Letter to Marlis Dec 2017- Jan 2018

Hi Marlis,

Another two months gone in a flash! Happy new year and all the best for 2018 😊. Thank you for the card and handwritten note, I really appreciated how you enlisted your daughter to help. A lot has happened in just two months, never a dull moment with us, that’s for sure. It’s a big one this time, so let’s get started

Trip to Queensland

The week before Christmas we went on holiday to Far North Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), finally. Cairns was where our Australia adventure started when we visited first in 2010 and we fell in love with Australia (took a few days longer for Yumi), so we were happy to be back. The town sure has grown thanks to tourism from Asia and it is busy, but in a nice sort of way. I think the town centre has doubled in size and there are so many more restaurants, shops activities and facilities than when we last visited. Most of it touristy stuff, but still good to see the town prosper. We stayed at two B&B’s because we also went on a 3-day diving trip to the GBR and made a day trip to Port Douglas to do some more diving, visited the rainforest and went on a crocodile tour. The diving in Port Douglas was more to get our gear wet and see if we still knew how to do things and get used to being on a boat. It was ridiculously expensive, but we got to see lot of fun things and overall had a good experience, including seeing heaps of kangaroos along the way and seeing the sugar cane country side. Soon after, our trip to the GBR was good fun. We sorted the logistics of handing in the car the day before and then departed the B&B at 5.30am!) and dropping off our luggage at the dive shop. The reef is very badly bleached in places, but still spectacular in others and a great place to have dived. Over the three days we managed to squeeze in 11 dives, 50km out on the reefs. We saw a few sharks, turtles, big groupers, barracudas, many different types of smaller fish and other animals. We also did two night dives which was a good but slightly disorienting experience as we couldn’t see a lot more than the light of torches and the reflection of the eyes of sharks on the hunt. There were 32 people on the boat and it was remarkably well-behaved and friendly, be it a bit cramped and the crew seemed a bit disinterested. I am not sure we’ll do it again in this way, perhaps next time we’ll go on a boat with less novices, so it’s just the diving and not a lot of people figuring stuff out. We thought we’d be a bit rusty, me not having dived in almost 3 years but it’s like riding a bike, once you know how, it’s hard to forget. We also went on a crocodile tour and until that time I hadn’t realised the real danger of these magnificent animals just being in rivers and minding their own business, very much like big sharks, who then get hunted because they eat people who get in their territory. We saw two big ones and a tiny one, learned about birds, snakes and the forest, lots of fun. The day in the rainforest was also worthwhile. We went up by cable cart and got spectacular views of the forest on one end and the ocean on the other as we climbed. There’s also a village up in the rainforest, which is a massive tourist trap, but we just focused on the nature walks and sights to see, leaving the stores and gift shops to the real tourists. Yumi did take the opportunity to eat a bratwurst in a very German café (including schlager music) run by a German lady and her daughter and we ran into a German couple who we’d also spent time with on the dive boat, small world. The trip back down we did by train (historic railroad they said, it would be fun they said) and that was a mistake in 30+ Queensland heat at 5km/hour down a mountain through 15 (I counted) tunnels. Took forever and even Yumi lost her patience. We were very happy to be back in town, but some of the views were very much worth it.  Finally we visited the botanical gardens of Cairns and they are still very beautiful and worth a visit. They really made good use of the space and with the tropical climate, there’s not a lot they cannot grow so the plant variety was amazing. As you can see, we had a holiday, but were very busy. On the way back home, Yumi caught food poisoning from some bad sushi (normally that would be me) and spent the whole flight sick as a dog ☹. We arrived back home in the early hours of 25 December, but didn’t do much for the

Next few days as Yumi was still unwell and we needed to rest from the holiday activities, haha.

Holidays in Altona

The Christmas break gave us a good opportunity to ground ourselves in the area and get to know our surroundings. The neighbourhood is very quiet, the train passes by every 20 minutes or so but it’s really not that annoying, our windows are double glazed on that end and it lasts all of 20 seconds anyway. No horrible or loud and drunk neighbours, actually, NO neighbours. Our gardener (yes, we have a gardener, he came with the lease and drops by for odd jobs and garden maintenance) tells us the neighbours only use the house as a holiday home and some car storage, good for them and good for us 😊. It’s great to be able to walk to the beach every day and see the ocean (well, the bay…) every day. Sun, clouds or rain, it’s a sight I never grow tired of and it always clears my head and the few worries I have. We’ve started getting our groceries delivered again because I am a Woolies person and we only have a Coles, Foodworks and IGA and it’ just not working for me. I go to Coles, but the store makes me sad just walking there and I ain’t no beauty myself but the people are just so ugly and grumpy! I know that’s terrible to say but they really are. I guess I just miss the Brunswick Woolies. And that’s about the only thing I miss from Brunswick, some of the shops and the good restaurants, not much else!

Back in with CMI

I think I mentioned last time that I was looking to get back into the Change Management Institute (CMI) and would have been happy to be the idea-person, but as it often goes, I ended up being in charge, but just locally,  of the Victorian committee. It was one of those strange situations where I wasn’t looking to be in the lead, but the lady in charge was looking to step down and I had been there before and had some useful ideas last year, so it kind of made sense. We had a vote and now I am the boss, go figure! There’s some networking to be done and a bit of team structure to provide, but everything else seems to work fine, I just have to hold down the fort and recruit a few new volunteers. I’ve started reaching out to some people I know and there appears to be some interest. The agenda for the year is basically full, so it’s really up to us how crazy we want it to be, keeping in mind that we’re all volunteers.

Starting at SES
Coming Monday I’ll be joining the Hobson Bay SES team for the first time. Summer is a slow period for that sort of thing and they generally shut down until after Australia Day. I could have started last week, but I had another event going on, so this Monday it is. I look forward to it, after the initial awkwardness of meeting all these new people has passed I am sure it will be fun again. Especially now my training is done, I don’t have to be there all the time every time, so that’s more relaxed. Once autumn kicks off we’ll be seeing some more branches and a flood or two, good fun! 😊

Small Poppy Project

I started this book project last year and left it for a while near the end of the year because I wasn’t very organised around it, but two weeks ago I started getting back into it and this week I did my first 2-hour interview and I ended up giving this director some advice on his succession planning and how to go about it, how funny is that?! I have a few more interview options lined up and think I will learn a lot about positive change initiatives across Australia and New Zealand. I will also make many new valuable connections for the future, but it’s mostly about the stories. Once I have 25 I will launch a website and then grow it until have 100. I am aiming for end of this year, but if it takes longer, that’s okay, I am not getting paid anyway, but it’s a great feeling to create something with others that might inspire many of my change colleagues.

Design course

This week I did a 2-day visual facilitation course, it’s basically learning to draw to make meetings/trainings/workshops and that sort of thin more entertaining for the audience and myself. I always wanted to learn how to draw better and it’s quite amazing how much you can accomplish in just a few days. There’s a whole science to it of course, I won’t bore you with the details, but at some point, I might send you some of my art (priceless, no doubt 100 years from now) to show what I have learnt, for now I am practicing in my sketch book and that is great fun already. My hope is that if a picture can say 1,000 words and I use 40,000 words a day (or so it seems), I can draw more, speak less and listen more to what people are saying. Sometimes I get so tired of listening to myself talk, there seems to be no end to the ideas in my mind, but it can be exhausting to just keep talking, talking and talking and never run out of words. The deliberate method behind this drawing method will hopefully calm my mind and let the hamster of the wheel for a while 😊.

I’ve got my starter kit and will see if I can find some icons, the company that came up with it is called Bi-Ka-Blo and you guessed it, it’s German and means Bild-Karte-Block. They’ve teamed up with a writing utensil manufacturer called Neuland and they make really cool stuff. Anyway, once my skill has improved, I might just start illustrating these letters 😊

Perth

Yumi has to be in Perth for a while at the end of February and I am not working right now, so I am going along, and we’ll make it into a mini-holiday, traveling to the south-end of the West Coast and maybe also to the North. I’ll be by myself during the day for 3 of the 8 days we’re there, but I am meeting some change management people, a friend from a training last year and perhaps some people for the book and CMI events, I’ll keep myself occupied and out of trouble for sure. It’s my first time on the West Coast, getting a little excited already.

Beach cleaning

Yumi found this great initiative called beach patrol, where once a month, a group of volunteers gathers to clean up their local beach and surrounding area. We don’t have uniforms or get to write tickets (probably good with my authority complex) but we get to feel morally superior while we’re walking around with our fancy bags, picking up cigarette butts and all sorts of cans, bottles, bags and whatnot. We did our first run on Australia day and a group of 25 people collected 50kg of rubbish and 2,000 cigarette butts. That’s a pretty good haul if you ask me. Obviously, I would get it much more organised than they are now, but there’s something very relaxing about just doing the work and making people aware that what they throw on the ground actually ends up somewhere on the beach or in the water. Most are just lazy/unaware, some just don’t care.  A side initiative, I started bringing plastic bags with me when I go on walks around a lake nearby. The council does clean up in the area, but on most walks, I get 1-2 plastic shopping bags of rubbish and tissues, lots of tissues for some reason. I am under no illusion that it will make a ground-breaking difference but for me it’s more about doing something instead of just walking past it every time and complain.  This morning I collected 3 bags and was followed by some bird for 500 meters. First, I thought he/she was defending its territory, but it probably just wanted something to snack on from me 😊. I’ve got the next area scoped already, it’ at the back end of a sports field where there’s probably two bin bags worth of rubbish along a fence line. Something to look forward to, haha.

Books

Because I had so much time on my hands I started to read ‘smart’ books once more and gained so much new insights. Read a great book on Everyday ethics, that really made me think about choices I make and how I am pretty much on the right track so far. Also read “God is not great” (I think you’ll understand the author is not a fan of religion) to understand more about the problems people have with religion and not only was it a lot of fun because the author, it was also incredibly smart and gave a much better understanding of why religion is potentially the worst things we ever did to ourselves. Then I read “Switch” a classic on Change Management and that book reminded me of all the good professional lessons I had learned in the past 5 years. Followed by another change management book that is called Hacking for Agile change. I’ll not bore you with the details, it was smart and practical and written by someone I meet with and will do an online presentation (web-seminar) with in March. Still not done I read the Feminist Fight Club, which is exactly what it sounds like, a very funny and at the same time totally disturbing book about casual discrimination of women in society and the workplace. I care about inequality in any sense and felt I needed to understand this whole concept of modern feminism a lot better and now I do. I needed to go to Sydney to get my passport done, not much to say about that, it’s Sydney and I am still not a fan, but I read “what is a Googly” a book about cricket on the flight in, which means that now I have at least a basic understanding of the game and don’t have to look on in bemused confusion at what’s happening. Not that I will watch it, it’s almost as boring as tennis! Just yesterday I finished a book called ‘Seeing what others don’t” which is about how to get insights and be better at picking up cues from people and the environment. Another great read that explains the science between how we make sense of things.  Now that that’s done, I can get back to Homo Deus, a brilliant book about the future of humanity by a writer I read another book (Sapiens) from that really changed my perspective on how society has evolved over time since the last ice age, it’s so beautifully written I felt sad when I finished it.

VR-goggles

VR stands for Virtual Reality and it’s basically a really big pair of glasses with tv screens in them that you wear like a helmet and makes you experience games as if you are inside them. The technology is quite new still but much advanced from what it was 5 years ago. It takes a while to get used to it, sometimes you get a little vertigo on the side but even Yumi had great fun pretending to be a dragon, bonking things with ‘her’ head while I was the other player running for my life as she chased me through a cartoon city. She got so into it that she kicked the table and broke her nail (ouch!) and almost headbutted the table a few times. It was hilarious and terrifying to watch at the same time. I haven’t put much time in it yet, but will give it a few months, perhaps it’s not for me, but I just wanted to try the new technology. If nothing else, we can use it as a second TV because one can watch a tv series or movie via the game console, while the other can watch TV, not that we had much issues about that, but now I can game and Yumi can watch what she wants on TV too, so that’s very convenient as well. I’ve got a racing game and some trial games, will probably buy a few games to test what works and what doesn’t. It’s very exciting technology and I predict that in 5-10 years from now it will have found it’s way to mainstream business and we’ll all be using them.

Family and friends

Not much going on as far as we know. My parents are the same, Yumi’s parents got their first iPhone, so that’s very exciting for them and very funny to us to see how they make sense of this new technology. All our friends are doing family and life things as they would while their kids grow up and life takes its course. Yumi’s friend Hester is doing a reno on her house, quite curious to see how that will end up, the pictures look pretty good. My friend Alex is thinking of coming our way with the whole family this time, but that depends somewhat on if we will go to the Netherlands ourselves mid-2018. Yumi had this brilliant plan that would really benefit the disability sector but her organisation (NDS) just lacks the vision and courage to go that way and Yumi is not confident she can make it work with the Dutch organisation in Australia. I think it can really work and also think she needs to start looking for a new challenge, but she just signed a contract until June 2019, so we’ll see how that goes. There are some life events going on in the Netherlands with my  father turning 65, Yumi’s mom turning 70 and me turning 40 and probably some other stuff that I forget, so we could go, I am just not that keen, because 69 and 39 and 64 were equally special to me, it’s probably just my contrary nature and dislike of convention so I’ll take my cues from Yumi on this (as I do in most things anyway). We’ll see.

Work and jobs

Since the last letter I started a project at Deakin University and finished it too, for now. I made really good money and when I did a bit of an overview of the past three years we found that we had made very stable incomes and that the money had been very good each year. I might get back once again at Deakin, there’s still 40% of the budget left, but I was not going to sit there and cost money to make them feel confident and safe and after a fashion they appreciated that. I greatly enjoy working with them, they are all so smart and good at what they do and I can fully support the idea that a great education is the best way to have a better chance at the life you want. I have started looking for jobs, but it ever gets easier and most job adds are just so soul-crushing bad it makes me not want to apply. You’d think that organisations would get better at it but nothing is further from the truth. My network is getting stronger and I am building the start of a reputation but for now I will just have to be patient and see who wants to work with a weirdo like me.

Social media change

I’ve decided to be much less active on social media, you know, that thing you are totally not on, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? I felt much better already after a week and now I just check it once every few days and if there’s something really worthwhile I post it, but otherwise I just leave it. I use LinkedIn (Facebook for business) for work and am trying not to focus on like or reaching as many people as possible but instead writing what I want to write. It’s just so weird sometimes. I pour my heart and soul and hours of writing into a 2-page article about change management, get 120 views (pretty good and great feedback). I post a picture of my bad drawing skills and training certificate, gets 1,200 views! How does that even work?! I’ve decided that I will just do what I want, that the technology is there for me, to help me and not the other way around. I do see the benefits though, just this week I made new connections in New York, France, India, Hong Kong and Perth, they are not friends, but people who like what I do and perhaps somewhere down the line we can help each other out, who knows?

Also, sometimes it’s a great way to be found. In April I will be speaking about Fake Change at what’s looking to be a very cool Conference here in Melbourne, thanks to social media. I’ve also gotten involved in some volunteering with year 9 students for their professional development (no joke, it’s what they want nowadays) and will be guest lecturing at Deakin in March, also thanks to social media. It has its good and bad sides, I  guess.

This Tuesday Yumi and I celebrated 4 years in Australia and I made the below overview for friend and family on my blog earlier this week:

Living the good life for four years today

Today is a special day. I thought about this day for four years. What it would be like, where we would be, what we’d be doing and how special it would be to finally become eligible to be an Australian citizen. And now we can. But we probably won’t just yet because I would lose my Dutch citizenship and while I don’t care that much for a country that still hasn’t decided to evacuate and carpet bomb 020 (Amsterdam) and then make it into a parking lot for Rotterdam (the REAL capital), there are some implications to consider. So we’ll wait and probably have Yumi go first (ain’t nobody got no beef with Luxembourg) and then by marriage to an Australian, I will become a dual citizen of Australia, but not the Netherlands. Ha, take that you bunch of bureaucrats!

Anyway, it’s still a special day and something to celebrate and a great opportunity to reflect back on the good, the bad and the ‘meh’. We always knew we were going to have a great time, but ‘blue sky, blue sea’ has turned into something a bit more detailed now.

In no particular order, here’s what we feel we gained:

Diving

We wanted to dive more when we moved here and at first that happened, we got our Rescue Diver ticket (I will never drag Yumi back up a beach in full gear ever again. Ever!) then we lost interest for a bit and now we’re back at it. Having seen the Great Barrier Reef, gotten our nitrox badges and having dived parts of the East and South Coast too by now, it’s about as good as you imagine. Yes, the GBR is not what it used to be and yes, the bay of Melbourne can be a bit ‘refreshing’ but there’s still so much life and things to see, totally worth it.

Beautiful and extreme nature

From the ‘mountains’ to the rainforest to the flatlands and everything in between, this country is so diverse and every new twist and turn has a view worth stopping for to take it all in, unless you  live in Brunswick, then you can keep driving…I think our most used phrase (probably mine as I do most of the talking) is “Wat leven we toch in een mooi land!” (How beautiful is this country?!). Tasmania is probably still my favourite place to visit, but everything else are close seconds and thirds

Work and non-work friends

Australians are great people (when they are not driving a car) and we have met so many friendly lovely people and got to call some of them friend. Either through work, volunteering or just shared interests forced us to go out there and meet new folks and if you HAVE to make new friends, there’s really not much better than the fun loving and good natured Aussies.

Tax haven

It’s quite amazing how much more money we get to keep after taxes. Income wise it’s been a really good choice to move to Australia. We get to help others, live the life we want, buy what we want and still have money left for booze and drugs for the whole street! Well, it’s mostly Dan and Ethel, they party like it’s 1899 and they would know as they were alive back then.

Work experience (all cool jobs)

Yumi’s been kicking goals for years now with NDS and has no plans to go anywhere until she’s officially crowned Miss Sector Innovation 2019 and I could not be prouder of her dedication to a sector and organisation that needs all the help it can ask but is either too busy, distracted or confused to make real progress work. Good things she has some very good co-workers. Funny thing is that of the two of us, she is the real change manager, I am the Magpie (bird) that gets distracted by shiny new stuff and starts causing trouble when it gets bored. But the places I’ve been and the people I’ve worked with are nothing short of amazing and while I generally don’t stick around long enough to get a meeting room named after me, I like to believe that people are not lying when they tell me I made difference for the better.

Travel options

There’s so many places you can go and just see. In the Netherlands we wouldn’t go to a cemetery, shopping mall or farm to just SEE, but here we do and we shamelessly behave like tourists where Yumi has the most endearing quirk of pointing completely obvious things out to me as novelties. It’s a left-over thing from her Tour guide Barbie days where she would plan all our trips and I would just tag along as a simple-minded oaf. Now I actually make an effort to inform myself, so she can enjoy things a bit more. If you know our sightseeing schedules or ever been subjected to one, you know the pressure, so we’re both happy to not do that and enjoy thing a bit more (Look at that tree, Gil!). We still have to go to the NT and the real desert of WA, but according to a lot of nationals we meet, we’ve seen more of their country than they have, which is kind of cool.

Cultural insights

It’s one thing to read about living abroad, it’s another thing to do it and experience it for yourself with so many other cultures. It’s not the same as living in your home country and welcoming foreigners in, here, we are the foreigners even though we look the same (well, I do, but Yumi’s Asian appearance isn’t exactly a shocker in Pacific ASIA (!). We’ve gained so much perspective on what it means to really be part of a culture and slowly but steadily you feel yourself becoming more Australian than Dutch, it’s not something we pursue, it just happens gradually, and we welcome it as there’s worse things to turn into.

Education and training

This one only worked for me, as Yumi already is too smart for my own good, I have to keep training and educating myself. It’s great to live in a city so big that there’s always something going on or to involved with, or you hop on a plane/train and go and do it somewhere else. I got my change certification, then got another, then started improving on myself (I know, it’s work in progress) and I am doing a change visualisation facilitation workshop this week which hopefully improves my drawing skills considerably.

Kendo

We’re still a bit sad that it didn’t work out because most of the people were lovely and we might still be doing it if we had stayed in the ACT, but that next level sh*t of Kenshikan was just not for us. A pity as we have all the gear, but we might come back to it at some point, it’s a skill you can’t unlearn, just get better at once you know the basics, or so we tell ourselves

Left side of everything living

It seems that the more I understand about where to be on the road, pathways, escalators and hallways, the more people start messing with me. How hard can it really be? Cars on the left, people on the left. So not cars sort of on the left, people everywhere else, in my way, middle of the road, standing around in door opening. For goodness sake, some situational awareness would be great.

Appreciation for shorts

After 3 years and a winter I finally succumbed and bought new shorts. And actually wear them outside. It still feels wrong, but jeans get a bit uncomfortable in 35 degrees plus heat. I must be getting old. Still not wearing them to the workplace though, not that integrated just yet perhaps.

Fan of sunscreen

Living in this beautiful sun-drenched country (outside of Melbourne) you develop a healthy appreciation for sunscreen, the more SPF, the better. The sun here is not the sun in Europe and it is not your friend. Ever. You can easily tell why, looking at all the lobster red people (white tourists) moving around the city and beaches. See a covered person on the beach? Not a tourist. See a person waiting in the shade? Not a tourist. People eating inside in summer? Not tourists. Walking around in 40 degrees with a silly hat (yeah, that’s me).

State Emergency Services

Even without the chain sawing and breaking stuff it’s by far the most rewarding volunteering I can think of. People have a problem, you fix problem, people happy. Trees getting feisty, bring out chainsaw, tree calms down. A few hours a week to keep the skills going, meet people from all walks of life. Love it! Did I mention the chainsaw?

Passion for homelessness

It’s not often I stay with a cause or anything all that long but the more people I see living on the streets, the angrier I get. It’s not an out-of-control sort of anger that makes you want to break (or chainsaw) stuff, it’s a deep and slow burning anger that I feel will stay with me until I find a way to make a dent in the number of people living rough in Victoria and then the country. It’s a problem with a solution, we just need to find enough people to give a damn.

Living near the beach

Four years ago if you’d asked if could see myself living near the beach, I’d probably laughed and thought it would be Queensland or Perth, surely not Melbourne and definitely not Altona. I didn’t even know it existed. But here we are and we’re loving it!

Of course there’s also things that we lost along the way:

Some of my hair and a lot of skin

Not much we can do about getting older, well, of course there are options, but most of those are irreversible, so we’ll probably not go for those just yet. Yumi gets the occasional white hair, I just turned nearly completely grey and got more lines in my face, Yumi’s Asian vampire genes are kicking in and she basically looks like she did 5 years ago. Not sure how that’s fair, as she also has the looks and the smarts of the two of us, but I had plastic surgery and have abs, so that’s something.

Spike and Pluis

We came here with our two weapons of mass deconstruction and knew they were getting on in age but had a few years in them. Overall, they had a really good run to the finish line and got to see more of the world then just Rotterdam (enough for most cats). They got to board an aeroplane twice and eat all sorts of foreign bugs, sleep in the garden forever and never be cold. Also, together they financed at least two $10,000 holidays for our vets in Casey and Brunswick, I think there’s still a picture of them on the ‘our main benefactors’ wall of fame somewhere.

Dreams (fulfilled)

The dreams we had did not go away or get lost, they got fulfilled. A very first world problem to have is that we now have to keep coming up with new goals in life as this country and all its opportunities just keep helping us achieve them. Perhaps it’s time to come up with some really crazy stuff and see how far Australia will go to help us out.

Trying to find what I don't like about Oz, it's been 4 years…

This one is simple, if I can’t find it after looking for it for 4 years it probably just doesn’t exist. Sorted!

Life moments of friends and families

This is probably the biggest concern we had when moving here. It’s still quite amazing how a few Skype dates a month and social media keep us connected much more than we had anticipated. Of course, the visits of family and friends definitely made a big difference and we don’t know what we don’t know, but overall it worked much better than expected.