It was down to some serious Christmas shopping this morning.  Yesterday Mum and I did a little and today I went into town with Dad to buy some presents for Mum.  We did a lot of walking and a lot of carrying heavy bags.  We also had a stop for a cup of hot chocolate and a lovely pain au raisin!  There weren't such big crowds that might have been expected certainly not early on although it did get busier.  Even with that it was enjoyable!

I'm on holiday now for the rest of the week and as usual when waiting to start some time off the morning dragged a little.  It wasn't so bad this morning as part of it was taken up with a short workshop that everyone is going on.  It was on customer journey mapping which I hadn't really heard of beforehand but which means mapping out the steps a customer would take to do a certain thing like borrow a book or look for something on the catalogue.  And for part of the workshop we actually had to do that in teams, pick an activity and behave as if we were an undergraduate or an academic or a mature student.  Not so easy to do as it's difficult to forget that you know how to do these things or you know where things are but we did it.  And quite interesting it was too to look at things as if they were all strange to you.

But now I can forget work related things for a few days and look forward to doing some Christmas present shopping. And there might be a cup or two of hot chocolate drunk as well!

I was supposed to be going out for lunch on Saturday but my friend had to cancel.  So I spent most of the weekend transferring all the various photos and documents off my old computer onto my new laptop.  I hadn't realised just how much stuff I had accumulated and in the end it took most of the weekend to do.  I was quite happy to have some time to play with it in any case.  I have a new broadband provider too and I can't believe how much faster it is now!