I thought it best to note down the stress and anxiety these past couple of months has given me in relation to the whole Covid affair. Both what it means to be a believer during this season as well as what is going on in the media.

Back in January my brother, his daughter (my niece), her boyfriend all got Covid. In my brother’s case it was somewhat worrying because we all fall into the higher risk category of being members of the BAME community (I so hate that category description but for the sake of time will use it here), and being over 50. I can thank God that everyone has recovered but my brother had a rough game with it – to the degree of not having to resort to going to hospital. He did get as far as having to call an ambulance at one stage which was quietly terrifying for us all.

After his family bubble had Covid, I’d heard that my sister’s youngest got Covid while working in London. My sister and brother in law are currently shielding during this lockdown and so again, to hear news of this virus reaching closer family members who are not normally going out to get exposed was disquieting. My nephew rode the illness ‘like a pro’ and has made a full recovery. I am currently in a bubble with my two kids and my mother who is 86 years of age. For a year now it has always been in the back of my mine to do everything that I can to ensure that my mother is kept safe as well as myself and the kids. My mental state has understandably had its ups and downs as a result

So, good old Boris – our esteemed Prime Minister – has been pushing ahead with the objective of getting the nation vaccinated in order for ‘things to get back to normal’.

Since news of the development of a vaccine came about toward the middle of last year, I had been quietly hopeful. But I admit this turned into scepticism when I noted the speed with which the solutions went to market, as well as being wary of some of the ingredients listed as being contained in some of the vaccines available. As a Christian one might assume that I would be very much against any form of vaccination, but in my case myself and my children have been fully vaccinated against all of the main worldwide infections and diseases. I think coming from a family of nurses greatly influenced that. So as any parent would do, I began to research and look into getting vaccinated versus playing ‘Russian Roulette’ and not.

On the one hand, my current employer was – shall we say – persuasive in their eagerness for all employees to get vaccinated. Back towards the end of February, only 49% of staff members had their first shot. When I had initially mentioned to my manager that I was still considering what to do I was met with a bit of a mini ‘push’ to make my decision sooner rather than later. I was pleased to see though that this hard sell drastically reduced and I was pretty much left to digest all avenues of thought before coming to my final decision.

I am also part of a social media group, the majority of which are turning out to be what might be referred to as “anti-vaxxers”. On a regular basis I’m witnessing information which is suppose to help us all make the right choice. What I am quickly seeing is the definition of ‘right choice’ is different to what I have found myself, my employers (the NHS) and my nursing family members.

Long story short, I have now had both shots of the AZ vaccine. My family members who are also NHS key workers have all had theirs. All of our outlook is one of ensuring that our family is kept safe. Let’s be clear, we can all still get Covid, however the severity with which it hits our bodies will be less fatal than before. But here is the corker – I cannot bring myself to be honest with this group.

Not saying anything about my decision has unfortunately been rooted in fear – fear that other believers in Christ will not view me with compassion, will not be sympathetic to my stance and ultimately will be hostile to me. I am sure that this is all unfounded but when I am around individuals who refer to vaccinated people as “Sheeples” and who share posts that are proven as factually incorrect or contradictory, I cannot help but think I will be judged.

The point of this short blog is to advise any believer who has chosen to have the vaccine to not fall into the trap that I did. Do not beat yourself up like I did. I do intend to answer anyone who asks me that I have indeed taken the vaccine without fear of rejection by them. In spite of the fact that I prayed to God, received in such a profound way an answer to the effect of going for it because ‘what man meant for evil, God turns for good’, at the end of the day, if you have extensively done your research and drawn the conclusion that you will have the vaccine then let no man condemn you.

Likewise if you have prayed to God, extensively done your research and concluded that you will not have the vaccine then let no society nor man condemn you either!

In closing, when I had to bring my fear of what others will think of me to the Lord, I was reminded of Luke 12:4 and 5 in the Bible where Jesus said:

“I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him”

Luke 12:4-5 NIV

So long as I had brought my dilemma to God first and got His green light to proceed, I should not have allowed any energy towards fuelling my fears.

At long last I have grown up to WordPress and have created this blog along with bringing over the previous posts from my old blog

I haven’t yet launched my new blog and so when I am not so tired I will continue to update these posts.

Why do this?

I realised that much of my traffic to all of my social media accounts were not really intertwined into one little area where, for example I could more efficiently create a video on Youtube but professionally embed it into an area such as this. Now I feel that I can.

I wanted a more personalised presence online where my branding could be subtle but ascetically pleasing at the same time. I’m discovering with Word Press that I can get ‘under the bonnet’ and add my own graphics over time. I felt more limited with what I could do with my backgrounds on my other blog. Here I’m learning very quickly to feel free.

The loss of a pet…

2020 is officially a rubbish year!!! We have lock-down due to a Pandemic, so much division and hate, we’re facing job insecurity as global economies fail. What could be worse? Yeah I know full well one of the things that could be worse (aside to losing a loved one to COVID). Losing your pet possibly due to the current circumstances.

When I first created the SLS brand the profile picture on most of my social media profile was of one of my cat family, Knuckles. On my You Tube channel, he was the face of when I was exploring facial animation software back in 2012.

He was instrumental when I had did a version of the Harlem Shake You Tube craze:

He was a silent gentleman in that he would try to protect me outside and then cave in through fear if something kicked off in the garden leaving his mum to do her ‘veloceraptor’ stuff. More than anything he was a big part of our little family.

When lockdown started we were of course spending more time at home and initially all of our feline family were over the moon that we were actually home 24/7. For Knuckles it was as though it was Christmas every day because the secret treats of tuna and prime quality turkey would be given to him by my two as well as myself without us all realising. But I also began to notice that he was beginning to lose weight. He was still his bubbly ‘bad-boy’ self, terrorising his little brother and pushing his mum out of her feeding bowl – but in spite of having food pretty much on demand the weight loss gradually continued. So we upped our game, changed his diet to less dry food and more meat wet food. He appeared to improve over the weeks and through all this time was so content, having play mates (my son) giving him long grass to play with, as well as receiving loving tummy rubs on demand (with the food and treats), but it seemed that by just over a week ago he went downhill to the degree that I needed to take him to the vets. The difficulty with this decision was that I also knew just how much he feared the vets – he didn’t just hate going but he would literally tremble with fear. But I also knew that to not take him would be wrong.

One of the biggest regrets I have ever made recently was to accept an appointment at the vets at 4.30 pm on one of the hottest days of the year so far. I could not get an appointment with my regular vets which was 5 mins down from where I lived – again due to the pandemic the vets were spreading out appointments throughout my city. Instead the only available appointment was a 20 minute ride away. My gut instinct was to not accept it and try for either an early morning or late evening, but I ignored

that feeling and rushed him to the vets further away. He had been playing in the garden before it had gotten too hot and when we coaxed him indoors he had just enjoyed 4 packets of top quality cat food and had guzzled loads of water. He was purring until he saw the pet carrier…… and was so upset (as I knew he would be) when he got inside it.

We can’t afford a car with air conditioning and so I had the car doors and windows open for half an hour prior to leaving and broke speed limits to turn a 20 minute journey to 15 mins.  But as a result of that journey, the trauma of hating where he was going had accelerated his deterioration. That particular vets stabilised him but did not have the facility to keep him overnight so I was forced to make the same journey back home. They managed to take his bloods and said it would be ready by the next morning – I was instructed to take him again to my nearer vets as soon as they opened in the morning.

That morning, I rang my local vets to find that the bloods had not come back but they still wanted him in. I got a second opinion from another emergency vet and our consensus was that it would be better to not have him endure another traumatic ride until the test results came back. It took this company until 6pm Friday to tell me that Knuckles had a hyper active thyroid but there was also readings linked to his liver.

To cut a long story short I was able to take him to an emergency over night veterinary clinic (so one last traumatic drive in a cooled car in the evening). They ran some ultrasound tests and told me that my kitty had a tumour the size of a golf ball on his liver as well as hyperthyroidism – it was time to let him go.

I told my kids and we all got in the car about 11 pm to take the ride to say our final goodbyes. I watched as my oldest daughter went in – we had to enter into the surgery one at a time with masks on. When it was time for my son to go in, I could see this 9 year old boy gird himself up to keep it together long enough to say bye and pet his buddy.

Eventually I returned my son back to the car and held my cat one last time as the vet administered the euphanasia injection, stroking his head as his life left him. I thank God it was quick and that he went to sleep for the final time.

I was present when Coco had given birth to Knuckles on my cream bedroom carpet and away from the birthing box that I had made for her. I am proud that the stain still couldn’t come out but we have the exact spot that Knuckles came into the world which about sums up what an impact he made on our lives. I was present when he took his first steps outside in the garden, guided by his mum but petrified none the less. I was there when he use to flash us such a face of betrayal when we’d pretend to throw some turkey for him to catch and eat and it would remain in our hand. From the 24th August 2007 to 26th June 2020 I was there.

But for the first time as a family we are experiencing 2020 with out him…

So yeah, 2020 proper sucks about now but I can thank God for the last 12 years of fun laughter, and love that this beautiful example of God’s creation had brought into all of our lives.

RIP old buddy I may not understand all of the biblical references relating to pets but I pray that in the new heaven and new earth you will be there..

I’m beginning to see a pattern in my not so frequent blog posts which relate to tech that I love using dying off but this had to be my first entry for the New Year and the New Decade.

I’m one of the generation who enjoyed Windows 95, loved its interface and the new frontier it offered – and then it died off.

I had to then adapt to Windows 98 with its ability to play videos…. I was in awe and fell in love with this OS. This too was killed off but I could understand this one. We’d all outgrown Windows 98 and craved for more as the internet grew. Although it was the operating system which saw me through my teaching degree and signified my future as a Tech Trainer/IT teacher, my mourning was for a little while.

I held out and so did not need to endure ME which I shall not talk about any further, but went straight to Windows XP. Whilst I didn’t like this operating system as much as 98 and 95 it did teach me how to use the back screens whenever some random hacker decided to play with my devices.

So with the nightmare that was Windows Vista I finally converted my 2009 laptop to Windows 7 and immediately took a shine to it. Windows 7 still allowed me to take a peek under the hood, so to speak but it was user friendly enough to allow me to do what I needed to do day to day.

So fast forward to 2016 when Microsoft announced that the operating system that we all loved had reached its end of life for security support updates. I was open minded enough to try Windows 10 for free but found with my laptop that 10 clashed with the old laptop’s graphics card which could not be updated further. I was stuck with Windows 7 which I didn’t mind too much.

But it was when we were given a date when Windows 7 security updates would finally cease that my ‘tech grieving’ began. I just couldn’t end my relationship with Windows 7 – we’d been through so much together and letting go was hard to do.

But reluctantly I upgraded to a desktop with Windows 10, where I could still plod on with those tasks from this blog that seems to be on the continual backburner and so far things seemed ok.

Except for the Windows 7 laptop that I just could not let go.

I realised that this laptop still had software that was incompatible with Win 10 but that I still needed to use. I also had the dilemma of requiring a laptop to use online for tasks such as homework for other members of our household. I wasn’t in a position to buy a brand new laptop which was completely out of my budget, so I pondered what could be done.

Then like a knight in shining armour came the light-bulb moment for me which was the Chromium Operating system that I had used during my last but one contract. The school had used Google Classroom extensively and each child was in possession of a Chromebook which ran Chromium. What was great was that a company called Neverware was offering the OS for home use completely free. Niiiccce! (exaggerated to mimick my ds when he is impressed with something).

So whilst I didn’t want to overhaul my old laptop I instead went on a mission to purchase an old laptop, wipe it clean and install Cloud Ready Chromium so that it becomes a Chromebook for my son’s school work.

Yesterday I went to an old pawn shop and located a relatively old computer ( 2011 Dell Latitude E6220 4GB RAM 250GB HDD notebook) second hand for £79.99. The previous owners had upgraded to Win 10 but the machine was running real slow and must have been riddled with malware. So with a strong cup of tea and moral support from my cheerleading son, I set to work to wipe clean its drive.

While I was waiting for this to be done (took a number of hours) I created a bootable usb with Chromium on. I used a Usb with 32GB data on but smaller ones would have been suffice to be fair.

I had to boot to the BIOS (F12 on this machine) and deselected everything else so that the machine could only boot from the usb. I then booted up the machine and installed Chromium.

By last evening I now have a cleaned up Chromebook (the old machine was minging with dried food etc caked in the keyboard and mouse pad) and it is from this machine that I am updating this blog.

I am so chuffed that instead of spending a few months trying to save up for a Chromebook at £150 minimum I now have quite a powerful little notebook for homework use on a machine which only set me back at just over half the price.

So mums and dads if you’ve grieved over your deceased Windows 7 machine which is more than 8 years old, incompatible with Windows 10, and have nothing to lose on the machine itself, definitely  upgrade to using something like Neverware’s Cloud Ready Chromium Chromebook. Home work can still be done using Google Drive and Docs/Sheets/Slides but you will save significant amount of dosh instead of investing in either a brand new laptop or new chrome book.

As my son would say, “Niiiiicce”

If you are anything like me then you will only now have noticed that your Google+ profile description has disappeared from the Blogger user profile.

Just had to quickly put something together while I was doing a little housekeeping on my Blog.

When you are in the bubble which is work-life-unbalance of a full time teacher, you note, through the haze of sleep, the numerous email warnings that Google provided regarding the death of Google+. I had loads but did not think it would have affected me so much because of the fact that I hardly used the platform.

It was only after I boosted my presence on Twitter that I remembered, “Oh gee! I haven’t posted to my blog for AGES!” and promptly took a look at my blog.

That’s when the shock hit me, my profile had disappeared! The offline job meant that it has taken me until 4 days into the Easter break, before I could update my blog…. to my shame!

So, this very short blog is to warn other bloggers that are on Blogger.com to check your profile out especially if you were previously linked to Google+.