It’s been a fairly busy week, as I’ve been away from Thursday to Saturday night, to the Hearbuy conference for Independant Audiologists. My boss Brenda took me along with her last year and again this year. We stayed in a Marriot hotel called The Forest of Arden, in fairness it does have a lot of trees, and is also a golfing centre with a 19 hole course.  We got lucky with the weather and as Brenda drove us down, I took a few iphone shots along the way.

We passed Ferrybridge power station a couple of times

and a few wind farms.

An uneventful journey, and we arrived at the hotel at 5.30pm.

The hotel is quite nice, and though the rooms are very basic and dated for the amount they charge, it was clean and the bed was comfy. We had dinner and met up with other Audiologists, had a couple of glasses of wine, then off to bed, at least I did. 🙂 It’s nice to chat on to people you only see once a year, and Brenda loves seeing the people she’s known for ages. 

On the Friday we have updates and hearing aid stuff, and then we sit and listen to motivational speakers.  This year we had Gerald Ratner, and he was brilliant.

Not sure my not-from-England readers will know who he is, but basically he was a CEO of a huge jewellry company who crashed his business by giving a speech where he dissed his own products- meant as a joke but it killed his business and made him a pariah in the business world, as well as the butt of many jokes. The newspapers were quite evil to him. As he told us- if anyone even now makes a big mistake in business, it’s called ‘doing a Ratner’!  He was so self depracating and it was inspiring to hear how he turned his life back round again. 

On Friday night there’s a big champagne reception,dinner, and entertainment evening where they also have casino type thingy’s, roulette, crap table & a spinning wheel of fortune.  You buy some special paper money to bet with and the proceeds go to charity.  The entertainment was both great and also pretty dire. They had a duo called Union Avenue who were really good

and an abysmal comedian/impressionist who was a semi-finalist in Britain’s Got Talent. I would beg to differ on that if he’s the best we can do🙄. No photo as I couldn’t bear it and left the room. If you are interested google Drew Cameron.

The dinner was lovely, and the champagne went down smoothly 🙂 

Sadly I felt a bit off colour in the evening, so only took advantage of the one glasses of champers, and went to bed fairly early, leaving Brenda to enjoy the roulette with her chums. 

The conference is mainly paid for by Hearing aid/hearing technology companies, who have an exhibition room where they talk to all the audiologists and try to convince them that there stuff is superior. In truth the hearing tech these days is so good it doesn’t really matter which manufacturer you buy from, it’s how good the audiologist is that counts. But good to see the innovations.

Felt much better after a good night’s sleep, and in the morning we had another motivational speaker, Derek Redmond, an athlete who held the British record for the 400 meters sprint, and won gold medals in the  4×400 metres relay at the World Championships and European Championships in 1986.  He was really funny and interesting so a good end to the conference.

We left at 1 o’clockish and I just snuck in this shot of a man delivering balloons for a wedding reception

and got home for 5.30pm, another sunny, uneventful drive. Today I’ve been doing a little photography

and cooked Sunday lunch. My mosaic table is now finished and re-installed so I’ll be posting that on Wednesday, and I did a couple more mirror shots while I was away, so I’ll be updating the project later in the week.  Now to iron my work clothes and have a little relax before bed!

have a great week peeps!