Back to school without the kids!

This week I’ve been on two training courses – both courtesy of Living Social – one to learn about WordPress (web design & build, on which we’ve designed and built this blog site) and one an SLR photography course.

The WordPress course was my idea to help kickstart my involvement in Martin’s business and I knew whatever I learned would fall way short of what Martin knew already but it’s certainly helped us create this site and means I can keep up, keep learning and has convinced me that I might actually be able to do something useful in this area!! I was amazed that I could build a website, link to PayPal, add clever menus, plugins etc and have something up and running just like that!

The photography course was Martin’s idea. I’m still trying to ascertain his motivation for this! Too embarrassed to sign up himself and so sent me in as the front man? Or to convince me of the value of taking a big lump of camera kit on our travels (rather than a couple of good pocket cameras – comments?). As you can see from Martin’s blog, when it came down to it, he spent a few hours reading the manual -after having a sudden panic I might end up knowing more, but the course was more about the basics so we can now talk about apertures and shutter speeds, focal lengths and depth of focus. It was fun but will I put any of this new found wisdom into practice? It’s hard enough to get the kids to stay in front of a camera long enough to point and click! Imagine the complaints when Mum spends 5 minutes fiddling with dials and zoom just to get a bit of depth or create a clever effect! Then says ”oh that didnt work, can we try it again?” The tutor did say practice on a tree which has endless patience as a subject (and which I did go for during the course – see my pics below!) but I think in all honesty it’s just made me appreciate how clever the auto button really is! And I still want the lightweight pocket camera!

We have two more courses lined up through Living Social – A Spanish course and a TEFL course (that’s Teaching English as a Foreign Language in case you didn’t know) . Just need an adventure travel safety and first aid course to pop up and I think our ‘training’ will be complete ! Or have I missed any?

I must confess, I’ve become a bit of a Living Social addict in spite of some early wasted deals. A few pamper treatments, some hot yoga, gym membership, a photo book, canvas print and some cheap passes to local soft play (for the kids not me!) no wonder it’s been valued at $6billion with people buying stuff they didn’t know they needed like this. Has given my Amex card a good hammering though but I earn airmiles from that, so this may contribute to getting us to South America in July – thus totally justified!

Now I think I need to curb my spending in this area and focus on redeeming my purchases before we go! Perhaps I should unsubscribe from the daily deal emails right now. But hang on, let me just have a closer look at the martial arts for kids on today’s deals…that could come in handy couldn’t it??