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7 March 2020

Letter to Marlis Jan-Feb 2020


Hi Marlis,

Summer’s gone and done and I hope you’re doing well. From what I see on Social Media and the news, things have calmed down in the ACT when it comes to the weather. By now you’re probably worrying more about the Corona virus and I hope you’re careful around other people. Good thing you have heaps of common sense and that you don’t like going on cruises and I guess you don’t have any plans to visit China, Iran or Italy! It’s been an eventful two months since I last wrote, so I’ll get started right away.

Carpentry School
I have been enjoying myself so much over the past eight weeks, I really feel I could be good at this and made the right choice to go and try my hand at this. The first two weeks we only worked with hand tools and took some time to get to know each other a bit more. My class is 16 people, one guy older than me, two 28-year-olds and me as the ‘old guys’, the other 12 are kids ranging from 16-21 and 3 lady-tradies to be. Being 25 years older than most of them is a bit of a challenge some times as their work ethic still needs to develop, they have different definitions of a job done well and can’t sit still for more than 15 minutes without having at least 3 conversations about everything going on in their lives. All that beings aid, when you can get them to work, the kids are alright.

We’ve made a saw stool, a toolbox and some other small stuff since we started. Four the past four weeks, we’ve been working on a scaled-down house. Mind you, it’s still 7.5mx4mx3.5m, so not all that small and it gives us the possibility to practice roofing, framing, windows, set out and all those other things I am sure you know more about than I do. ๐Ÿ˜Š. I love finding out how it all works, how you can solve things and create things with you own two hands and some power tools. It’s also pretty amazing to see how much you can learn in just a few weeks. I mean, most of it could be a lot better, but the teacher feels we’re doing really well for our first time.

We have two teachers across five days a week and they are very different but both very good at what they do. One shows us everything by doing it, the other wants to show the process behind it and talk us through things. You can probably guess who the kids like better, I like both of them just as much and get a lot out of it. We’re going to finish a week early because (and this is the teacher talking) 2 of the old guys have been doing more than the 12 kids combined and more than 50% of the work. Yes, you guessed it, one of them is me, haha. I just don’t stand around and get stuck in, always finding something to do, cleaning up as I go (there is so much mess every day, I love it!) so that when we go home at 3.45, it’s all ready to go. I remind myself that these kiddos have their whole lives ahead and should really just experience the last few weeks of their freedom in peace without me telling them what or how to do things, they’ll find out soon enough that everything the teacher said about work is 100% true. I think some of them will be fine, some…not so much just yet.

The next big thing is finding an apprenticeship and so far I haven’t been very lucky. Of course, I knew it would be extra hard for me, being older and thus more expensive. I will just have to keep going at it, despite being rejected 23 times so far, eventually I will find someone willing to take me on. It’s not that different from consulting really, what matters is what you do with the time you are not working. I also think I might have started too early. Tradies are not the best of planners and now that we’re nearly done and I can say I can start in the next few weeks, I might be more appealing and suited to their immediate needs. There are some encouraging signs, but I’ll just have to keep my spirits up in the meantime. It doesn’t help my confidence levels though, when the teacher says that you are (one of) the best student in this class, but still likely to be the last to find a job…because I am old, haha. Guess I’ll have to prove him wrong somehow! Even if it all doesn’t work out, I truly feel I’ve learned heaps and can now at least confidently build a deck, construct small things and understand the language so much better.

Anniversaries
February and March are always special months for us because it’s the anniversaries of Yumi’s birthday (1979), our arrival in Australia (2014), my big belly-buster operation (2015), our move to Melbourne (2016), our new-ish car (2019) and Yumi starting her own business (2019). That’s not even counting the many birthdays of friends and family! Some we celebrate by going out to dinner, most we just chat about, reminiscing and look at some pictures to remember the good bits. Every time we still realise how very fortunate we’ve been to experience all these wonderful things, the places we’ve been and how many wonderful people we’ve met along the way. We have a lot to be thankful for, that’s for sure.

Beach Patrol
After a good two years and most of that as coordinators, Yumi and I have finally found someone to take over as leaders of the community clean up group. We’ll still go and do clean-ups, but what we liked about doing it, the going out walking and doing it together, didn’t work so well anymore, with one of us always having to stay behind to look after things. We got a big grant in January and managed to keep the number of volunteers up and running so we feel we’re leaving it in a better place then when we started, which is all you can really hope for anyway. Because of school hours I’ve not been doing my clean up walks around town and I have to say it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Sure, there’s more cans and stuff lying around then when I did pick them up every day, but it’s not like the streets and parks have turned into dump sites altogether. Victoria has finally agreed to have a deposit scheme for bottles and cans and all of us expect it will reduce the litter from recyclables by about 50-80% in….2023. In the meantime, we’ll have to keep at it! Yumi and I look forward to still being involved, just a bit less so ๐Ÿ˜Š.

Yumi’s business
She’s still going strong after one year and that surprises absolutely no one. Now that I’ve been in school for the past few months, she’s having a new experience as well, being home by herself most of the days when she’s not out with clients. Work has been steady and the learnings have been many, with more work on the horizon and big plans for the next year too. A very positive side-effect is that she’s much more involved in our own finances and how all those things work. I find that very helpful and a big relief because in the past I couldn’t get her interested in any of it and had to do it all myself. Now she doesn’t just get it, she actually makes plans, budgets and everything. Yay!

Yumi’s birthday party/week
We always try to do fun activities around each other’s birthday, because we can and it’s fun to do. But as we get older the list of things we’ve done and still want to do gets a bit shorter. All the same we had a good time the last two weekends, basically just eating cake all day in various spots and walking around. As a spur of the moment thing (we didn’t know it was on until the day before), we planned a visit a Gymnastics World Cup event two Sundays ago. Yumi did 12 years of gymnastics when she was a younger Yumi and I had a really good time to, just watching all these super-fit people running and swaying around. An added bonus was to see a Dutch gymnast (Epke Zonderland) win the gold medal and qualify for the Tokyo Olympics (If they still go ahead…). We combined it with a walk through the botanical gardens, some cake from a fancy cake shop and a nice diner at a Japanese restaurant in the city, where we ended up getting a 50% discount because our order got totally messed up and super delayed. We kept saying it was all fine, but they insisted, so okay, we’ll have that great meal and pay half price ๐Ÿ˜Š

Then last weekend we celebrated some more by taking the ferry from Williamstown to St. Kilda, do some more walking, lots more cake eating and a visit to the Luna Park for a ride in a supersized swing seat merry go round at 15 meters high. It was sort of funny that the very new safety system kept telling them that a buckle wasn’t closing so they had to run around and check everyone about five times. Not very reassuring, but as we were locked in from all sides, we eventually got up there, had the ride, some good views and a lot of fun. We also had a waaaaay to big lunch and almost had to roll ourselves back to the ferry. It was a wonderful and sunny way to spend the day though.

SES activities
It’s been the busiest I’ve ever seen it with SES activities for the past two months. I’ve been out at events, dressed up in a human-sized platypus suit in 30 degree heat to entertain the kids, fixing things on roofs, fixing things in roofs, responding to big trees and branches down, small trees falling over and floods due to heavy rain. And that’s not even counting training nights and administrative activities. Not complaining at all, it’s been great fun most of the time and people in general are very appreciative of what we can do for them. We’ve even been out helping in other areas when that massive hailstorm struck and every second skylight in Melbourne got smashed. We had a set of 3 jobs all on the same street two weeks ago that saw us roll out at 9.30pm and arrive back home at 4.30am! I’ll admit it was a bit rough getting up 2 hours later to go to school and hear some of the kids complain how tired they were because they only had 9 hours of sleep and had been to the gym yesterday…Hahaha, not doing too bad myself I guess ๐Ÿ˜Š.

All that being said, I’ve decided to step away from my Finance Officer role since this month. I’ve done it for nearly 18 months, modernised it quite a bit, but I don’t want to deal with all the organisational silliness any longer. There were just so many arbitrary rules, people with weird ideas about collaboration, too many emails and so many people with opinions who then of course did nothing when the work needed to be done, just your average volunteering gig. I’ve handed over to another member who can now see how they like it, handed in my key and are now considered an ordinary member again. I admit that the decision to not involve/inform me about some changes they were planning to make to the unit structure (people and roles) and only announced 2 months later played a part in that as well. I felt like I was good enough to be used when convenient, but not trusted enough to be involved in these matters. Never one to make my opinion clear, I handed in my keys and told them more or less what I thought of that way of doing things. At the end of the day, it’s still government and they can’t help themselves, but I had enough all the same. Nobody wins in this scenario, things are just more inconvenient and take longer now, but at least I hope I will enjoy my volunteering experience a bit more again. We’ve got a new unit boss, which will make a positive difference, even if he only does 50% of what he has planned, so we’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, I was out 2 nights ago having a good time climbing in and over roofs with my mates, finishing my 103rd official ‘job’ in 3 years ๐Ÿ˜Š.

Small stuff
  • ·       Kala Space: I’ve not been very involved with the National Homeless Collective for a while now. They’ve been busy looking after many things, still not completely organised, but slowly getting there. I saw some posts on social media from them that I just couldn’t get behind and that always make me take some more distance, just to see how things go. They’re still doing great things, but I just can’t be as involved as a few months back. Handing in my keys today, so they can give them to someone else who has more use for them.
  • ·       Volunteering: Yumi is planning to volunteer to be the companion for a blind lady in our neighbourhood. I think it’s super cool that she’s even considering doing this. It’s also a really good way for her to get up and move around a bit, much healthier than sitting in her home office all day. Me on the other hand, I’ve decided to tone it all a bit down. I’ve been giving away a lot of my time, but I need to spread myself a bit less thin and focus on my new career now.
  • ·       Dentist: We finally made going to the dentist a priority and had a very pleasant experience with one very close by. Always nice to know we still have no cavities, all that brushing must pay off, right?! I also decided to finally take action on my nightly teeth gnashing, so I am getting a sleep guard, which will probably improve my sleeping and save my teeth for years to come! I’ve known for years that I should do this, but I kept putting it off. Went in to get one fitted last week and it was a very funny experience with the foam expanding in your mouth and hardening to a mold. Done in two weeks, very curious to see how it’ll work.
  • ·       Side business activities: I’ve got a very small business thing still going on the side, working with one of Yumi’s partners (Alan) on providing some advice to boards and directors on safeguarding and quality in care facilities. We’re doing a 15-minute presentation at a conference in two weeks and a trial run with a business here in Altona of all places later in April. Good way to keep my skills and knowledge up. Apparently, I can’t bring my toolbelt and power tools, haha.
  • ·       Greyhound fostering: Another idea of Yumi’s to change things up a bit and get out more. We’ve agreed not to have any pets for years now, but she found this initiative where you can socialise a retiring racing greyhound for 3 weeks every few months before they go to a permanent new home. I think it’ll be good fun, once we get all the paperwork sorted. She’s promised to be its main carer, let’s see how that goes.
  • ·       Friends and family: Everyone seems mostly alright. One just recently lost her father too soon (not that there’s ever a good time, right?), which always makes me want to go to the ACT and show support, but it’s really not that helpful. On a more positive note she’s got a new thing going after a looooong divorce process, so that’s good for her. Other friends are making a big change by moving house in a few weeks to a very different part of the Netherlands. Our parents are good and things are calm, everyone’s kids are good and growing. It’s all the very good kind of routine.
  • ·       Long weekend: We’ve got three days of free time ahead, so today we’re going for a hike in the Dandenong National Park, do some shopping in the Dutch store, maybe some shopping for ‘stuff’ and have lunch somewhere nice. The rest of the weekend we’ll figure out as we go.


I think that’s the main items for these past 2 months, not quite sure what the next two will look like, but I’ll tell you all about it in 2 months’ time.

Be well and stay warm,

Gilbert

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