Altona, 10 July 2021

Hi Marlis,

I hope you are well and warm and already looking forward to Spring! It’s pretty cold in the mornings here at the moment, but I still go on my morning walks despite the ‘near-Canberra’ temperatures. As usual, it’s been a busy two months, despite not having a regular job, so here’s what I’ve been keeping busy with. 

Work-Work-Work

In my restarted career as a consultant, I took the opportunity to focus more on the things happening in the boardroom and work with Yumi’s business partner Alan. Him (mostly) and I have developed a product around advising boards how to take more note of Human Rights, quality and safeguarding and we called it…Right on Board. Yes, we’re nothing if not creative, haha. It’s very well received and Alan has been able to sell at least 6 workshops already. From August on I am getting more involved in the delivery, with Tasmania and NSW on the cards later on this year. August will be busy any way, with the Right on Board workshops, public workshops (where everyone can join) and the third and last round of the Change Tools Masterclass I’ve been doing for Deakin University. They contacted me quite unexpectedly to work with my original team from 2017 to convert the Masterclass into a digital delivery model, which should be a lot of fun if it all comes together.

I am also developing a whole new workshop based on the work of a Dutch author you’ll have never heard of, but he’s doing really well for himself and has been a close work relation of Yumi’s for years now. Last year we decided to make this happen and it took until now to actually start the work. There will be a workshop, workbook, cards, worksheets and even his book. I’ve called it Purpose in Practice or PiP as a working title, and that seems to stick so far, so I might just go with it. I am about halfway through it all, but there’s heaps of things to do and design, so I am thinking it will probably take until September to have it all sorted. It’s good to work on it every day, even though I don’t always feel like it and on some days I don’t feel like it will go anywhere at all, but we won’t know until it’s out there! I am learning heaps again, which is always good for me and I am developing new tricks and skills with new software programs as well, which is a nice bonus.

There are some other leads slowly warming up, you know the kind. People who start out all excited and then you don’t hear from them for a while, then they come back and go quiet again. Then again, it’s been a rather challenging time for everyone, especially the care providers, so I’ll not judge them too harshly!

Yumi’s work

Yumi is as busy as ever working with her own and shared clients and seems to be enjoying herself running her own business. It’s already been two years since she started out for herself and I don’t think she’s regretted it for a single day. Some weeks are slow and then others are super busy, but she always manages to make enough money to look after both of us and allow us to put money aside. It’s a strange time to be in the advisory business because there’s a lot of work to get done, but you can’t do everything online and clients want her to come in and do the work, but every time we get things sorted, some COVID outbreak happens and plans get changed. She’ll keep herself entertained regardless and it’s a new financial year which always means that new funds become available in the sector. Just the other day she got a contact from at least 2 years ago on her work email from more than 2 years ago. Yep, work seems to keep finding her!

Fluffy and Maple the foster dogs

A few weeks ago we had foster doggo #4, Fluffy. He’s named after a huge 3-headed guard dog in the Harry Potter books and if there was ever a misnomer for a dog, this was it! He was such a fearful fellow. Sometimes it was a challenge to even get him to go out the door and walk down the street. But on most days he was such a character! He had just turned five and wasn’t very socialised, so he did all the jumping up to you, gnawing on furniture, barking and generally misbehaving. That went away after the first week when he settled down a bit and showed more of his own very fun personality. He is extremely clever, got most things figured out in no time at all and he loved his snacks, so we had quite some work on our hands. As soon as he figured out that you could run up and down stairs, he often spent hours snoozing on the landing, just so he could keep an eye on whatever we were doing and if there was any food to be had. Not that he needed to gain weight, he was fine when he came to us, but a little bit more blubber on the bones in winter is okay! After the three weeks it was time for him to go back for adoption and he got scooped up in a matter of days. We saw a picture of him with his new family and they all looked so very happy that we felt very proud of our good boy. 

#3, Bronn, had some misadventure and injured his paw in the kennel from which he needed to recover first, but he got picked up for adoption in that same week, so we were doubly proud! It’s a strange thing because we can only do so much and it’s really mostly up to the dog themselves to behave, but after 3 weeks we have a pretty good idea of what they are like and Yumi writes these really detailed reports that must be very helpful for the new family to know about when they adopt. All good work to make sure they get the best chance at a new life. This Wednesday, we’re picking up an old girl (11 years old) called Maple. She was part of a group of dogs whose owner passed away recently and she needs some medical treatment. No need to train and teach her all sorts of things, she’s basically just with us to gain some weight and get lots of food and love, the two things Yumi does best! She needs to get desexed in the time she stays with us, so she’ll be with us for five weeks or so and Yumi is planning on driving her to the clinic, spend a day volunteering and then bringing her back home from Seymour, about 100km away. It’ll be fun and different to have an older dog around the home/office, she’ll probably sleep a lot and only wants short walks. We might take her to the beach and the lake, which is something all the other fosters seem to enjoy enormously as well. We have no idea about their backgrounds, but for some it might be the first time they even see so much water and sand in one place!

    

    

    

SES

It’s been busy times for the people in orange and I am sure you saw something on the news about the weather events in Gippsland and the Dandenongs here in Victoria. I think it’s now the biggest event in SES history with more than 10,000 requests for assistance over that period of time. I put in a fair bit of time and so did a few other members of our unit which

Is always good for team spirit. 

The fun and games started with a 4-day deployment to Gippsland in our capacity as a land based swift water rescue team. We were supposed to save people from floodwaters and dangerous situations, but soon realised that the conditions were not suitable for our skills and so we basically did nothing more than evacuate some people from their houses and stand around. It was all so very unorganised and confused that after 4 days we were all tired, angry and frustrated, which is not cool if you do this as a volunteer. But SES is a bit different in that way that we do potentially very dangerous things and it’s not something you just walk away from. So we woke up at all hours of the night, drove with lights and sirens (that part was cool) to all kinds of places around Sale and Traralgon, to then stand around and do nothing. We might have saved one person’s life because he was actually considering walking through super-fast moving water which would have drowned him for sure. He seemed confused and distraught, but we managed to talk him out of his plan and back to his car to wait until the water slowed down, so that’s a win. When it was time to go we were happy to do so and get back to our own areas. The teamwork was great as always, working with teams from 25 different units, but the coordination was totally amateur.

To quickly forget about all that, I spent the next two weeks travelling up and down to Emerald and Lilydale who got hit the most by the storms. I had seen bad situations with trees, but this was devastation on a scale I had not seen before. It’s strange but it’s beautiful and terrible at the same time. We did a few very good jobs on trees we could handle, cutting access to homes, removing trees from roofs and cars and covering up smashed roofs. All the while you’re driving through a wasteland of fog, trees and powerlines and only afterwards did we realise how potentially dangerous it all was in the first few days. It’s hard to imagine how big a 40-meter tree is when it’s on the ground, even for people who live there but the worst one I’ve seen had completely bisected a house and completely destroyed it. The occupant was ‘fine’, but at 89 or so, this was something he didn’t need in his life of course. The most amazing thing was the gratitude of the community towards us just coming to help for a few days. If you ever need to feel good about yourself, SES is a good place to get that, haha. 

In between we also trained our latest group of new recruits, who are not really all that new anymore and some of them have really got the orange virus in their blood already. They’ll do this for years if we let them and why not!? A lot of my colleagues got their chainsaw ticket, which means I get to do less cutting because they need the practice, so now I just help them do it safely, which they seem to enjoy. I’d rather do it myself, but hey, it’s not all about me, or so I am told! We also managed to clean up all our clothing and gear and even run our first fundraising Bunnings barbeque in 18 months and with all the media exposure we got $1,100 in sausage sales and $1,200 in donations from the public (and Bunnings), so that’s amazing. 

We’ll put that money to good use when our new truck arrives this Monday after about 6 months delay. Well, more like 4 years, but who’s counting, right?! It’ll be really good to have more modern equipment and everything in neat drawers and behind roller doors. Our old truck still had its trays and lockboxes from 35 (!) years ago, so it was about time for an upgrade. Of course the best part of it all is that I passed my driving test for the Heavy Rigid truck license so now I get to drive it around for real. I was secretly already doing that on the depot grounds anyway, but now I can go out around town, which should be fun. Three others also passed their driving test, so we might have to take turns, but as I am generally one of the people who responds when the pager goes off, I like my chances of getting some miles in. Here are some pictures to give you an idea. The person walking through water supporting the lady with the dog is me, I only found out later it was taken or I would have put my mask on a lot better!

 

 

Personal development

Aside from getting my driver’s license, I also invested dozens of hours into learning more about physical and mental disabilities as part of the new career direction I took. I did a very good course online with the University of Queensland and got a fancy certificate that says I now know more than I did before. I also read heaps of articles and most of a book about learning disabilities and aged care challenges. After a year and a half of working with my hands, it was a bit of an adjustment, but it felt good to put my brain to work in different ways too!

To get even ore certificates and shiny awards, I enrolled in the Australian Institute of Company Directors course for Board Directors. It’s very expensive, so I thought a long time about it and did my research but couldn’t find any bad experiences, so I just closed my eyes and pushed the pay button, haha. I’ll start in October and do it all at my own pace and I hope to have it all done by end of December. Having that piece of paper adds to my credibility with boards and I genuinely hope to learn a lot more about what it takes to govern a business from a distance. It’s a bit like a driver’s license or another course I did, you just get it as a rite of passage. I hope it will open new doors and opportunities eventually, so it’s a bit of an investment is what I tell myself.

In the meantime I can practice being part of a board because I got accepted as a committee member (not exactly a board member just yet) for a disability service provider called Knoxbrooke. Yumi did some work with them, so I know they are solid. The chair of the board happens to be the director of the MBA at Deakin, who I know from the Change Tools Masterclasses. It’s a small world sometimes.

The health care corner

Lots of medical things going on the past two months, most of them good. Yumi and I got our second COVID shot yesterday and we’re lucky enough to have no real side effects just yet. A sore upper arm, that’s about it. It feels really good to know we’re now much better protected against passing the virus on to other people.

I also got my two front teeth fixed last week and that was just so weird! They had chipped form years of grinding my teeth in my sleep and I am sure the excessive amounts of soda I drank for the past 25 years didn’t help much as well. All the same, initially I had 3 options. Crowns, veneers or filler. Mind you, crowns and veneers would be $4-6,000, so I was keen to hear about the filler option. 90 minutes later and $100 poorer I walked out with two completely fixed teeth.

As long as I don’t chew on the furniture or start cracking nuts with them, they should last me a good long time.

You’ll be happy to hear that aside from B12, we now also take vitamin D. I am still unconvinced of the use of vitamins in general, but I can’t deny that my eyesight seems to have recovered considerably. I probably still need glasses, which I am in total denial about, but a few weeks after I started taking the vitamin D capsules, I noticed I could read things that I couldn’t read anymore before. Winning!  

Yumi’s been having headaches on and off for the best part of two years now, but as she can be a bit stubborn (some would say incredibly stubborn) she just kept postponing going to the doctor. Now she’s finally gone and they’re doing some tests. So far, they aren’t finding anything really, but at least she’s got some extra strength migraine medication just in case, which I find very reassuring.

A long list of short things

• Snap lockdown 4.0 came and went an no one even got excited. It’s face masks on, then off, then on again around here and we’re just rolling with the punches. I don’t wish ill on anyone but it’s very quiet all of a sudden with the jokes and comments from NSW and QLD now they are in the same situation as Victoria was a while back. Not so funny now, eh?!

• Friends and family are doing well. A holiday to Italy for the Amsterdam crowd, a super cool and very well-paid new job for Yumi’s friend Hester, my friends Just and Alex thinking about new jobs and our friend Danielle had a daughter (Charlotte) a few weeks ago. Our parents are doing well too, everyone is over the whole COVID thing, understandably, but Europe isn’t quite as well off as Australia.

• On my morning walks I now listen to Australian True Crime, a podcast about, well, Australian crime! All sorts of old cases, cold cases, recent developments and things I never knew about the justice and prison system. Very informative and entertaining although it’s a bit scary sometimes when I walk around town in the dark of early morning and listening to how a serial killer ran around a neighbouring suburb 20 years ago. Good times, haha.

• I have a new laptop and it’s a Mac. For the past 25 years I have always worked in a Microsoft environment and it’s like driving stick when you only ever drove automatic. Some things work really well and others are just really weird design choices. But after 4-5 weeks I am now getting the hang of it and it’s a good challenge to keep learning new things. It needed to be a Mac due to workshop materials I am using, which were all created on Mac software. Now I can live in two system worlds and be part of the cool kids’ team for a change.

• Volunteering for Beachpatrol has been a bit quiet due to the cold weather and the Happy Paws Haven people had some sad personal affairs to sort out, so there wasn’t much for me to do there too. It’ll pick up again for sure, even when I am not sure how much I can really do for them anyway, but we’ll see.

I think that’s it for the update this time around. Please stay warm and safe until the weather gets better and the COVID craziness calms down some more. I’ll write again early September.

Be well  

Gilbert