Presentation completed and exams to come!

Last Thursday, the day of the dreaded presentation finally arrived. My group was presenting next to last, which was late in the afternoon. This meant that we were watching everyone elses presentations and started to feel increasingly nervous.

We felt that we had done everything we could to answer the questions as accurately as we could and to cover all aspects, but after listening to everyone else, it appeared as they were mainly concentrating on the changes from "moving from an institutional home to independent living".

However, we did get an amazing response from "the audience", our tutor and the assessors. They all loved our case study and the way it was presented. It was Carol who created Summer and she presented her to the audience as herself. She was very good.

Afterwards there was a little presentation for our tutor, which caused her to be in tears. The head of Social Services was there and he was also in tears and one of the assesrs from the college got up and said that she goes to various presentations from all over the country, but these, last Thursday, were amongst the best she had ever seen, which ofcourse set Di off into tears again (and some of us).

All in all, it turned out to be a wonderful day, and it beats a day in the office anyway. Now I need to concentrate on the remaining two assignments and then it will soon be time for exams. Two exams of 1.5 hours each and they are both on the same day: 14th of March, only 6 weeks to go.

New grandson, Vidar

Here's a picture of my new grandson, born on Monday 22nd January 2007 at 7.40 PM. He weighed in at at nearly 10lbs and was 20" long. His name is Vidar [veedar] and in the piccie he is only 12 hours old.

Presentation, etc

Can you believe that it is past half-way through January already? I thought we were going to have some lighter evenings soon, but there are no signs of them yet. The weather, however, has been atrocious, which doesn't help. Gales and tropical rain every day and dead grey and miserable even when it hasn't rained. What happened to winter?

At work it has been very busy, as usual. Lisa applied for a support workers position and got it, so she will be leaving us soon. That is such a shame for us; we will miss her, but it is the job she always wanted, so we have to be pleased for her. We will enjoy the leaving party though, next Saturday.

My Mental Health course is nearing the end now and on Thursday we are having a group presentation. This has been booked in at a hotel, where we are going to have a carvery lunch and the head of social services is going to come and watch and also an assessor from the college. My group consist of Carol from maintenance, Laura from Partnership, Sue from the Club houses and me. We have done a case study on a 19-year old, white girl, who is suffering from depression.

It is first time for a very, very long time that Carol, Sue and myself have done a presentation as we are all over 40. However, Laura is only 22 so she is finding it a little easier and is helping us "oldies" a lot. We don't know what we would do if we didn't have her. We are absolutely dreading it and it doesn't help that someone in our class told us that last year 4 pupils failed the presentation. That will probably be us this year! The draw for the order which the groups are presenting has been done and my group will be hanging around waiting most of the day as we are presenting next to the last. I'll let you know how we went on.

Birthday, Christmas & New Year

Wow, haven't the last two weeks flown?

Since my last post we have had Works do, Chris' birthday, Christmas, stay at John and Ann's and a New Year. It wasn't as quiet as we thought it was going to be and, as usual, we didn't get done half of what we wanted to do. Never mind, we did enjoy the break though.

A few weeks ago, I bought a fish tank from the car boot sale. Chris had the lid and lights for his birthday and also a book about "Setting up an aquarium". After Christmas we went to a pet shop and bought the gravel, which took the two of us all evening to clean up and rinse through.

Last Friday we got the plants and 12 little baby goldfish and set it all up. We sat down and enjoyed the display as Rumpleteazer entertained us greatly with her curiosity. She was absolutely determined to get to the fish, one way or another. It took several days before she gave up, but it didn't half amuse us.

The works do at China Gardens was a great success; I had a fab time. Christmas Day was quiet but enjoyable. We had loads of present, some funny ones, some more serious ones, but they were all excellent, thanks to all our family and friends.

Boxing Day we went to John and Ann's and we had a wonderful time. Andy and Amy came as well as Mum and Margaret so we all played games until midnight. Chris and I had been invited to stop over, so there was no drinking and driving to worry about. Great Thanks!

Last Saturday we went to Lee and Pod's with Barb and Bill. Pod's mum, auntie Bet and John and Jimmy also came and another smashing time was had by all.

New Year's Eve we had planned to go on top of the hill again, as usual, but this year there were weather warnings and gales, so we gave it a miss and watched the celebrations in Sydney on TV. Sadly, most of the famous celebrations, such like Edinburgh and Glasgow, were cancelled due to the weather, but there were still some grand fireworks in London.