Altona, 11 November
Hi Marlis,
It’s hard to believe how fast the past two months have gone by, but here we are, getting ready for Summer! I hope you are doing well, despite the lingering Covid restrictions, fingers crossed that things will get back to normal (or whatever that means) soon. Here’s what’s been happening for us since the last letter:
Post-lockdown life
Now that the curfew, lockdown and restrictions are finally in the rear view mirror we are finding not that much has really changed for us. Yumi hardly goes anywhere other than walking the dog and my three most often visited locations are two supermarkets and the SES unit…Yep, our lives are just full of excitement! But seriously, we had expected that we’d want to go and do some shopping, go to the movies or anything else ‘out there’ but we realised just the other day that we’re still behaving as if the lockdown never ended. Maybe I just need to go to Bunnings again for everything to start feeling like normal again, haha!
I’ve been to Melbourne CBD a few times now and it’s so much quieter that it feels like a different city altogether. The buildings and stores are the same, well most of them, things are getting built still and there’s people walking around, but it’s not even half the normal busyness than what I am used to seeing. Trains are basically empty, a lot less noise and cars and shops don’t have as many visitors as usual. It must be very strange for all the business owners to make sense of what to do next. I heard on the news that restaurants in Melbourne will get government support to attract more customers, but now they can’t find the staff to cook and serve! Those people have moved on to different and better things. Well, good for them, I hope they get paid a lot better and cop less abuse in their new jobs :).
We find ourselves making plans and then postpone them, make new plans and postpone them again because things keep shifting. We’ve had a few good weekends weather-wise and despite the mess they make, it was really good to see the beaches full of visitors. One day was busier than I had ever seen it in the four years we’ve lived here now, people were setting up tents and whole outside entertainment areas at 6am, talk about true dedication to getting the best spot on the beach!
Maple the foster doggo
This dog is a story and a half for sure! She’s now been with us for four months and it looks like she’ll be around for at least another 3-4 weeks. Not that she’s in our way but it has all gone quite differently than planned to say the least. First she had to gain some weight, then she had the whole desexing operation and then there were the corns. It’s a greyhound specific ailment that can have serious complications, like operations to remove them or even amputate a toe or paw if it gets bad. Maple needed to get her left outside toe on her right paw amputated 4 weeks ago and she’s been soldiering on like the trooper she is!
First there were a few vet visits to determine if they could fix her toe with medication and a small procedure but all of that didn’t work so she ended up losing the toe. She’s taken it all very well, even though it must be annoying to have your leg and foot bandaged up for weeks and to have to wear a plastic cover every time you go outside. Just yesterday we were at the vet to get her stitches removed but it turned out that she had popped some of those last week and now she’s looking at another two weeks of being all wrapped up, poor thing!
She’s doing really well though and we’re sure she’ll find a good home. There was someone who wanted to adopt her but they fell off the face of the earth a while back, so the adoption team at GAP (Greyhound Adoption Program) will find her a new home. Yumi monitors the adoption website and sees old dogs getting adopted all the time now. Maple has a lot going for her once her medical issues are behind her and we think she has at least another 3-5 years in her. She’s still very much the queen of the sofa and snoozes her days away, but she’s just lovely, affectionate and super relaxed about life in general. The only times she gets excited is when we go out with the car or when it’s time eat. She’s also taught herself to jump into the back of the car and she just looks like the proudest dog when she’s done that, haha!
She’s also very cheeky and has a mind of her own, but in a good way. She always wants to go forward, walk a little further, sniff another bush or tree and she’s forever curious. She’s supposed to wear a muzzle when she goes out (it’s the law) but I’ve not done that for months and now even Yumi is just letting that go and Maple loves it. Sometimes when we go out into busy areas we have to put it on just in case and as soon as we’re back in the car she’s just shaking her head and pushing into us to get it off. She’s also not supposed to go off-lead, but when I walk her early in the morning and late at night I let her wander home by herself the last 50 meters or so and she just doesn’t run away, always sniffing and never further away than 2-3 meters. Good dog! It’ll be hard to give her up again, but she can do better than our small house and back garden and I am sure there’s someone out there who will love her almost as much as we do.
SES-activity
I don’t think I’ve ever been this busy with SES. Most of September was quiet, with us slowly going back to in-person training, doing some maintenance and a small number of call-outs. Nothing out of the ordinary, just keeping busy. But then October came around and everything changed since we had a big weather event pass through. The one in June, when the state had 11,000 call-outs was very big and mostly concentrated in one area (Dandenongs) with lots of damage to very big trees. The storm that came through two weeks ago was totally different though. Just over 10,000 jobs got recorded and not only did it hit other places, but it was also some of the hardest wind I have experienced since coming to Australia! Trees and branches everywhere, lots of building damage, trampolines flying and fences falling all over the place. In a regular month we do about 10-15 jobs and call that ‘busy’ for our unit. This time we did about 95 in just 15 days! Most of them we got to do in one weekend and then we just kept mopping up after. I was out every day and night for eight days straight and even this week spent a few hours in people’s front and back yards, on roads and on roofs putting back tiles or covering up holes.
We only have a team of about 15-20 active volunteers. In out unit but thanks to a lot of effort going into training and them being very dedicated we did an excellent job if I say so myself. Our area wasn’t hit too hard, so we got to go out into neighbouring areas to help them out and got to make ourselves useful. A lot of the jobs were trees on the road or footpath and those we just cut up and leave. There was also a job where a whole tin roof had been peeled back, some trees through roofs that were so big we’d need a crane and more than a few trees on or in cars that always provide a bit of a challenge to get them off without causing more damage. Those jobs always draw a big crowd for some reason, especially if the alarm goes off, haha. Almost all people are very friendly and very appreciative when we rock up. Some even want to feed us and give us money but we just get on with it, after all there’s still a few things waiting for us, so yeah, we’ll just keep going!
Thanks to a clever training plan we now have a very skilled crew with very useful qualification like truck driving, chain sawing and rooftop repairs. My role is changing a bit too. Where I was just always ‘the guy’ because I ca do any job and am almost always available, I now have to stand back and let others do some of the work too. I thought I’d find that annoying but it’s actually very cool to see the people I helped train do such great work. It also boosts their confidence when they get to work on complicated jobs and big trees. After all, the only way they get more experience is to do the work and after five years and more than 300 jobs I should just step back and let them do it. Three of us were in a backyard earlier this week where a tree had split and 80% was lying down on part of the house. That took a good hour and a half to cut up/down with different saws! We were quite proud to have caused zero damage dropping it in parts and when we were done the yard was just full of branches in big piles. Good times, even though I didn’t touch a saw and let my two colleagues do all the cutting, only giving them advice when they asked for it and they did a very good job.
There will always be jobs for me to do, like 2 nights ago when a tree dropped a 5-6 meter top section in the middle of a busy road in a town nearby. Off we go and 15 minutes later the tree is in pieces and dragged off to the side. It’s always rewarding when the police go: “Oh, that was fast” and my team go: ‘Yeah, that’s Gilbert!” Even the local council crews know we can get the job done now, which wasn’t the case when I started out with this unit four years ago, yay us!
Work
It’s been crazy busy the past two months, mostly just because I keep saying yes to everything that sounds fun. Here’s what’s been keeping me busy:
• Right on Board sessions
Across September and November Yumi’s business partner Alan and I delivered a whole range of training in public workshops and to six organisations in disability care on quality, safeguarding and human rights. We call the program Right on Board, a bit of a s of a play on words with them being executives and boards of directors, learning about rights and responsibilities. Feedback from participants has been very good and I get to do interviews, research documents, write reports and do workshops/presentations with a very broad range of businesses, some quite small, but also the biggest provider of services in Australia. It’ll be good to take a break from it in two weeks when we do the last one for the year and then review the materials for next year. Next week I’ll be running an in-person full day workshop and I haven’t done that by myself for nearly two years so I am equal parts excited and stressed but it’ll be fine, we have good materials and I know my half of it by heart by now.
• Purpose in Practice
This project involved translating the many materials of a Dutch author who is on a mission to make organisations focus more on their customers and less on the processes they operate. I am a big fan of his work and so is Yumi’s business, so I got to create a whole workshop, a 70-page workbook, a set of 80 cards, 40+ worksheets and a website to pull it all together. Wouter, the Dutch guy, likes what I’ve done with it all and now it’s a matter of finding clients who want to buy/run the program. It’ll take a good few months for it to get some traction and attention but that’s alright, I mostly wanted to unlock it for the rest of the world in English and enjoyed the challenge. My original plan was to have it up and running in September but I had to wait for others to sign off and it took longer than I would have liked so we only launched the whole thing very quietly in October. Anyway, we’ll see what happens in the next six months or so.
• Comic Book
Remember those Chameleon Cards that I made in 2019? Well, I’m working with the same friend (Peter) to create a comic book about bad change management practices and how to do better. There will be 50 comic strips and about 260 tips (50x 5-6 tips for each makes for a lot of tips!). We’ll donate all the proceeds to charity like we did the last time and hope to sell 300 copies, leaving us with about $5,000 to donate. It’s been such a fun process to write it! Peter always wanted to create a comic, but it’s more than just drawing funny pictures. You need a set of topics, scenarios, characters and all sorts of stuff, but most of all, you have to be funny. And being funny on demand is not easy! I now appreciate stand-up comedians even more than before because you have to write and construct the joke in advance and then deliver it so that people can enjoy reading it, despite it being all staged and designed. Good thing we have a team of reviewers across Australia (and Belgium and Hong Kong) to tell us if it all works. I’ve done all the writing (about 20,000 words, which is a small book) and Peter has drawn more than 300 images! It started out as a quick list of 50 things that don’t work in change I wrote up on the train home after meeting Peter for lunch and now it looks like we’ll launch the book on 6 December. Here’s an image of the cast of characters to give you an idea, once it’s done I’ll happily send you a copy or if it all works out I might be able to drop by and hand it to you in person.
• Change Tools Masterclass
Round 3 of the Change Tools series is done and dusted once again and this time around it was different yet again to the previous years. Deakin university has already asked me to do it again and because I’ve rejigged the materials considerably and will do some more work on updating it over the next months I’ve agreed to do it once more. The part I like best is the interaction with students, but it’s also pretty cool to see what they end up writing in their change plans. Some were very good, although all of them make it a bit of a rush job. Fair enough, they have busy lives and it’s not like they need to be fully experienced change practitioners after four weeks. Then again, it’s always great to hear the very positive feedback and see a few of them get very inspired by the possibilities change work has to offer if done right.
• Change Tools Micro-credential
Six months ago my ‘old’ team at Deakin university asked me if I wanted to get involved in developing an online change management course that would be fully online, with students learning at their own pace. I say old team because I had worked with them in 2017 on this exact topic of online learning design and I felt it was an excellent way to come full circle working with some very talented people. A micro-credential is basically a small portion of a university degree packed up in a neat little package that will give a student 4-6 weeks of learning at university level with credit that goes toward an actual degree. They call them ‘stackables’ because you can stack all these credentials on top of each other to end up with a university degree that you can sort of pick and choose. It doesn’t quite work that way, but let’s leave out the boring details for now. Deakin being Deakin it then of course took another 3 months for things to get going, but 3 weeks ago I finished my part of the job of converting the Change Tools masterclass to online learning and now it’s just waiting for final reviews and quality checks. It’s been a good experience working with my learning designer Jenny and the production team, but Deakin is just so disorganised that it took them 5 months to get the contract sorted. I’ll spare you the drama but after 4 months it looked like it would all fall apart because they got all silly about $1,000 insurance on a $10,000 job but fortunately we found a way forward and now we’ll launch on 29 November. There are 15 micro-credentials for students to choose from and the very first course Deakin sold was….mine! Yay!
No wonder I feel like I need a bit of a break, right?! it’s been a bit busy. Considering how I started the year building tables and cabinets and now I’ve written about 60,000 words, created books, cards, websites and online learning I don’t think I’ve had a more creative year so full of learning and development.
Yumi’s Work
Yumi has been quite busy too, mostly being a foster mom for Maple, but work has been very full on and creative for her too. She’s been designing a series of three workshops for National Disability Services (NDS) full of practical tips on how to get more out of the workforce through smart use of capabilities and tools instead of just squeezing people for more hours. She had to create all of it from scratch and spent weeks putting it all together, crafting tools and reviewing 100’s of options. Safe to say her classes were very well attended and got very good scores, as always. She’s also going to do some coaching work with a big client in NSW in a few weeks and it looks like I will be in the neighbouring suburb working for a different client at the same time, so we might be travelling together if it all works out, how cool is that?! She’s also been working with this team of enthusiasts who are all about reinventing work and how it can be done in different ways. They are planning to represent Australia in an around-the-world 24hr global event by hosting a 4-hour event on good practices in ‘new ways of working’. It probably all sounds very fancy to you, but there’s actually quite a lot of merit in getting people to think about work in different ways now that we no longer want to go to offices and do things the traditional ways. Yumi seems to enjoy herself with it and that’s what matters most to me.
Small stuff
And then there’s just a few small bits and bobs to keep you up to date on:
• AICD-course: I’ve started a Company Directors Course, which will teach me what you need to know if you want to be on a board of a business. Seen how I advise people on boards on how to do things better for their clients, it seems like a good idea to know more about their jobs. It’s a highly regarded course to do so if I ever want to join a board at least I’ll have the shiny certificate of competence for it. I’ve got until March next year to complete the 2,000 or so pages of reading but I plan to be done by the end of December. I am 70% through the reading material after 6 weeks and it’s not all that hard.
• Podcasts and walking: My walks are still a daily thing and now that daylight savings is turned to summer settings I get to walk in the light a bit more, which is nice if you listen to episodes on true crime, murder, abductions and other terrible things in Australia. After 200+ episodes I feel like I’ve learned a lot about the Australian justice and legal system and even a bit of history!
• Volunteering: BeachPatrol has been slow with the lockdown, even though Yumi and I did a big clean over two days of our neighbourhood as part of Clean-Up Australia day a few weeks ago. Tomorrow is the first clean up in a long time and it promises to be raining cats and dogs (well, not really of course, that’d be very messy ), so we’ll see how many people turn up.
• Family and friends: not much going on in this department, just people living their lives mostly. Kids are growing, jobs are getting done, all is good with the world.
• Queensland: we’re still hoping to travel to Queensland to go and see where we might live next year, but the border situation is a bit unsure still and it’ll be still fine if we go early January or even February really. But it would be nice to go for a very long drive.
• Knock down rebuilds: The house across the street, that stood empty first and then got rented to a series of shady characters dealing drugs and getting up to no good has now been knocked down and hauled away, got riddance. It got a bit noisy, but nothing too bad. And now it turns out that the house at the back will also be demolished and that’s literally 4 meters away from our living room, so that’ll be interesting. I think they won’t start until next year though. Ah well, we’ll be gone by this time next year, so we’ll be surrounded by tradies for most of it, haha.
• Birthday: It was so nice to hear from you on my birthday, thank you for calling. We didn’t make a big deal about it due to lockdown and I always feel the celebration of being together for 24 years this year is much more worthwhile anyway. 43, which means that next year I’ll be half as old as you exactly :).
That’s about it for the past two months, I really hope I get to see you if our travel plans all go well and I’ll call you to check if we can visit, but if not you’ll get another letter in two months with our latest adventures!
Be well, stay safe
Gilbert
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