Letter to Marlis February -March 2026

 

Bellbird Park, 9 April 2026

 

Hi Marlis,

 

I hope you are well and had a good Easter with the family, although not all at once 😊. You are certainly getting the cooler weather of the two of us, which must be nice after such a long and dry summer. I’ve had some pretty big adventures over the past two months, so here we go!

 

I am not including any pictures this time, sorry, my printer isn’t that great and I didn’t take many great pictures. I promise to bring them when I visit later this year.

 

Cambodia

What a cool trip it was! I had never expected that what started as a bit of fun in online teaching in 2019 would give me the opportunity to go to a different country and teach people about change management in 2026. I was there from Friday 13 to Sunday 22 March and ran two 3-day Change Fundamentals workshops for two groups of 30+ government, not for profit, education and industry professionals. I won’t bore you with the detail of what we covered exactly, safe to say it was a lot of smart change stuff and they loved it. And I loved it too!

 

I was there with Deakin University on behalf of the Australian government (DFAT), accompanied by our Lead Academic Dhara and semi-pensioner Michael, both associate professors in their field. Dhara was nice, be it a bit distracted and busy, but Michael and I got along very well and I really enjoyed working with him and learning more about his field of ethics and leadership. The three of us went for dinner nearly every night in different parts of the capital, Phnom Pehn, and over the week and a half I was there, I got to see a lot of the city and all its hustle and bustle.

 

On Tuesday and Wednesday, when we weren’t teaching, I got up early and worked my regular job, had some meetings and then went to see the sights like a real tourist. I went to see the Killing Fields memorial for the victims of the Pol Pot regime, which was very different from what I expected, it looked like a park more than anything else. But there was also S21 Prison, in the middle of the city, where 20,000+ people were tortured and killed by their own countrymen, and that place just felt evil. I wanted to leave as soon as I stepped inside the old school buildings they had converted to prisons. I don’t have to tell you about what people are capable of, but to see it for myself and hear/read the stories of things that happened months before I was born, is chilling.

 

It was important for me to see and witness that part of the country’s history and they’ve done a good job of sharing and coming to terms with what happened, but fortunately I also got to do a lot of fun things!

 

·      I went for walks every morning in this city that never sleeps, I think I walked a total of 75km while I was there. People mind their own business and I never felt unsafe; they appear too busy with their own affairs to pay much attention to others.

·      I visited the national museum, which wasn’t much to look at and kind of stuck in the 1980s, but I at least got an impression of the wonderful art and architecture of Angkor Wat, the famous ancient city 350km away that I will visit and explore with Yumi one day.

·      Also visited the national palace and some temples just because they were there, but they are quite literally everywhere and as I don’t have a lot of use for religion or monarchy, I left most of them for others to see and enjoy.

·      I went for a huge walk along the river, out of the main city, across the river to where most tourists don’t go and saw the city change from very clean, to very dirty, to something in the middle. This city will change so much in the next 10 years and you can feel it everywhere you go and everywhere you look. Good for them!

·      I went on a riverboat cruise, which wasn’t much of a cruise, more like a big circle on the river, but it was nice all the same to see the city from the water when all the lights come on. I had walked about 12km in 30+ degree temperatures, so it was good to sit down and let the breeze come in over the water.

·      I went to the Central Market, where I posted a card to you ( I hope it arrived by now), bought some crappy souvenirs and was amazed by how much stuff they can cram in a very small space. Imagine the Canberra Centre, but with 10x as many stores and 100x as many people, I don’t think you’d enjoy it. I ran into Louisa from Italy who I never met before. She needed some help finding a bookstore but couldn’t figure out how to get her phone GPS to work. She made me think of you, so I helped her navigate to the store as it was only 10 minutes out of my way and helped her a lot, so that was my good deed for the day done!

 

My hotel was very good, I had a very large room on the 8^th floor and could see most of the city from there, with construction going on everywhere and a whole Buddhist temple complex with 50 or so buildings and shrines outside my window. The weather was great (hot, but dry), the people very polite and friendly and everything so cheap that I simply couldn’t spend more that $30 per day even if I tried.

 

Traffic was also very interesting. There are so many tuktuk taxis and cars all jostling for position that you’d think there’d be accidents all the time, but everyone seems to know what to do. I guess it only looks like chaos to outsiders, haha. I figured out quickly that you should ignore the lights and just step into traffic. People will slow down or go around you, but if you don’t, you’ll be standing there for a long time because they don’t stop until they reach their destination.

 

The government team we worked with already told us they want us to come back and if I am available, I’d love to do this again, maybe in a different country. What an adventure!

 

Yumi’s job and activities

Yumi is busy as always. She went on a trip with her team to Roma and Charleville (500km west of Brisbane) to meet with community groups, service providers and even the mayor of Charleville for their Workforce project and had a very productive time of it. She gets along very well with her team and since the last letter I wrote, she hired two additional team members and collected even more projects that they are starting on.

 

So much has happened and has been built since she started in 2024, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the next two years are even bigger and better than the first two. She’s still got three more years in the contract, so let’s see how far she can run. She seems to be enjoying herself and I couldn’t be prouder of how much good she does for the mental health sector. My jobs are generally for businesses who just work for money (they say they don’t, but we all know that’s the #1 priority) while she and her team actually make the world a better place.

 

She’s still enjoying the dance groups she’s part of and with the third year of the Common People Dance Project starting in a few weeks, she’ll be dancing even more. I enjoy the Common People performances a lot more than the Choo La La performances, but I’ll be there anyway, it’s great to see how much fun she’s having!

 

Things are going well on the greyhound front too. Two weeks ago, we had 9 dogs come down from Rockhampton on a Saturday, that’s 9 dogs out of racing, so always a good day! Fun fact, the ACT has banned dog racing, yay! I hope other states will follow soon, but given it’s a billion dollar industry, it will be a while I think.

 

Fortunately, Yumi now has a coordinator-colleague in the North, Dee, who took care of the distribution of six of the doggos, so we only had to organise for three of them. One got picked up immediately when the trailer arrived, and the other two stayed with us overnight. The boy was fine, a gentle giant who was just out of racing and excited about everything. The girl was a bit more work and a very rare barking greyhound, which she demonstrated a few times throughout the night, haha. We know to ignore it, but let’s just say we both needed a nap later the next day. Dash also thought it was all a bit much, but he’s always very friendly and a good host. By the end of the morning, both dogs had gone on to their foster families and we could finally take a break too.

 

We spend last Saturday at a dog market (where you can learn more about the breeds and buy all sorts of stuff for your dogs) near the coast, which is always great. I stupidly got a bit sunburnt, but we all had a great time with the visiting greyhounds and all the other pooches walking by. This coming weekend we’re doing a Bunnings BBQ to raise funds for the charity, it’s a complete mess with getting things organised, so I am helping out where I can, but even I am getting confused with where all the materials are. Then again, we always seem to make it work, so why would this time be any different!?

 

Work update

In other news, for the first time in 28 years working, I was made redundant last week! It was the strangest thing really, but not a surprise. Before going to Cambodia, I had already discussed with my manager that I felt the organisation needed something else, more project than change based support, that I was there too early and they needed to do some other things first for me to do my best work. I am sure you’ve heard me say this before, it appears to be a theme in my career… I spoke to a few other people in the business and they all agreed with my assessment of the organisation, so I put together a plan that didn’t include me moving forward. I was planning to leave by end of May at the latest, but they didn’t wait that long.

 

We had just gone live that day with a project that had been six months in the works and a smaller project as well. One moment I am preparing a strategic plan for my manager, the next I am talking to the head of HR about how the business is letting my manager Chris, my last team member Marty and myself go effective immediately. Righto!

 

Fine by me, because this wasn’t going to end well anyway and I got paid until end of May, so I feel like it’s a fair deal, but handled a bit clumsily and with a weird sense of urgency. Well, that’s in the past now and one week later, I think this is the best possible outcome. I am proud of what I achieved and enjoyed working with the people, learned a lot and got to do most of the things I said I would do. These things happen, no big deal, I’ll take a break and get some other things done before moving on to the next thing, whatever that may be 😊.

 

The yard project - part 4

Speaking of getting things done, I’ve started on removing the strip of grass that simply wouldn’t grow because it sits under the roof overhang. We decided to fill the space with river pebbles, 5 tonnes of them apparently! The past few days I’ve been stripping back about 50m2 of grass around the house, which was hard but good work and I think for someone who isn’t a professional gardener, I did a pretty good job. I even put up some string to help me keep a straight line, immediately bagged all the dirt and sods and also fixed a patch that I hope will take well. I still hate gardening, but I think the end-result will look better and…less grass to mow, haha!

 

Next week will be the hard part where the pebbles arrive on Monday and I get to walk them into the yard. I could go with a wheelbarrow, but I don’t want to ruin the grass, so I am planning on using two buckets instead and do about 250 trips up and down the path and driveway until it’s all done. My poor legs are already quite sore from all the bending and squatting, only fair that my shoulders should get a bit sore as well. For once, I was smart in my planning and didn’t start the work before I had the Bunnings BBQ, because having sore muscles while standing for 8 hours selling sausages is not a happy day.

 

Lots of Small Things

It’s been s strange couple of weeks and I am still puzzling some of it together, so instead of writing a rambling account of everything I’ve been up to, here are some short notes to keep you up to date on what happened in our lives.

 

·      I’ve been getting so much done around the house in the first few days being unemployed! Fixed the fence in a few places, cleaned and meshed the gutters, cleaned my office, put new strips on our doors to keep the mice and snakes out and re-organised my tools, always so therapeutic!

·      Yumi had a 30cm Easter Brown in the house while I was away and they are seriously deadly. Even the young ones come out of the egg with enough venom to kill an adult. Fortunately one of my fire mates is a snake catcher, so it was caught and taken off within the hour and Dash got a trip to the vet only to find that he probably hadn’t even noticed and definitely wasn’t bitten. So glad we have insurance, because that test was $650, but after insurance only $130…)

·      The new car is doing great and with the whole fuel situation we’re having right now, it feels pretty good to drive electric. I checked and our fuel cost has gone down by 80%, yay!

·      Our June Japan trip is coming up and planning it has been a lot of fun, we have the tickets and accommodation sorted, by the time the next letter comes around I’ll tell you more about what we have planned.

·      I passed my second exam for Karate and am now the proud owner of the orange belt. Something has shifted for me for the better. I get less frustrated and enjoy it more. It’s almost been a year since I started and I only considered quitting 57 times so far, but I am still there twice a week and get a bit less bad at it every time.

·      All our family and friends are doing well, getting life done, finishing school for some of the kids, finding new jobs for the adults and my parents have multiple trips with the caravan planned, over the next few months, good for them, I am so glad they get to travel when they want now!

·      Its’ been quiet with the fires fortunately, giving us more time to train and practice. I’ve made a few proposals for how we can do things differently and introduced a phone group where we can share information and updates which seems to work very well. It can be a bit frustrating at times how slow things move, but the I remind myself it’s only volunteering and all is good with the world again.

·      I’ve been assigned a new mentee in the Mentoring program for the Change Management Institute and we’ll start running a few events soon, so that’s all kicking off too. I didn’t go to networking drinks at the end of March. I was just back from Cambodia and wanted to go to Karate and be at home with Yumi more than hang out with my Change friends, but there will be enough opportunities in the months to come, I am sure.

·      I’ve also signed up to help organise the seventh edition of the Australasian Change Days or ACDC as we jokingly call it. It’s become a fun group of friends who like to do good things for the community and I consider it a privilege to be part of it. It’s shaping up to be another good one and a good way to spend my time.

·      Over Easter Yumi and I started playing a video game together again, which has been years and I always enjoy it, even though she takes for-ev-er to make any decision, it’s a great way to spend time together. I had bought the game to play by myself, but realised a few hours in I would enjoy it more playing with her and fortunately she agreed to join in on the fun. As usual she’s the smart wizard and I am the dumb but mighty warrior, so we’re essentially playing out our real life, haha!

·      Our house apparently has gone up in value by 25%, which is always good news, but of course now we also get to pay 25% higher council rates... Oh well, it’s all fun and games on paper, we’ll see what happens when/if we sell in a few years from now. We’d still have to buy in the market then, so we’ll just keep saving and paying of the mortgage as fast as we can.

 

Okay, I think that’s most of what’s been going on for us. Be well, stay warm and safe, I’ll write again early June.

 

Gilbert

Letter to Marlis December- January 2026

 

Bellbird Park, 10 February 2026

 

Hi Marlis,

The new year sure is off to a flying start with heatwaves, bushfires, the US invading other countries (again), it’s enough to turn off the news and just listen to music on the radio! I hope you got to spend a lot of time in the garden, away from all the excitement, just getting along with the plants and the birds😊. I have lots of adventures to share from the past two months, so I’ll dive straight in.

 

Car troubles

We were almost ready to go on holiday up North with our trusty Ford Escape (who we call Eski) and then she developed issues with the engine. It was all downhill from there. First, we brought her to a service garage, but they couldn’t find anything, then we brought her to a ‘real’ repair shop and they found it was a leaking head gasket.

 

This is bad news on the best days, because the whole engine head needs to come off to fix it and then you still have to figure out what was actually broken to make it leak. All in all, it was going to cost $6-8,000, possibly more. She was only 8 years old and we bought her practically new, so we were not expecting this at all. A mechanic friend of ours said it would be smarter to write her off, so instead of the $12,000 that she would be worth if her engine was fine, we got $1,250 for the recycling parts. Ouch. And then we forgot to ask for the plates, so the wrecker got the money for the rego that we’d already paid, boo! Oh well, lesson learned, but I hope we never have to go through this again.

 

It was quite emotional for us as we’ve had a lot of adventures with Eski and she’s always served us well. I’ve spent so much time in her driving to and from work, on holidays, volunteer events, day trips and driving around greyhounds to their new homes. I did get to drive her onto the tow truck myself, but it was a sad Friday, and I was sad for the whole following week too.

At the same time, we had to find a replacement vehicle and my heart was not in it at all. Fortunately, Yumi had her mind set on an Electric Vehicle (EV) for a while and had looked around for what was available. I wasn’t very excited about the whole process and the amount of money they cost because everyone wants one now. An average model easily goes for 40, 50 or even $60,000 new. No thanks! We landed on a Build Your Dreams, the Atto 3 model for a much friendlier price of $33,000 for the 2023 model. It’s only 2.5 years old and has 16,000km on the odometer, so we feel it’s a pretty good deal.

 

Like most EVs, it’s from China and gets the best reviews from all the car review magazines. We’ve called it Zappy and it is a very fun car to drive, be it a bit smaller than Eski and almost completely quiet, because there is no engine, just a big battery! It has incredible acceleration, so now we’re constantly watching our speed, but all the funky new technology helps. It also comes with a full sunroof, many safety features (so many!) and the best part is that ‘fuelling up’ with electricity costs a few dollars, instead of the $70-80 every week, nice!

 

 

 

 

Then we brought our other car in for a service and found out it needed new brakes, new tyres, new sparkplugs and a few other things to the tune of $2,400. Sigh… we thought it would be just an oil change and a few other bits! We want to keep Polly (It’s a small Volkswagen Polo) in good repair, as he will not be making as many kilometres as before, now that we’ve swapped cars again. Yumi drives Zappy to work, but because we had one car for a month or so, I have started cycling to the train station again and found it’s actually just as fast as driving and I can be there in 11 minutes and get a bit of a workout. Not too big of a workout though, it’s an e-bike, so the electromotor does most of the work, haha.

 

Solar Batteries

Since last year we’ve been looking to get a solar battery installed, because we have so many solar panels that generate a lot of electricity. When the unexpected cost of the new car came around, we weren’t sure we’d go ahead, but I ran the numbers and our plans should all still work out, so we’re getting them in May-ish of this year.

 

We’ve experienced a few power outages over the past year, three or four I think, with one lasting nearly 20 hours and those batteries will be able to power our whole house for 3-4 days or even up to 6 if we only use what we really have to. There are some government grants available too and with the additional charger for the car, it’s not cheap at just under $20,000 but it will increase the value of the house and also give us the reassurance that everything will keep running, no matter what happens.

 

Thanks to smart technology that comes with it, you can even make money selling back electricity to the grid. My friend Michael has had them for about a year now and uses 10 times more energy than us (they have a pool, 2 kids, 2 EVs) but still only pays $3/month. That’s right, three whole dollars per month. He calculated they’d recover the investment in 4-5 years, which will be longer for us, but it’s nice knowing we’re getting all this clean energy from the sun, without burning fossil fuels.

 

Painting the fence

Oh my goodness, what a project it was to paint the fence. All 85 meters of it, some parts even 3 times! I did it in the week of Christmas, because I worked until the 20^th and the weather was going to be bad from the Wednesday, so I started on Saturday and spent 3 days and twice the amount of paint I thought I would. I used a battery powered spray gun and it worked very well, aside from having to change the battery every 15 minutes or so. Good thing I have 7 from all the different appliances!

 

 

 

 

I could work from 6 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon and then it would be so hot (37 degrees) that the paint would instantly dry in the spray gun nozzle, so that made it easier to just stop and cool down inside. I could have continued with a brush, but the spray gun is so much faster and 7 hours of non-stop painting is a lot! I think I drank 5-6 litres of water every day, next time I’ll do this in any other season but Summer!

 

The last day, the temperature had dropped considerably and the rain didn’t come, so all of a sudden it went twice as fast, which was exactly the boost I needed, because I was pretty much over everything to do with paint by then. The end result is pretty good, if I say so myself. There are a few spots that will need a touch up, but for a first time, I think I did a good job.

  

Yeppoon Holiday

Our holiday to Rockhampton and Yeppoon was a good time away. We had to get a rental car that would fit everything, so we hired a Nissan Xtrail and drove in comfort for the two weeks we were there, with enough space for Dash to move around in the back seat.

 

We stayed at a horse farm, that’s somehow only had 2 horses and 1 pony, and enjoyed the peace and quiet in our very comfortable shed-house or shouse as they called it. It had everything we needed; a decent bed and good water pressure and the internet speed was better than what we get at home, haha.

 

 

We didn’t get up to much, although I drove to the beach every morning to walk and practice my karate moves. The beach was long enough to walk for an hour  one-way, but I only walked half of that every day, going back in time to pick up Yumi and Dash for the morning walk. The sunrises were worth the early start and it didn’t surprise me to see 20-30 people there with me, all with their own thoughts, their dog and the waves.

 

Nothing really happens in Yeppoon, which suited us just fine and the weather was good, so we hung out around the house, read a lot, slept some more, went on a few daytrips to local landmarks and not much else. We did visit the Love A Greyhound facility in Rockhampton where Yumi’s ‘boss’ Jo lives. It was great to see the whole setup with the kennels and the doggos looking very well taken care of.

 

We decided to come home a few days earlier to relax some more at home, which suited Dash just fine too. We took our time on the way back, stopping every few hours to give Dash a walk, get some food and just enjoy the day, which was really nice. Yumi organised trivia for the last 3 hours and those flew by! We’ve now come to realise that Dash would much rather just be at home, surrounded by his own things and familiar smells, so for our next trip, we’ll find a good dog/house sitter and leave him at home while we travel, a better experience for everyone!

 

 

New lawnmower and snipper

I finally buckled and bought a fuel-powered lawn mower and a much more powerful whipper snipper. With the grass the way it is, the electric one just didn’t cut it (pun intended) and the lighter whipper snipper was also struggling. The new tools rip straight through and what used to be a 2+ hour job, I can now get done in just under an hour. I still hate mowing the lawn, but there’s much less time spent grumbling about it for sure 😊.

 

When we got back early from holidays the grass has grown quite a bit, so I got into it with the old Ozito electro lawnmower and just like with the previous one, one of the wheels broke at the axle, but this one also decided to completely fall apart on the side where you adjust the height. Ozito is notorious for not having spare parts, so I just cracked it and brought them straight to the recycling centre and bought the new gear. I thought it was going to be a hassle with the fuel and oil, but it’s not any harder than maintaining chainsaws and I know how to do that!

 

The whipper snipper is a serious piece of powerful equipment that gets quite heavy after a while but man does it get the job done. Yumi has started helping out with yard work, which is great, but we might have to switch roles because this one is quite the workout on your arms and back, but so is the mower which ways 4x as much as the old one, but I am hoping that means it will not break so easily.

 

New garden stairs

In yet other garden news, we also had the garden stairs replaced. The previous ones were really on their last legs and very wobbly already, so we got Dave the Carpenter to come in across 7 days and build us a new one out of the same timber the front fence is made of. It will probably outlast the house and us, but no one will fall off it and it will not wobble with even the heaviest load. Another plus is that now they are finally angled straight towards the hous instead of the previous ones, which were oddly angled off to the left, but now that they are gone, it’s hard to imagine what was there before.

 

The grass is doing quite well, with very few weeds and as long as I mow it every week in summer, it’s not to bad. With the fence painted and the stairs done, it’s starting to look nice. We still have the plants to do and will probably have to cut out some of the dead grass and replace it with pebbles under the roof overhang because nothing wants to grow there, not even weeds!

 

 

 

 

Holiday plans

This year Yumi and I are getting serious about planning our free time. With the busy lives we both have, holidays have been a thing on the to-do list that keeps getting pushed back until another year is gone and we’ve not moved one step beyond Queensland.

 

In early June we plan to go to Japan to visit Osaka and Kyoto, a mix of history and modern culture for 10 days. I’ve wanted to go back to Japan for a long time after visiting Tokyo in 2016. Yumi’s mum is from Osaka, so that’ll be extra special to see where she grew up even though it will be very different from the 1950s and 1960s of course. I get excited just thinking about it, especially because it’s not very far away on the calendar and only a 9-hour flight with a minimal time difference, so we get to enjoy more of our holiday without jet-lag.

 

The plan was then to also go to the Netherlands in September, but it just didn’t work with the schedules. We also thought to switch Japan and the Netherlands, but that didn’t work too. My parents had already booked their holidays for the year and we’ve got work/sport/volunteering/house things going on as well. It doesn’t help that in the holiday periods everything doubles or triples in price on both sides and the weather in October/November in the Netherlands isn’t great either. Next year perhaps!

 

Now we’re looking at Fiji, or New Zealand, or Vanuatu, and I hope we get to do some scuba diving together again, those were always the best trips! By the time I write you again, we’ll have a plan 😊.

 

Cambodia trip

I’ll be going to Cambodia from 13-22 March to deliver two three-day change management workshops with Deakin Business School. We’ll be a team of three lecturers working with two groups of 30 people, all professionals who studied in Australia at some point. I think it will be great fun and such a cool opportunity! As usual, the Australian government is taking forever to get things sorted, but we’ve got a high-level plan of what we want to teach and who does what.

 

McNab (my actual job)  has been very supportive, which is great of them, especially my manager immediately said yes, which he really didn’t have to. I will arrive in Phnom Phen (the capital) on Friday the 13^th, then we work Saturday, Sunday Monday, I’ll work for my real job on Tuesday and Wednesday (only a 3-hour time difference), then the second group on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and on Sunday I’ll fly back to be back in Brisbane from 6.30am on Monday.

 

I think I’ll just stay in the city and see what tourist-like things I can do in the afternoons and evenings. I considered going to see Angkor Wat, a world-famous temple complex, but it’s 350km and a 6-hour car-ride on-way, which I wouldn’t want to do by myself anyway. If I go to see it, it’ll be with Yumi.

 

Work

I’ve been keeping busy at work over the Christmas period and start of the new year. Things are finally starting to pick up some pace and I am keen to get into the details with the business. However, my manager is telling us to go slow and I think he ‘reads the room’ very well, so we’ll do as he asks and go slowly-slowly. I’ve built most things that we need by now and have been involving the team every step of the way, so to me it’s just a matter of pressing play and we’re ready to go.

 

I don’t mind having a team of people to lead, but am also not really enjoying it yet. We’re very much in the stage of everyone finding out how everyone else works and everyone’s busy, so it will take a while for things to come together. I might soon be hiring an additional person on the team, so then we’ll be five and if I get my way, by the end of the year we’llbe seven or maybe even nine, depending on how much change they really want to get done.

 

What I’ve come to see is that everyone loves the concept of change, but the actual work involved in getting to that better outcome, that’s not nearly as exciting. I understand that very well and there’s no point in pushing people beyond their limits, so we’ll manage expectation, as we like to say in the change profession, and see how much we can get done this year.

The past few months a lot of new people (including me) have joined and everyone (but not me) wants to share their ideas and opinions. I quietly got involved in a few projects, started testing some tools and frameworks and kept my head down and busy while everyone else was making noise. Things are much calmer now and in a few weeks the plans for the year will be done, projects will  start to get delivered and then things will slowly fall into place. It really is a marathon and not a sprint!

 

Yumi’s work and volunteering

Yumi got a promotion at work, which is funny because I predicted it during our holiday and the Monday after we started work she came home and shared that she’ll go into a more strategic role immediately. She will still be leading her team (half the small organisation reports to her already) but they’ll hire a new person to take on some of her work, so she has time for the bigger picture items.

 

I worry that she’s already very busy, but this is how she wants to do things and it is her work, so I just try to support her where possible because we’re team 😊. She’s going on a weeklong trip to the Western part of Queensland, near Roma, at the beginning of March, to meet local mental health service providers and meet some of the organisation’s members. Fortunately they are flying, because it’s a 5-hour drive one-way.

 

It’s been blessedly calm(er) with the greyhound fosters and adoptions now that a new coordinator has joined the team and that lady is just as action-oriented as Yumi, so things get done quickly. We also spent about 6 hours on Dash’s birthday (Australia Day) doing an inventory of all the dog-related items we have at home for the charity, which fills a complete room by now. Last week we went on a greyhound walk and there were a record 17 dogs. That’s a lot of tails and snoots! I think there’s an event at a pet store next weekend and a charity BBQ soon as well, but I’ll wait to see if I need to help out with any of that, always on standby.

 

 

Rural Fire Service

A small team of my firefighting mates and me are planning to organise a renovation in our fire station to create dressing rooms so we don’t have to take our fire gear home to store it. I’ve made an inventory and did some measurements and once management has had a look at the plan, I hope we can get started. Even if we end up not going ahead, it will give us a chance to do a very thorough clean of a lot of the spaces. I counted how many bottles of (donated) water we have and it’s over 3,000. Enough to give every active firefighter 10 bottles every month for at least 18 months. It takes up so much space we can’t put anything else there. I have a plan to get rid of it, or at least store it all in one place.

 

We (surprisingly) also were allowed to start a group chat on our phones where we can share pictures, tips and stories about fires and other activities. It took forever, but finally I just said I would do it and it was done in 24 hours and now we’re having a lot of fun with it during and after training nights.

 

It’s been quiet with the fires, only a few small ones that were quickly under control and I hope it stays that way in the next few months. I am also hoping to progress in my training this year, but like everything in the fire service, it takes forever to get organised, so I am keeping my expectations low 😊.

 

Small things

·      6 February marked 12 years in Australia for us, wow time has flown by, but I think I say that every year. We went out for diner to celebrate and the Japanese food wasn’t very special, but we had fun reliving some of the memories and listing all the adventures we’d been on and plan to go on in the years to come.

·      Karate practice continues as well, I don’t always feel like going, but if I can get out of my own way, I actually enjoy the training. It’s been 9 months now and become part of my life, just a thing I do (badly) on Monday and Wednesday. In a few weeks I might grade for my second belt, the orange one this time, but there is some more work to do.

·      Works is ramping up for the Australasian Change Days, or ACDC 2026 as we call it. We’re a team of 5 this time, with one previous team member from Melbourne joining again ad it will be great fun to get things organised before we deliver a three-day spectacular in August!

·      Book sales for my new book have been okay so far, with 57 copies sold, but 43 to go until I hit the 100 mark. After that I consider it a success and will move on to other projects. I still want to do a card game and the idea of offering an online course will not leave me alone!

·      Dash gave me a good scare a few days ago. We were on an early morning walk (5.15am) and he had just done a bit of running around in an open field. I was about to connect his lead and collar when he spotted a hare taking off and that’s when I saw him run faster than ever before. He didn’t get it, but he was gone and out of sight within 20 seconds. I ran after him, but despite him being 8 years old now, I think he easily went 65-70km an hour. Good thing there were no roads or cars nearby! When we got home, he was sore for the next two days and couldn’t even jump into the car, but I am sure he’s had many dreams since then of the hare he almost caught.

·      Our neighbours who were planning to move to America have now moved to the Sunshine Coast instead (he will continue the business by flying up and down). Seeing how much junk came out of that house I was amazed they could even fit in there, haha. The house and yard look the best I’ve seen since we moved here, let’s hope our new neighbours are just as quiet and friendly.

·      The volunteering with the Change Management Institute is about to kick-off with a very busy year. We had a team lunch on Sunday the 8^th and plans were made, so let’s see what we can organise for the community this year. 11 February is Global Change Management Day, no idea who decided that, but I’ll be sure to wear extra festive socks that day!

·      I got another certificate done to stay up to date, this time it was my Change Management Master accreditation which proves that I actually know what I am talking about. It’s part of my experiment where I now have one from the Change Management Institute and will get another from the Association of Change Management Professionals and then compare the differences. I have lots of opinions on accreditation and certificates, but thought that if I have opinions, I should at least have done it for myself 😊

 

Okay, that’s it for now I think, I’ll write again once I am back from Cambodia and back at work in early April, be well and stay cool until the Cold Snap shows up!

 

Gilbert

 

 

 

 

 

Bellbird Park, 11 December

 

Hi Marlis,

I hope you are getting to enjoy being outside a bit more now that Summer is on the way. We’ve already had our first few heat waves and it’s looking like another hot week coming our way. It looks like I didn’t take many interesting pictures this time, so this letter has no pictures and just words, sorry!

Like with most letters a lot has happened over the past few months, so let’s get right into it, shall we?

 

New job

I’ve been in the new job at McNab Construction for about 2 months now and it’s surely been a whirlwind! My official title is Change and Business Improvement Team Lead, which is ridiculously long, so I just say Change Lead.

I’ve been to the Toowoomba office (100km to the west), The Gold Coast office (100km to the South), visited two of our other businesses and six building sites, attended a ground breaking/sod turn (lots of shovels and pictures) and met at least 200 people of whom I remember maybe 50 names...

I have a team of three to look after, Jess (39), Marty (64) and Greg (53). We’re all coming at change and business improvement from different angles, but we’ll figure it out. It’s a bit of an adjustment to lead a team again, but fortunately they are all grown-ups and experienced so it’s more a matter of getting comfortable with each other, building trust and collaboration.

Our job is to support the business with the strategic plans and projects they want to run to do things better or differently. The challenge is that when I started there were a number of empty positions that needed to be hired, like the Chief Operations Officer (my manager), the Chief Technology Officer, a Legal person, a Robotics person and about 12 others, so all these new people and me are hitting the business at the same time. Everyone is genuinely friendly and helpful, but I can easily imagine them getting a bit tired of all the new faces and big ideas they want to get started on.

I just do what I always do, create more clarity through structure, models, frameworks and templates, always good to have for when things kick off in the new year. Our CEO was very clear to the whole organisation about not starting new initiatives until the new year. This was right after I started, but he did explain the first few months would be ‘rocky’ and so far it’s indeed been an adjustment, which is management speak for: “Not sure that I want to do this, but let’s see what happens”. For me it’s mostly that I am not sure I like leading a team, perhaps I am better as an individual contributor. In the previous role with Lactalis I had prepared and helped run a complete system introduction, so that’s what I am comparing it too, which isn’t quite the same of course, this will be a job for the long run.

I thought I would have to toughen up a lot of the change management language I normally use, thinking that these builders and tradies are all rough and tough, but the exact opposite is true! They want us to really focus on the peoples’ experience and consider the organisation 5 years from now, which is very rare and a welcome change from how these things usually go. Let’s see how it all works out, when we get back in the new year.

I might have mentioned it before, but the new office is just 200 meters away from the Lactalis office where I was until August this year. I know the neighbourhood really well, have my favourite routes for when I take a break and go for a walk and I get to walk from the city across the river most days. That’s always a nice start to the day, even when the weather isn’t great. There’s always something to see and it keeps me fitter than just walking from the train station, which is only 5 minutes away from the office.

 

Yumi’s work and dancing

Yumi has been busy at work as always. They keep coming up with good ideas and getting funding for them, so her team is pretty busy and is always on the verge of expanding with new team members. At some point she’ll have half the organisation reporting to her! She went to Melbourne on a short two-day trip a few weeks ago and even if she grumbles about being away from home (mostly being away from Dash😊), she’s really good at networking and always comes back with new ideas and things to experiment with.

Her next dance performance with the Choo La La ladies is on 20 December, so I get to sit through that awkwardness once again, but she has some much fun with the whole thing I am always happy to go and see what they’ve come up with this time. I like her other dance group better because it’s so over the top and outrageous to watch. And everyone keeps their clothes on (mostly) which is always a plus, haha.

 

The Yard Project

Last time I wrote you, the soil and grass had just gone in and since then we’ve run about 30,000 litres of water through it all and I don’t know how much weedkiller. Despite the extremely dry weather since, all that water kept 85% of the grass alive, so there’s only a few dead patches that need to be scooped out when the weather cools down.

It’s very much a first world problem, but oh man do I hate mowing the lawn, every.single.week. Aaaaargh. But…I bought four additional batteries for the electric mower and now I can do it all in one go and be done with it, which makes it slightly better, but still two hours of my life I don’t get back every week. I could of course pay someone to do it, but that thought annoys me even more, so I grumble my way through it every week and get a bit faster every time. It’s just so much grass, and it keeps growing!!

All grumbling aside, it is a massive improvement to what the yard used to be and we think everyone in the neighbourhood is quietly following along how we’re going with it all. When they walk past some just nod in appreciation and others want to know how much it cost, if we’re happy with the gardener we worked with and what weedkiller I use to keep it so neat. It’s not quite where I want it to be just yet, but it’s really hard to kill nutgrass and because we watered the grass so much, the weeds also get all the nutrients. Sometimes I step back and wonder about how I’ve become this person, someone who thinks about weeds, garden hoses and fertiliser too much. I am sure I am being punished for something I did in a previous life! 😊

This week we’re getting the very rickety garden stairs replaced with properly made timber stairs from the same materials as the front fence (Merbau timber) and I hope it’ll look really good. Surely that’s it then for the yard for a while, right?! Wrong! Now I finally get to paint the whole fence (all 60 meters of it, twice and half of it on two sides, yay! Strangely enough it’s something I actually look forward to. I bought a battery powered paint spray gun, and Yumi and I decided on a specific colour of grey we both liked. Now I just need to wait for the Christmas break and three days of dry weather to get the job done. After all that, it’s time for the plants to go in, but that will be in  Autumn to give them a fair chance to settle in. Yumi has big plans, but somehow I feel I will be the one who ends up digging a lot of holes. I hope the end result will be worth it.

Greyhound things

Late Spring and Summer is when the big flies come out here, and Dash is terrified of them. Then there’s the late-night thunderstorms which scare him equally bad. Whenever that happens he just doesn’t want to go outside the next morning. It’s so sad and we feel really bad for him. He just turns into a 35kg puppy who wants to hide in his bed and there I am, making him come outside to go for a walk.

He’s usually fine once he’s outside and better when it’s Yumi and me walking him, but when there’s a big fly buzzing around or trying to land on him, he goes into a panic and starts snapping at the air to try and eat it. Even after he gets it, he just wants to go home right away. I try to calm him down and keep on walking because he's never actually been stung since he joined our family, so I hope at some point he realises that it’s not as scary as he thinks, but it might never happen. Poor guy, I wish there was a way to explain it to him ☹.

 We had Evie the 9-year old greyhound come and visit for a few days and she was right at home once again. Dash didn’t mind her too much, she’s stayed with us before for a few days and he’s always such a good host. She steals all his toys, sleeps on his beds and gets in his way, but he takes it all in stride and mostly just ignores her. Her foster parents had to visit family in NSW and when they came to pick her up you could hear Dash breathe a sigh of contentment and relief from the comfort of his own bed, haha.

Yumi had to deal with lots of mini-dog dramas too. Dogs getting bitten, a dog losing her tail getting caught in a car window, dogs not working out with families, one ate rat poison (twice!), one having to be rehomed because of family issues, all that stuff. But there have also been a lot of adoptions and new fosters, so the dog business is keeping on keeping on! A few weeks ago, we must have had a record 14 greyhounds join on the greyhound walks one of her friends organises every two weeks, that sure was a lot of tails and happy doggo grins!

 

The new book

I might have mentioned it before, but I’ve written a second book and after many, many, many rounds of changes it’s now out in the world. 10 Years Writing About Change is very different from Bad Change, and mostly a gift to myself for being in business for myself for the past 10 years. The hardest part is always the promotion and continuously having to remind people that the book is for sale, I am not particularly good at it, so it costs double the energy to get it done every week. You’d think I’d be more excited about it and I am, but it’s also just another book on Change and I wrote and shared all the content over the past 10 years already, so it’s not as new to me as it might be to others  So far, I’ve sold 50 copies for charity, which doesn’t seem like a lot, compared to the 1,100 copies Bad Change has sold, but any self-published book that sells more than 100 copies is considered to be doing really well, So I am on the right track.

I joined in on a book fair a few weeks ago, as a combined event between the International Association of Business Communicators and the Change Management Institute. No wonder we go by the acronyms IABC and CMI, haha, those names are so long! It was a panel of 4 other writers and me, answering questions about what it’s like to write books and what tips we had for aspiring writers and of course people could buy some books at the end. I even sold a few copies of both books and made some new friends, so that’s a good night in my book.

 Funny thing was, I had ordered a bunch of the more affordable and slightly less glossy US version of the book (somehow you can’t print standard quality in Australia, don’t ask…) and they were supposed to arrive well on time before 27 November, the night of the event. Then I got a message they would arrive on 1 December and I was like “Okay, it is what it is”. So I sold out at the book fair, come home late that night and what’s there waiting for me? Exactly! The books had arrived that afternoon… Oh well, I’ll have enough copies to give away to friends like you! I don’t expect you to read it, but wanted you to have one as we’ve been friends for 10 years too this year. I think I started visiting in June 2015, so it’s about six months overdue, sorry!

 

Change Management Institute

It’s been a busy few months events-wise. We had a morning event, networking drinks, a weekend event, the book fair and the mentoring program was also wrapping up. 2025 has certainly been the busiest year for the Queensland community. Oh, and I got a very heavy glass Change Leader award for being one of the three Australian Change Leaders for 2025. Always nice to get some love from the community, but still feel weird getting awards, so I just say thank you and get on with my day.

We have even bigger plans for 2026, getting out to Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Toowoomba, maybe even Rockhampton if we can make it work. I think that is important because the CMI team and I are CMI Queensland, not just CMI Brisbane and we hope to inspire some people to join our team as the regional connections. It’s very simple on paper, but in practice it takes a lot of organising and chasing people.

I’ve decided to finally get my CMI Change Master accreditation (it’s 50% discounted for CMI volunteers, so that’s nice!). After filling out some forms and getting two references to support me, I now have an interview on Sunday 22 December and I think there’s one more step after that, but I’ll see what happens. I think I’ll be fine and once I have this one, I’ll do the other big one, which is from a similar professional body in the United States, called ACMP (the name is too long to spell out, trust me). After that I can finally say I’ve done all the major ones and have an informed opinion. I can already tell the process is very different. The CMI one is all about evidence and interaction, the ACMP one is essentially a multiple-choice test based on their body of knowledge (a book). I expect that by the time I write you again, I’ll have one and perhaps have started on the other. Not sure if I’ll be much smarter when it comes to change but I’ll have a shiny certificate to prove that I know what I am doing.

 

Rural Fire Service

It’s been quiet with fires in our area after a very busy period in October and a wet end to November but this weekend we got to go out in force to a mid-sized fire that had kicked off on Thursday, got put down quickly, but flared right up across 150 metres of bush away from most people on Saturday. We had good fun with water, blowers and rakes for about 5 hours, putting it out and then making sure it wouldn’t get back up again. Learned a few things, stood around and chatted for most of it, which was nice, because 32 degrees is too hot for wearing all our gear and getting in front of flames.

We had a great response time too, because we were at the station with about 10 firefighters doing some mowing, grounds maintenance, cleaning and organising before we go to reduced capacity for the next 5 weeks over Christmas. It’s likely we’ll come in any way, because school holidays mean higher fire danger and the temperatures will go up as well. We’re trying a roster to keep our vehicles ready to go, but it’s a bit hard on the people who have been there for 10 plus years and have seen that being tried and not work. Me and a few newer members (all been there 2+ years too) are willing to give it a crack, otherwise everything will always stay the way it was. Sometimes we talk too much and do too little, but not while I am there, ha!

Early November we got to visit the Airforce base nearby (two of our members are professional firefighters there) for a demonstration of their equipment. They have some pretty awesome tools and vehicles. Their fire trucks are specifically built for airplane fires and are like our trucks on steroids. We carry 2,000 litres of water, they carry 11,000. We can empty a tank in 13 minutes, they can do it in 2 minutes. Our truck has 4 wheels that come to my thigh, theirs have 8 which are nearly 2 metres tall. The coolest part is their water cannon that can reach over 100 meters far and 50 meters high. We’d be lucky to get 20-25 on a good day. Everything is just superpowered and extra big, which is just the best. We all turned into little girls and boys 😊 They were super nice too, taking us through their procedures and equipment. I thought it was going to be a bit boring, but it was great fun and I learned a lot about other ways to fight different kinds of fire. Not that we’re likely to ever do that, but still good to know.

 

Short things

·      I just finished another round of grading student papers for the Change tools course and there might be some changes coming for that collaboration with Deakin University. It’s been running for 5 years now and I always expect it to end, but it keeps getting renewed each year. Just this week I was talking to them about delivering some online work with a group in Cambodia, which sounded interesting. More about that in the next letter.

·      Karate is going okay. I am not making as much progress as I would like and I get so frustrated being told I need to go faster, but when I do, I get told to do it better. On good days I just laugh and keep going, on not so good days I wonder why I show up for this twice a week. I am about to hit 30 lessons with my yellow belt which means I am technically ready for the next orange belt, but I feel like I might as well wear yellow the rest of 2026. I said I’d give it a year and we’re only 7 months in, but at this rate I don’t know if I’ll continue beyond that.

·      For the Christmas break we’re going to Rockhampton and spend some time on the coast and in the bush, without any actual camping. It’ll be good to get on the road again and see some different scenery. We’ll also stop by Yumi’s greyhound charity boss who lives up there with her 5 greyhounds, husband and however many greyhounds happen to be in the kennels, so that’ll be fun for Dash too. Yumi also somehow managed to make a work appointment… We don’t get up there very often so it’s all good, I know a few change people there so might take the opportunity to see them too.

·      We went to a concert by a country/folk/rock band called the Dead South from the US in the Brisbane Riverstage Musci Bowl. It was very, very good and they sounded almost exactly like the cd, haha. They are my kind of music, but Yumi went along anyway. It had been 28 years that we went to an actual concert as we both don’t like big crowds, so it was a real night out and good fun with great music. The average age was probably 40-45, so no dramas or lots of drunk people, just solid music one song after the other, we should really do this more often!

·      We’re thinking of getting a solar battery installed in the new year. With the Queensland sun being out most days, it means we’ll be fully independent for electricity and can even sell back power to the grid. My friend Michael had one installed a while back at apparently it only takes a day to get it all sorted and set up. We might also pre-install a battery charger for an electric vehicle. Not that we’re planning to buy one soon, but we might in the future and then it’ll be a hassle to get it added. I’ll know more the next time I write.

·      Family and friends are all doing well, getting ready for a new year and rushing to the end of the new one. Nothing to exciting, which is exactly how we like it 😊.

·      Okay, I think that’s it for now, not such a long letter as last time, but work has been busy with me being all over the place and getting up to speed with things. Next time I’ll be more settled in and we’ll see what has happened by then.

Have a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year, I will call you to say just that on Christmas Day when taking a break from painting my fence!

 

Be well,

Gilbert