I have to admit I have stolen this idea from a friend Morgaine, from her wonderful blog that can be found here. It's all about looking back on the week in a positive way, discussing what's been your favourite parts and reflecting on some of the negatives but learning from them and the good bits too. It's intended to be done weekly, so I feel that it's a good way to jazz up a boring old Thursday evening (apologies if Thursdays are your exciting night of the week!).
Five Favourites:
1) Normal school weeks: It seems like the first time since December that our groups visiting here have followed a normal school week for me. It's not just their fault, it's mine too, every time there was a standard school week group in, I had holiday booked! It's nice to get back into the routine I'm used to.
2) This weeks The Ruby Chorus: Every other Thursday evening, I'm not suffering from a boring Thursday anymore. My lovely singing group (The Tuesdays) has set up a new group, run every other Thursday for those of us who want to do something a bit more challenging. Instead of just being given lyric sheets and all learning from hearing the music and being taught in nice simple methods from the choir leaders, we're given sheet music and the lovely leader of the choir has been teaching people the basics of reading music, timing etc. We've been singing some lovely pieces such as the Flower Duet, Amazing Grace, Bring Him Home (from Les Miserables) and a bit of Zadoc the Priest. Today for some reason was just particularly good and we had a real laugh for part of it too.
3) New Joules Clothes: This isn't intended to sound too shallow, but having walked past the recently shut down store in town this week, it made me appreciate the lovely things that I managed to pick up in their closing down sale a couple of weeks ago. I've decided that instead of going clothes crazy and buying impulse things from cheaper stores that I'm then not so sure about. I need to be more patient, wait for things to go into the sale in more of the stores I love that have a heftier price tag, and spend more on better quality items, that will last. This mean that I don't have to have tonnes and tonnes of cheap stuff that doesn't last. I don't mean to sound snobby or anything but expanding my Joules clothes has made me really appreciate the items I have from Joules/ similar stores and appreciate the better quality fabric, the fit and the cut etc.
4) Just Give Me A Reason- Pink ft. Nate Ruess: I really do adore this song this week, sometimes you just get songs with lyrics that really speak to you, and this is the case for me with this song. The video on YouTube is also beautiful, you have to check it out!
5) My lovely Mum: It's been a strange week for her, due to ups and downs about her operation on her collar bone (she fell off a horse back in October) and also finding out that she has yet more health conditions developing, she really does have enough already. Pray/think of her please.
Lessons Learnt:
1) Family are so so important: I went home last weekend and going back made me realise just how important my family are. I didn't appreciate them enough when I lived at home/closer to home, especiallydcuring my mid teens but now they're not there or a little drive away when I'm having problems it really made me realise how much they support me. I went out for a lovely meal with The Elder Basons, The Boyf and The Boyf's Parents. It's not the first time our sets of parents have spent time in each others company, and we know they get on well but for some reason I think this time everyone felt even more relaxed and it was lovely.
2) The Wonders of multi-cultural education: This week our group doesn't have a single child in it from British descent. Now a lot of people would take that as a bad thing, and I do think it's a shame that there isn't someone representing a whole childhood spent in British culture in what I'm about to describe, but it was also very moving. We took the children to a local village this week to do a comparison between this sleepy village and the area they live in Hackney and when we went into the church, knowing that they're all from different countries I decided to tackle the topic of religion with them and it worked a treat. I asked them all to have a little look around the church and then got them sat in the pews and asked each child in turn if they worshiped in their faith regularly (all but 2 did) and if so what faith they worshiped in and a feature of this church that was different to their place of worship and hearing them talk about their own experiences from such a wide range of countries was very inspiring, probably because they're all 10/11 years old and were still young enough not to be scared to talk openly about their religion.
3) That I need to trust my gut instinct when driving: Yet again I panicked when I saw a sign saying a location I thought I was heading for, even though I was also thinking, 'I don't think I came from that way though'. It was a mistake to trust the panic sign, it took me into Sussex and added 45 minutes onto my journey.
4) No matter how upset or angry you are, there is no need to put this across to your colleagues: I wasn't on the receiving end or the giving end of this, but I see it happen in my workplace fairly regularly and it annoys me. I am a firm believer of, when at work, there is no need to lose your temper at people and be disrespectful. I know colleagues quickly become friends, but also, you have to remain professional. If you have something bothering you in your personal life, you cannot let that affect the way you talk to/act towards colleagues and if you have a problem you raise the issue diplomatically, instead of just getting stroppy about it!
5) Washing doesn't do itself: I wish. Enough said.
This ended up a lot longer than I expected, but at least there is now a bit more structure and thought gone into a blog post, instead of mindless ramblings about my normal life. If you regularly blog 'Five Favourites, Five Lessons Learned' please comment with a link to your blog, I love things like this :)
Ta'ra a bit, as they say in the home-shire.
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