Walking! Cooking! Learning! Studying!
Posted in Family, General, Outings, Studies, Work on 07/02/2007 01:37 am by Victoria
Sorry I haven’t updated for ages – for some reason I just haven’t felt motivated enough to write anything. I’ve been quite busy too, both in and out of work.
The picture on the right is one I took a couple of weeks ago on a walk through Blakeney marshes. It turned out to be a nice sunny day, and it was somewhere different to go to. I took several other photos too; you can see them at my Flickr account.
For the first time since I left high school, I have taken up cooking (well, it’s more like bakery so far). Last week I baked a chocolate sponge, and a couple of weeks before that, I cooked a Victoria Sponge, which is basically just like the chocolate sponge but without the cocoa powder! I thought it would be good to start cooking again, as I always enjoyed cookery at high school (although I didn’t like the washing up afterwards!) I’ll probably aim to cook something every couple of weeks or so from now on.
At work I’ve been learning several new things. This week, I started learning the Reporting Services program (part of Microsoft SQL Server 2005). Everybody in the company is set objectives by their manager, and one of my objectives this year is to convert some of the databases from Microsoft Access to Reporting Services format. Then people will be able to access our reports dynamically on the intranet, whereas with Microsoft Access this isn’t possible. I attended a brief training session about Reporting Services, but I will have to do most of the learning by myself. It looks quite difficult, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it soon. I’ve ordered a book from Amazon.co.uk to help me learn it.
I’ve also enrolled on the CII Certificate in Insurance course – to get the qualification I have to study 3 modules over the next 12 months. I’m about half way through the study book for the first module, which sounds good but I’ll then have to go back and revise everything ready for the modular exams. You can choose when to take the exams (they’re multiple choice so they can be done online) so I’ll probably book my first exam in a couple of months time. One of the men back in my old department studied for the same qualification, and he passed a couple of months ago. I’ve been wanting to do this since last year, but I couldn’t enrol back then because of the restructure and having to move jobs. Now that I’m more or less settled into my new job, I feel more confident about studying. Two other girls in my department have just begun studying for the Diploma (which is the next step up from the Certificate), but they’ve been working there much longer than me.