A Time of Magic

I’ve just completed my modern languages degree and, frankly, am still quite staggered at having done such a thing because I would never have believed anyone who ‘d said even 10 years back that I’d have such a degree.

Yet, it’s seemed a relatively doable (though not easy!) thing for me and just kind of crept up on me over the last seven years and I still get the French Diploma from four years ago out now and again to look at it.

How come? Well, I did it as a part-time distance learning degree via the Open University. That let me do one course a year over seven years (it’s possible to do it full-time in three) and gave me a diploma in French after the first three courses and another in Spanish after the second three.

It’s not easy by any means as it’s very definitely degree level study. However, it is very much doable and I was able to fit all but the level 3 courses into my life relatively easily. Bear in mind too that I’m not really what I’d call a linguistics person so if the subject were more in line with my personal interests it would have been much more doable I think.

When I reached the end of the course I thought that I’d have a look around to see what might be around to follow on with my educational hobby and the educational landscape has, of course, changed drastically since I started some seven years back. Then courses basically came in a big box and consisted of, for the languages, a piles of cassette tapes, video tapes, CDs, work books and so on. Nowadays, the videos come on DVD and some of the workbooks are implemented in software via the DVD too and, of course, every course comes with an online element.

What’s also evident is that there are a lot more universities around offering distance learning courses and the list includes some heavy-hitters. However, the landscape is bumpy to say the least. For instance, Harvard’s contribution is via their extension school and seems markedly inferior to Yales’s contribution (although, sadly, Yale don’t currently give course credit for the course materials they make available).

It is clear that a lot of universities are getting a toe in this market and that can only be for the good of all of us who are interested in education at university level in the years to come.

Over the last four or five years we’ve both put on far more weight than we wanted to and are hoping to make a start on getting it off as part of our transition to a new lifestyle we’ll be getting started on in the new year.

The snag is that it’s hard to know where to start. Ideally we’d not have dropped out of our exercise programme as getting back into it will be hard enough going with the combination of all that extra weight that we’re lugging around and the lack of muscle to haul it about thanks to the relatively sedentary lifestyle we’ve had over the last few years.

So, we have started looking at fat burners like Apidexin to jumpstart our move to being properly healthly once more. Snag is that we’re a little worried about effectively getting add icted to this approach which we’re sure wouldn’t be a great move.

Just as people have various dietary deficiencies, so too do their pets.

That, of course, makes for a growing range of pet supplements which offer a similar range for your pet as the corresponding dietary supplements do for you. In fact, in practical terms, the biggest difference in them is the delivery method used: t’ain’t easy to get a dog to take a tablet so the vitamins and whatnot are included in various biscuits and the like.

The other difference is that they’re, currently, a whole lot cheaper than the corresponding diet supplements that are available for people. Somehow, I can’t see that remaining the case forever though as sooner or later the fashion element will likely increase the range and attractiveness of these things.