Hi Marlis,
Hope you are
doing well in chilly Canberra with those sub-zero temperatures, brrrrr, not
quite there yet in Melbourne, but getting close 😊
It’s been a
very eventful two months again so let’s get right into it!
My dad’s leg
is slowly healing
It’s taking a
bit longer than he would like (which would be 3 days instead of 3 months), but
my dad’s leg is finally starting to improve. It’s taking quite long for the
bone to grow together, but he’s no spring chicken anymore of course. The
prognosis is looking good though and he gets to leave his bed a bit more often moving
around with crutches. In two weeks from now he’ll be able to put all his weight
on it again and in in the meantime he has discovered Netflix (Internet tv, with
lots of options), so that’ should keep him occupied for a while longer. He
might never be able to walk without a cane, but we’ll get him one of those
gentlemanly ones, with a hidden sword inside in case he gets attacked by a
horde of ninjas. Best to joke about it, not much else we can do anyway.
Yumi’s work
Yumi has been
crazy busy, travelling interstate to Sydney, Canberra and across Victoria as
well. It even looks like Perth in October is in the cards now too. I got to go
with her as her driver one time and spent a beautiful day by myself on the
Mornington Peninsula while she was being an expert on a panel of smart people.
It was a perfectly sunny Autumn day, just me and my laptop on the beach with
the colourful beach houses, the occasional dogwalkers and the ocean. She’s
becoming quite the celebrity in the disability sector and gets asked to come
and speak about doing things in different and better ways so frequently now
that she has to start scheduling around it. I could not be prouder of her and
her dedication and smarts. Just the other day she was asked to advise one of
the biggest consultancy firms in the country how to run their multimillion
dollar contract for the government. How’s that for being a real expert amongst
experts?! Also, they are a bunch of idiots who make big promises they cannot
keep and then worry about how to make it happen. Disgraceful as we’re talking
about the most vulnerable people of society here. Good thing Yumi’s there to
help them out.
My new job at
Deakin University
I was sooo
excited to start working at The Salvation Army and while I have done some
really cool things and my manager was happy, I was just so disappointed after
just a few days. It was just like every other office, with people worrying
about little things and playing games. I had hoped for more, but just kept my
head down and produced my deliverables at a rate that was impressive even by my
standards. After 8 weeks of 2.5 days a week, I was done with 4 months of work.
The people were nice enough but I really was not the right person at the right
time. Once I had moved on and nearly started on my new job they did offer me
another much bigger role, but I think I’ll just stick to the people in Bourke
Street who seem truly concerned with helping the homeless. Funny how it could
be the same organisation yet so different in nearly everything else. Four weeks
ago today, I started my new job as change and communication manager for Deakin
University and that is something else entirely. It was my dream to ever work
for the Salvation Army, but also to ever work for a University. 2 dreams come
true in 1 year, that’s pretty good in my book. My project is not that big, but
it is ground breaking in the sense that it offers online education in a truly
new and engaging way that is a first in Australia and large parts of the world.
It’s the same as always, nothing documented, we start from scratch for most
things, but the one big difference is that I am not the smartest person in the
room by far. There’s professors, Phds and all other sorts of smart people
around. And I am continuing my winning streak of female leaders as both my
manager, her manager, their manager and her manager (the Vice Chancellor/CEO) again
are all women and not just women, but smart, opinionated, inspiring and
hard-working women. Great place to work indeed. It’s been like drinking from a
fire-hydrant for the past 4 weeks, but just this morning I started to see
things in perspective again. Those 4 weeks really flew by though, can’t wait to
see what the next weeks will bring. My contract runs until the end of the year,
we’ll see how we go. So far they like what I am doing so I’ll just keep doing
that in a beautiful office, with friendly people and the occasional visit to
the campuses to be surrounded by students and other smart people. There’s
definitely worse places to work. 😊
Quitting CMI
Last month I
decided to quit volunteering for the Change Management Institute. I had been
doing it for little over a year now. With the new job, SES and The Agile Eleven
it all became a bit too much and I was putting a lot of time, ideas and
efforts, which made others do a bit less than they might have. I don’t blame
them, I had a lot of time but all of a sudden I found that I was doing what
felt like nearly everything and it started to get to me a bit. We had another
very successful, inspiring and well appreciated event at the start of May and
right after that I decided that it had been a good run, stopping on a high note
rather than get frustrated and low on energy. I am still a member, made some
new work friends, developed new skills and contacts and had some great
opportunities to learn new things, so just a step down really, but not out just
yet. I do feel the change community in Melbourne could do with a bit of a shake
up, but everybody seems to be looking at everybody else to make that happen.
That’s not me at all, so I’ll go where the action is. Sometimes I get a bit
tired of myself, always moving and quitting things, but I just can’t be
bothered to wait for things to happen, see, not much changed with me at all 😊.
SES
One thing I am
thoroughly enjoying is the Monday night SES antics. All twelve of us have
passed our basics training, so we’re no real embarrassment to anyone anymore
and now we’re doing General Rescue, which is a bit more serious and invested. I
just like that it is so different from everything else that I do on a daily
basis that it somehow works for me. Just this Monday we were learning how to
tie all sorts of knots and not only am I learning useful things, we’re having a
lot of fun doing it together as well. We’ll be climbing rooftops, shooting
ropes with slingshots and going out on real calls soon enough. A while ago I
thought we were getting called in, but it was a false alarm at 5am. Good thing
I was already awake 😊. I’ll be out at Essendon
Shopping mall again soon, tin shaking for funds and hopefully will get an
opportunity to do some community engagement training by the end of the year
perhaps. All good fun.
Anniversary
Yumi and I
will be married for 10 years on the 30th of June, how crazy is
that?! I won’t say that I remember the day as if it was yesterday, I don’t, but
10 years seems such a long time ago and it doesn’t feel THAT long ago that we
were in Rotterdam city hall and had such a great day with friends and family.
Fun fact is that I am still wearing my wedding shoes to work about once a week
(they have been re-soled a few times, yes) Later this year we’ll be celebrating
20 years together, which is even more remarkable of course, but also really
weird to consider that I’ve known Yumi longer than I have not known her.
Blessed life indeed.
AFL match
About 3 weeks
back it was national volunteer week and because I am such an asset to the
community through all my hard work at SES (show up, eat cookies, go home, haha)
We got free tickets to our very first AFL game ever. Well, that was a wonderful
experience to have done once. It was the Geelong Cats vs the Essendon Bombers
and we could just cheer for both as we have no club allegiance to speak of. It
was fun to see couples where one of them was a fan for the Cats while the other
was a Bombers fan, that is just so Australian. Can’t remember who won, the
better team I think 😊. Was fun to be at a game
once to know what it’s all about and to have been in the Melbourne Cricket
Grounds stadium as well, but I don’t think we’ll make it a new thing for date
night, too cold, sitting too long watching too many hairy and bearded men
wrestle each other to the ground and run away with a ball.
Comedy
festival
At the end of
April we also went to two nights of the Melbourne Comedy festival and that was
a lot of fun (no pun intended). We went to buildings you’d normally not get
into and the first night was just one performer and she had a great show about
how she felt that she had always been a dragon. I’ll not try to explain that,
jokes are never funny when I try to retell them anyway. The other event was
right in the heart of the city in City Hall and it was so massively busy with
about 20 acts going on at the same time in different rooms and people running
everywhere. We went to ‘Best of Asia’ which were 4 stand up comedians from
Malaysia, Singapore, India and Iran and they were hilarious too. Lots of jabs
at their own countries and culture, but also putting some perspective on
Australian culture, which we love as foreigners of course. Even though we don’t
go out on weekdays most times because it just gets into the way of work day routines,
it was fun to be out on Tuesdays and Friday nights for a change. Haha, look at
us being adventurous.
Roadtrips
Every few
weeks we go on a road trip, so I don’t feel too boxed in and I am starting to
find that it’s really just Brunswick and how everything is built back-to-back
that I don’t like. As soon as we get a bit further away from Melbourne, there’s
the Australia I love! Some towns look just like the ACT, more similar to where
you live and some parts look like mirror images of Casey where we used to live.
Perhaps we’ll end up there, I really don’t want to live here for much longer,
despite everything being so very close and convenient. Just the other
week we went to the Tullamrine airport area and had a very nice walk around
parts of the nature reserve there. You can see for miles in all directions and
even better, there’s kangaroos and not just 10 or 20, no, closer to 100 if not
more, moving around in mobs. Nowadays you then try to break out your phone and
capture it for social media so everyone can see how cool your experience was
but I just let it go for once and watched them bounce around until every one of
them was just picking up speed and really moving. It was beautifully peaceful.
On a different weekend, we visited the height of consumerism, Hoppers Crossing,
which is such a weird place. It’s a nothing town (well, sort of) with a HUGE
shopping centre and people
from all over go there to stand in line for the toilets before starting their
shopping spree. Must be because there’s nothing else for miles, but even the
men’s had a line, now where do you see that?! It was nice to see the shopping
centre and know what it’s about. I wasn’t very impressed, but shopping malls
have been my thing of interest for a long time and I’ve seen ‘em with
ice-hockey rinks inside, so everything else seems small in comparison, I guess.
It was nice, white and shiny new though and it had a food court, so Yumi was
happy enough 😊. There was also a nature
reserve and nice beach walk way close by so we detoxed a bit from all the
shopping and strolled the beach looking for sea shells, just the two of us,
driftwood and some cheeky sea birds and magpies. It was cool to be able to see
the city on the left and Geelong (where Deakin also has a campus) on the right
of the bay. Our final road trip was to Castlemaine, more of a historic town
than all the other stuff and we had a great time just walking the old trails
and visiting some of the oldest settlers’ stuff Australia has to offer. There
was this once place where they had these massively wide fir trees. They were
only about 30-40 meters high, but at least 80-100 meters wide and while it was
a beautifully sunny day (again, I know, we sure know how to pick them!) the
temperature underneath the canopy was at least 10 degrees cooler. They also had
an old railway track that you could walk and supposedly see kangaroos and other
wildlife, so we did and of course, no kangaroos, the wildest thing we saw was
wild blueberries, which tasted great. It would be much appreciated if the
animals could just stick to the program, but perhaps no one has told them they
have a job to do. I’ll show them the brochure next time, haha.
Pluis is under
the weather a bit
Our old lady
turns 13 (we don’t really know, but we set her birthday for 1 July 2004) in a
short while and she’s been having a tough time with sneezing fits. After
waiting a few days, reading up on the internet about what it could be, we
decided to be responsible parents, go to the vet, pay $700 for all sorts of
tests (don’t get me started) only to hear that there’s really nothing they can
tell us. Great. We took her home and it’s been steadily getting worse, which
means it’s probably an infection that has been getting worse for a while or
cancer, which is to be expected as she had a benign granuloma on the back of
her tongue for at least 8 years. As we keep each other company in the early
hours of the day I hear and see her a lot more than Yumi does and some of those
sneezing fits make her shake and tremble all over, but she eats and drinks and
grooms most of the time (she’s never been a great fan of coat and paw
maintenance) and she’s her grumpy self, so there’s either just nothing we can
do, or we’ll get some more bad news in a week or so. We’ve decided it’s best to
know, so we’ve agreed to do a CRT scan and the works, which fortunately comes
as a package deal at the very affordable price of $2,000…holy moly, I’ve seen enough
vet bills by now to know it’s really just the materials and equipment and I am
okay with them making a profit as well but wow, good thing we make money. Ah
well, what can you do, she’s been with us for too long to just let it go, so
we’ll just get it over with by next week Monday.
The Agile
Eleven 100 days experiment continues
After 40+ days
I am still enjoying working with that
collective of business professionals to develop a business that we can all take
part in. It’s been a very interesting experience so far, with lots of new
things I’ve learned and some very useful skills and new skills that I picked up
that made my start at Deakin a lot easier. The two owners (Eduardo and
Catherine) are making a real effort to open up their business and let new ideas
in, but it’s hard for them too to be flexible and inclusive sometimes, so we’ve
had some colourful people leave already and I am expecting that we’ll not all
make it to day 100. I’ve also learned that my ideas around team work are really
more based on working with friends and likeminded people and sometimes that
just makes me want to quit when I find that everyone just seems to be in it for
themselves and their own benefit or hobby. I know that’s not true for all of
them and most of us have day jobs and obligations, like vet bills, hahaha, but
I’d like it to be more collaborative. I do recognise the pattern that I create
where I get super invested and nobody else seems to be able/willing to follow.
Story of my life I guess, will try to slow it down a bit. Perhaps at the end of
the year when my contract with Deakin ends I might step into the Eleven,
perhaps I’ll cheer them on from the sidelines, it’s nice to have an option any
way.
Some assorted
small things
·
Salvos Intersection collection. On Saturday 3 June, I had a great and
cold time tin shaking for the Red Shield Appeal from 7-10.30am. It felt good to
be part of it again and raise funds for the homeless. It’s a small thing, but
it helps and particularly now when I ride into the city there’s just so much of
them and they must be so cold. Last year I wasn’t working at this time and
while I rode my bike it was always when the sun was out and late in the morning.
Those poor people. ☹
·
Cycling and diet. I really enjoy being able to cycle to work again,
clocking about 18 kilometres a day, which helps with the diet and I am happy to
report that now that I am working again I’ve dropped about 5 kilos and the other
4 I am looking to shed will probably be not too hard. I cut out, chocolate and
most sweet stuff and as always, it’s not hard, I just have to keep at it. I
work in Docklands nowand can walk in all directions and see the ocean in the
distance, which is pretty fancy right?
·
Gaming. I’ve gamed quite a lot right before I got back to work and
played probably one of the best games ever which featured a young lady who
looked like a tribal warrior but lives in a time where the Earth has seen a
catastrophic event and there’s lots of mechanical animals around. Your job is
to find out what happened and the story telling and game mechanics are just so
beautifully done I kept running around until I finished it at 100% (which
almost never happens with me being so impatient). Right now, I am playing a
shoot-em-up that plays in Bolivia and revolves around me taking care of the bad
guys. I know you don’t care about those games but it’s easy to start and stop,
which suits my busy schedule a bit better right now.
·
TV and movies. Now that my job is no longer to watch tv and read books,
I have much less time to see the good stuff, but I am still very excited about a
film that is based on The Dark Tower book series by Stephen King. It plays in a
world similar to ours, but different and time is all messed up, most people
have gone and things have meshed together so there’s references to knights and
gunslingers, but also Harry Potter and Thomas the train. It’s a bit weird, but
great story telling. I’ve read all seven of the books, which he completed over
the course of 20 years or so and now the movie will have some of my favourite
characters, I am hoping it will be even better than the books.
Well, that’s
me done and you updated on most events in our lives. I hope you get through the
cold parts of winter alright and I’ll write again in a month or two to keep you
updated.
Be well and
all the best to the family!
Gilbert
