Altona, 9 September 2021

Hi Marlis,

I hope you are doing well in these strange and unpleasant Covid-times. Well, at least it’s Spring and it got off to a very nice start here in Victoria with a few days of 22 and 23 degrees. Not bad at all!

According to my calendar, which is not always correct, it’ll be your birthday on the 21st! To me you are forever 80 years young, but perhaps it’s more something like 86 or 87 by now? Who’s counting anyway, right? Only 13-14 more years to go to 100! I hope you’ll have some family visit on the day, and I’ll be sure to give you a call as well. If it turns out not to be your birthday, we can still have a chat at the very least !

It’s been busy but not busy if that makes sense? We’ve been in lockdown 5.0 and are now in 6.0 and it’s really getting a bit old. Hopefully we’ll see restrictions lift by the end of the month if everyone would just do the smart thing! All the same, there was enough to do, so here we go with the going-ons of the past two months.

Work

I’ve been keeping busy and then some over the past few months, but you won’t hear me complain at all. I’ve been interviewing people, writing reports, delivering workshops on the internet, creating new things and working with friends to make cool videos about work stuff. I really enjoy working on all those different things and while it’s not the same as building beautiful furniture, it still gives me a lot of satisfaction to work with clients and students

For Right on Board we work with disability and aged care providers to make sure they do their best work when it comes to quality, safety and human rights of their clients. I interview between 10-20 people and then read close to 50 documents before I write a report with recommendations on what they can do better. Some are really good already; some are just a bit full of themselves but are still willing to listen because they can get into real trouble ($500,000 worth of fines kind of trouble) if they get caught doing the wrong thing. Most of them are really good though and I enjoy meeting all these different kinds of people from all walks of life. This month we also delivered that public workshop I mentioned last time and it was really good fun hearing experiences from all over Australia.

I’m making good money right now and the rest of the year is covered income-wise, but I’m still thinking of picking up a part-time contract for a change role if one is available, just to stay in practice. It doesn’t have to be the most challenging work, just enough to keep my skills sharp. Apparently, there’s a lot of demand for change people right now, but I’ve been avoiding going on job boards so far because it’s just so depressing to see how poorly described and uninspiring most roles are.

I’ve also started work with Deakin university to convert the masterclass materials I’ve been teaching for the past 3 years into what they call a micro-credential. It’s a fancy word for a chunk of specific material that’s lifted out of a standard degree and tailored for the professional market. I thought I could convert what I had in 3-4 days, but it proved harder than I thought, and I ended up doing it in 6 days. It’s a lot easier to show people a few lines of text and image and then talk through it than to write for an audience that I will never meet. The idea is that we’ll build a learning environment on the internet, where people can do their own learning, week by week and step by step. I’ve always been a fan of the concept because it just makes sense to me. None of the boring stuff and only what I really need. My kind of learning!

Finally, I was waiting on some feedback and comments on the Purpose in Practice workshop I have put together based on the work of that Dutch guy I mentioned last time, but after 4 weeks of waiting it turns out my reviewer had forgotten about it…Right…Oh well, Yumi will have a look over the weekend and then I’ll send it off to the Dutch guy for final approval and if all go well I can still be ‘ready for market’ by the end of September. I will admit that I’ve lost a bit of enthusiasm by now, having not worked on it for 5 weeks, but hopefully the wait will be worth it 

Yumi’s work

Yumi landed a new contract with an existing client who used to be her employer, so she’s set for the next three months and will have other client things to keep her entertained. She’s been having a bit of a slump motivationally speaking and I am just happy that she’s taking a bit more time than usual to do other things than just work-work-work all the time. She’s always doing things and keeping busy, but it’s good for lots of things to take it a bit easier every now and then I think. If only I would follow my own advice a bit more, haha.

Maple the greyhound

Last time I wrote, we were about to have Maple visit for a while, likely up to 6 weeks because by then we’d have a trip to Tasmania planned. Of course that didn’t happen with the lockdown and as she wasn’t getting as fat as we liked fast enough for her to have her desexing operation, we decided to have her over for a bit longer.

She’s a lovely lady, very well-behaved and low maintenance, sleeps most of the day and just loves ear scratches and belly rubs. She has this really weird way of clearing her throat where it sounds and looks like she’s choking on her own tongue, but after a while we even got used to that once we realised she’s actually just fine. Because she is an older lady (11.5 years young) she’s the first dog to be allowed on the sofa and boy does she own it! One of the nicknames for greyhounds is “long dog” and she certainly stretches herself out to the max, haha. Like all dogs her tongue lolls out of her mouth when she sleeps and when she wakes up it takes a minute for the muscles to work again, which makes her look like she’s not completely right in the head.

Just last Friday she finally had the operation and while she was out they also cleaned her teeth and clipped her nails so she’ll be ready for her adoptive parent when she’s recovered. Apparently it’s a vet student with a small dog, so she’ll be in good hands and have a little friend for company. She’s been back to the vet this week to stay for 2 nights to get more fluids and pain medication in because greyhounds are notorious for not eating when stressed and it doesn’t get more stressful than this at her age. She’s doing quite well, but she’s lost a lot of weight that she couldn’t afford to lose, so we’ll fatten her up with lots of chicken and then it’s time to release her to her new parent and forever home. It’ll be nice to sit on our own sofa again!

Queensland adventure

We’ve done some more work on our ‘moving to Queensland’ plan as well. It’s now a competition between Townsville and Brisbane, so we’ll probably end up in Sunshine Coast if our previous experiences are anything to go by! In all seriousness, it’s still very much undecided between the two. Townsville has better weather but rednecks and limited opportunities, Brisbane is a big city with all the plusses and minuses that come with it, so we’ll have to go and see. Quite literally, we hope to go on a trip in November and stop by in the ACT as well, but with the current Covid numbers still rising, I don’t see us going anywhere anytime soon. It’s still a lot of fun to think about the options, what we’d do for work, where we’ll live, what land we might buy and how we’ll go about building our own home. I think it’s starting to get to a point where we can do with some change of scenery again after more than 5 years in Victoria. To be continued… 

Volunteering

Like last time I wrote, volunteering has been mostly quiet and fortunately we didn’t have too many weather events come through. Only a few jobs for SES in the last rainstorm that moved through, so all we do is a bit of maintenance and a bit of driving around to keep the vehicles operational. Any excuse to get out of the house will do at some point! Here are some pictures from last week when an old tree decided it had been enough and dropped a big branch.

Lots of small things

It’s been that kind of period where lots of things happen, but at the same time nothing really major happens. Here are some small mentions and thing going on in a row.

• My diet has been going well! I had slowly crept up to 94kg again and that was becoming a bit uncomfortable, but now I am sitting at 89, which is a lot better. I am planning to drop another 5kg in the next three months and then I’ll be in a really good spot

• I’ve just finished the third round of teaching change management to mature age business school students and their feedback was just the best, yay me!  All I have left to do is grade some of their papers and I’ve already had 4/15 back and done, so we’re making good progress and Deakin has already asked me to go again next year, which should be fun!

• I have a new hobby while doing my morning walks. We have a group of people putting up stickers with misinformation and protests about covid and lockdowns which is just not helpful. I ‘patrol’ different parts of town every day and peel them off or scratch them out and it seems I have helpers who I’ve never met who do the same. One group puts them up, we take them down, they spray paint slogans on the roads and paths, we contact the council to get rid of it the same day. Good fun!

• This Saturday I’ll be presenting at an online change conference called Australasian Change Days Conference (AC/DC, get it? Like the band, haha). I helped set it up a few years back but moved away for a while and this team of legends has just made such a good event out of it, it’ll be good fun. I’ll be talking about the future of the profession and am hoping for a good discussion. We’ve got people from all over the world and lots to listen to.

• I’ve had some time to get back to reading smart books that teach me things instead of just zombies and murder plots. I was very impressed with a book called “Sand Talk”, which is all about how indigenous thinking can change the world. I also read a book that I thought was going to be boring but was actually very good. It’s called “the fish rots from the head” and deals with how to be a good board director. I am now reading “Change, how to make big things happen” which is also quite good (just started) and goes into how change happens at the level of whole societies and communities based on 10 years of research so that’ll be an interesting read.

• Friends and family are all doing well, everybody just living their lives, going on holidays and getting on with things while dealing with Covid in very different ways than we do in Australia. My friend Alex is about to move into his new home, my other friend Just might soon switch jobs and my dad did a bit of truck driving since a long time and seemed to have really enjoyed it. 

I think that’s about it for this time around, not so much to say and share, but next time I’m sure to have new stories and adventures to tell you about.

Stay safe, be well and enjoy Spring!

Gilbert