Spring has sprung

Well as promised I fitted in a wander with my camera between bass playing. I've never really just gone out just with the purpose of taking photos. I wasn't really in the best place for photography, just a random street near the church we were playign in really, but I'm actually quite pleased with what I found! And some time in the sun always does me good :)

I love the fact that the sun makes everything so colourful! (And the fact that my camera is fairly good at point and click!)

Confessions

I have a confession to make... I've become slightly obsessed with browsing the realms of the blogging world and pintrest. I'm amazed how many inspiring people there are out there and I feel like i ought to be blogging about my favourites or something but right now I dont think I have any. I'm just enjoying reading and getting ideas and looking at amazing things and wanting to try some myself and not doing them because well, i'm spending all my time looking at them! It also makes blogging a bit daunting. But I think for now I'll just keep going, I havnt quite figured out what I want my blog to be yet, you can probably tell I've just written about lots of bits and peices, but it's a start.

One plan is to bring back the photos to my blog, it's been sadly lacking in the last couple of posts. I'm playing a concert thisevening and has rehersals all afternoon (and was playing another gig last night!), but somewhere in there I think I will have a play around with my camera. It's beautifully sunny today which I love. I can't wait for summer, for lieing in the garden reading my book (probably a text book), for days at the beach, for summer dresses and ice cream. Sunny photos here I come!

Stars

I love looking at the stars. When I've got stuff on my mind it puts it all in perspective. It's so peaceful (if your in the right place)  it makes me realise any problems of mine are tiny in comparison to everthing out there. It reminds me of a winter when I was about 15 when I walked the dog with my dad every night. He used to laugh at me attempting to walk in a straight line while looking at the stars (im incapable of it but I insist on trying) and everytime I remembered my camera it was cloudy and every time I forgot it there were stars everywhere. I remembered this today because it's the first time my cameras left my bag in the last couple of weeks and guess what... I wanted to take a picture. Guess I havn't got rid of that habit! They were good times, and when I go home now I always go walk the dog with dad at some point. It normally ends in me being pushed in a puddle, or a bramble bush, or being jumped up on from behind in the dark, or listening to awful music on radio 2... but we enjoy it and when I get back frozen, muddy or complaining about whatever dad has done I'm always in a better mood strangely! This started about stars.... ah well.. heres a memory for you!

OT

I would like to answer a question which is going to follow me for the rest of my life... 'so what is OT?'

The obvious question when you say your at uni is 'what are you studying?'. People can understanding when you say history, or art or even nursing. My answer is occupational therapy. To which I normally get a 'ooh' or a blank kind of smile and then... so whats that then?

The problem is it's pretty hard to explain. I'm not sure even most of my friends and family really know... I'm not entirely sure I do! We were talking about it in a lecture the other day and I quite liked our lecturers quote: 'It's not our fault it's so complicated!'. And thats the thing, its pretty difficult to sum up an entire career into a nice short sentence. Would a nurse be able to do it? Or a physio? The difference is people don't have a picture in their head of OT. So... For anyone passing my blog, please read on and learn a bit cause one day you might need an OT and it would be nice to know what they do.

My normal definition is 'we work with people to live independantly with illness'

An improvement I heard in discussion the other day is that 'we help people live how they want to live'. I like this, indepednance isnt the only thing we work for, it's not always possible and it's not always wanted. But we help people do what they value and what is meaningful to them and we call this occupation, be it getting dressed in the morning, having a job or going swimming. We see occupation as vital to good health. We can work in physical or mental health, with any age group. We can work in hospitals, the community, prisons, charities, schools ... you'll be surprised where we pop up! We look holistically at a person, considering their environment, their illness and its effects, their values and their goals to decide what to work on and we use a range of techniques to acheive them. eg. teaching techniques and strategies, providing equipment, groups, education, exercises, splinting... the list could go on!

I'm struggling here to define what we do because it's so broad, but I've tried and hopefully you have slightly more of an idea. Please note I am only a second year student, not qualified, please don't reference this! It's just an attempt at getting a few more people out there to understand what OT's do, because I think it's really important and the more widely OT is known, the more effective can be!

If I'm clever enough I may start a new page of my blog to continue this and give some examples.... we will see!

For further infomation http://www.cot.co.uk/ is pretty good :)

Girly weekend :)

Nothing too creative to share recently, been busy with my sister who came to visit for a few days. I think it was good for us both to have a few days away from normal life.

Here's some snaps of what we've been up to (i remembered the camera again see!)

 ... such a cute film! We were planning on watching the descendants but it had sold out so we saw this, a good girly film to watch with the sis :) 

Brunch in a little cafe with stuff from all over the world on the walls, it makes me want to travel and see all those places! I liked this map. We're going to volunteer in morocco for 3 weeks in the summer, just my and my sister, so excited!



And ice skating! Told you we were busy! Amazingly neither of us fell over. It was a tad scary but great fun and we saw olly murs's tour van thingy outside after!

And then we spent a fair amount of time shopping... I havnt got photos of our purchases but we had fun and came home for a dvd and ice ceam :) All in all a pretty good few days.

HTC 1

Two blogs in one day, that's a first! I kind of feel like I'm enjoying writing the blog at the moment but I'd really like to get to know other bloggers gradually aswell so I thought I'd sign up to a blogging challenge or two! This is my first months baking for 'Have the cake'. I've never made (or even heard of) Linzer cookies before and due to my student food cupboard lacking jam at the moment I adapted it a bit and used icing and then stuck some fruit on to make them a bit colourful! I have to say they were quite yummy though and it was nice to cook something I havn't done before. Keeping up with my 20 things too!

Calm before the storm...

The last 5 weeks of uni have been a bit nothingy really. I havn't enjoyed the unit and we've had very little work. To begin with it drove me crazy, our course is so full on normally that I didn't know what to do with myself! I have gradually got back into the things that I enjoy a bit though, so in some ways it has been a good thing. .... blogging and browsing pintrest, randomly deciding to bake a cake or making a pressie for my mum. I've just completed my latest project, my first patchwork! I'm quite pleased with it, I love the strawberry material :)

Saying this, tomorrow we start our next unit which by the sounds of it will be back to to the busy life I'm used to, I'm kind of looking forward to it! But I also want to keep up the things I've started to enjoy. Today is my last day of calm for a while and I'm making the most of it. I've had a very lazy morning reading 'A Game of Thrones' and browsing blogs. I'm going to make some fairy cakes just cause I can and I might do a bit of scrapbooking or patchwork, we will see. I also need to tidy my room up a bit and print everything  for tomorrow, strangely I actually kind of enjoy getting it all organised, I guess it makes it feel a bit more undercontrol.

Finally, my sisters in Paris this weekend and then coming to visit me next week. Missing chatting already and she's only been away 2 days. Can't wait for next week!

20 before 20, number 1!

I've been away for a few days, hence the lack of blogging, but I've brought back some things to share. Number 1 on my 20 before 20 list is to carry my camera with me more, so i took it with me and it actually snowed and I actually took some nice photos! I cant say that I have any kind of skill in photography but I do enjoy it, my photos tend to stay unedited apart from the odd bit of cropping, mainly due to not knowing how to do it! and not having the technology... anyways here are some of my shots I'm fairly pleased with...

A walk in the dark and the snow :)

The sun setting, was rather beautiful (i still have ot say b-e-a-utiful to spell that.. random fact) and I was quite pleased with the photo too!

I like this one just because it says 'fun' :)

Number one on my list is turning out quite well!

Music

I had a plan to finish my latest project today but it hasnt happened so instead I thought I would write about my music.
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I've started this several times now, I'm realising music is too much part of my life to be able to write one post about it. I guess what I want to get at is that there are times when music is part of my life and I go to rehersals and I do the odd concert and I enjoy it. There are other times when walking into a music department almost feels like a second home, and not only because you spend so much time there! More because there are friends who put their head round the door when your practicing just to say hi, and because you are somehow valued for the part you play. Because when rehersals are cancelled you can end up going for a drink with 2 girls, one of which you've never spoken to before. And because any day you go in you can meet someone new and you might not be friends for life but you can have a chat and learn something and its another familiar face next time your there. Last year, my first year of uni, I was banned from playing bass and piano for medical reasons and I really missed playing. I didnt realise at the time what I actually missed was having this group of friends. This year it's taken a while to get to know everyone but I'm really enjoying it, I'd forgotten what a big part of me music can be and it's nice to be reminded.

This is me concentraing hard, playing my first ever bass solo in the uni scholars concert before christmas.... just to add some colour to all the writing!