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9 June 2017

Letters to Marlis April-May 2017

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

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