on the material but actually getting my sewing machine out to make it up into a cushion was daunting me. So I took it into a repair shop and asked them to make it up. The result is I now have a new cushion cover.

Work has been busy this week. I seem to have stayed to 6pm most nights. Now a lot of this has been due to the fact that I had 4:30 appointments and they needed time. With one of them it was just a matter of doing standard statistics but because I am quick at doing it, they came to me rather than doing it themselves. I don’t really mind this. The person is amazed at how quickly my brain gets into a research project, but the truth is that the engagement during these sessions is quite superficial, when I am working on something in depth it normally takes me a session of playing before I can do a proper analysis. i need to find my way around the data. When I work in these sessions I do not spend time trying to find my way around, I rely on the people there to guide me. It can mean I make mistakes. Another which was really quite interesting, looking at computer games designed to teach clinical knowledge and unfortunately the final number were quite small. However if they have created the game, run focus groups and such it is still a worthwhile project.

I also have managed to do two more videos for the NVivo course. I really need to get these out pretty regularly from now on but I have realised that the ones which are mainly software actually do take me a lot less time to do. I do not have to think of the visuals and so can do a video in a couple of hours session. That is a five minute interview, but by the time I have worked out what needs to be said, set up the computer, done a dummy run through, recorded once and junked then done the final run through and edited, as well as psyched myself up to do it then two hours is often reasonable.

I also found with being on holiday next week that I was struggling with getting everything set. I ended up sleeping most of Friday and was going to fill in the form from the end of Beta testing for SPSS when I got up. The only thing was that I really only got around to it after 5:30 p.m., yes I was sleeping most of that time, and then the department decided to do a major upgrade (see http://cicsupgrade.blogspot.co.uk/ ) and the result was that everything was down and I could not do the bit of work I was planning until Saturday afternoon. It was just awkward with not being in work Monday to Thursday next week I had something to fill in that needed to be done by next friday but I could not do it until this Friday as that was when I was sent the link. However as they were tweeting and such all through the night giving updates on progress it was quite interesting. Indeed at one point in Sheffield it was trending higher than UEFA and this on the day of the England Sweden match.