Springfield Lakes, 11 September 2023
Hi Marlis,
Happy Birthday! I’ll give you a call and hope this letter finds you exactly on Tuesday the 12th, but make it a good day and treat yourself to something nice! I hope you are keeping well and are looking forward to being outside a bit more once again. It’s been a very full-on two months, so let’s get straight into it.
Trip to the Netherlands
From 26 July to 7 August we were back in the Netherlands and it was good to see family, friends and Rotterdam once again. Everyone really went all out to make us feel welcome and I couldn’t stop marvelling at how many vegan food options there were to choose from. Australia is not bad at all, but wow, the Netherlands really takes it to the next level. Yummm!
It’s quite bizarre to see how much all the kids have grown, with most of them now already or soon becoming teenagers! When did that happen?! Other than that we realised that it’s us who have changed the most really. We look at how people behave in traffic, the crowds everywhere, the weather and the price-levels and we’re like “yeah, nah”, rather live in Brisbane. There’s so much to tell about all we did in those two weeks, that I’ve sectioned it up for easier reading and tried to keep it in order. 😊
Staying at my parents
The flight in was uneventful and long, as expected. We left on Wednesday 3am here and arrived on Wednesday at 9pm there, but of course with the time difference, more than 26 hours had passed. My mum and dad picked us up at the airport and drove us back to their place, where we also stayed the last time in 2019. It really is like a hotel, nothing to worry about, everything is there when you need it, your food is ready when you get back and you can come and go whenever you like. They did everything they possibly could to make our stay as comfortable as possible and it was!
The next-morning jetlag wasn’t so bad and we immediately got started on the program after breakfast to go up north and visit a contact of Yumi’s. It’s called the “dementia-village” and they have a unique approach to assisted living for people with Alzheimer. The idea is to let them all live together in a village like setting with support 24/7 when they need it instead of institutionalising and hiding them away them in rooms until they die.
Yumi visited for 2 hours and I went exploring a nearby castle (“The Muiderslot”) that I grew up with hearing about and seeing in tv series, but never actually visited. It would have been nice if not for the weather which was just pouring down with bucketloads of rain. Little did we know that would be the theme for every.single.day! So much rain.
We worked around it and it didn’t make too much of a difference to our plans, although we got rained out more often in 2 weeks than in the past 3 years or so. Ah well, we got some good use out of the umbrellas we bought and got lucky a few times during the day, but it was horrendous for most of our stay. I’d go out for early morning walks to have a look around and see the old neighbourhood (we used to live about 3km away) but always had to bring an umbrella for those surprise rain showers, haha!
It was nice to have the evenings together with my parents to just sit and chat, until the jetlag caught up on the first few days. We also spent the Saturday together going to a museum (photography), having a fancy lunch and going to the cinema to see the latest Indiana Jones movie. Totally forgettable movie, but it was great to do things together. My dad had not been in a cinema for 17 years, so that was quite the experience for him too!
Road trip down memory lane
I always like to visit the places that used to be significant, like where the family business used to be, the street I grew up in, the first house I remember living in, my old school, that sort of thing. Some places are filled with sadness, others with great joy, most a bit of both. It’s amazing the things you remember when you are in the actual location, although it gets a bit busy with all the memories trying to push to the front at the same time.
Because I get up at stupid o’ clock wherever I am and it was summer with long days over there, I had the opportunity to spend some time in solitude in these places and just be there in the moment with no other people, no traffic or other noises. The connection to these places is slowly growing distant and fading away as buildings, people and places disappear and new elements get added. It’s not always a bad thing, but I notice it a bit more every time we visit, which is normal I guess.
The most fun I had when I went to the campus of the Erasmus University where I met Yumi all the way back in 1997. I was literally the only person there, which isn’t strange if you consider it was Sunday morning 6am-ish. So many new buildings, some old remaining ones, places where we used to hang out, paths we used to walk together with our study mates. They’ve really spruced up the place over the years and now that I’ve worked at various universities, I see them in a very different way as to when I was a student there.
A day out in Rotterdam
Yumi and I had a great day in Rotterdam just going around, looking at how everything had changed and doing some shopping and eating. We took the train into town from where my parents live and stopped at a shopping centre we used to live next to just to see how everything had changed.
It was remarkably similar still, but a bit more modern. We continued our trip into the city, checked out the (still quite) new Central Station which looks very sci-fi and spacious and then walked our way towards what is still the best apple pie in the city, they even had a vegan option, yay! Then we did some more walking and Yumi spent about an hour buying clothes (that she needed) while I just went for a few loops around the city by myself. Again, so many memories, but it’s still the same beautiful, loud, ugly, everchanging and rough city that will always stay in my blood.
We had a nice lunch, walked around some more, bought cool socks for me and rode the train back just looking out the window to see how much the city has changed and continues to do so.
Visiting friends
On Sunday we visited my friend of nearly 25 years Alex, Suzan and their three girls in their new (to us) home and it was just the best to see them do so well, the girls getting all grown up and hearing about their lives. They’d just come back from a three week holiday and about to go back to work, so we just sat around and chatted about life, work and plans for the future, as you do. My only regret was that we couldn’t stay longer, they are such lovely people!
On Monday we visited Yumi’s best friend of nearly 25 years and to get there we took the touristic route past the towns we used to go to for either shopping, entertainment or sports and we also stopped in Oostvoorne (East of Voorne) which is an island and part of the southwest coast of the Netherlands. I spent my teenage years there when my parents moved there because it as safer. It was also incredibly white and not unlike a rural town with the same rural mentality. I never really liked it there, but it was an okay place to live, with the beach and coastal forests nearby. It has changed a lot, but we were mostly there to see the coast and then move on to Hester, Aschwin and their kids. We stayed a bit longer this time around and again just chatted about life and everyday stuff. That’s the great thing about our long-time friends, you don’t need a lot of time to get used to each other again, you just pick up where you left off when you last saw each other😊.
Arnhem
On Tuesday we picked up our rental car in Rotterdam City while the sun was out for a whole 30 minutes before it rained again and travelled 120km to the east of the Netherlands to stay in a place called Arnhem (from the World War II movie The Longest Day) that is very close to Germany and just a 10 minute drive from Yumi’s parents. They are getting on in age being a very respectable 74 and 75 years old (spring chickens compared to your 89, course 😊), so it was all a bit too much for them to have us around for the full five days, that’s why we arranged for accommodation in Arnhem. The place was nice enough and had everything we needed, aside from an elevator. If you look past the massive roadworks going on in the street outside, around town and the 8 flights of stairs we had to go up and don every time we went out, it really had everything we needed and with the city, shops, parks and parking all 5 minutes walking away. My personal favourite was dragging the big 30kg suitcase up and down those stairs, yay…No, just kidding the best parts were the morning walks through the city and parks and going out for dinner to a fully vegan restaurant on our last night in town. Unfortunately, in a very rare occurrence Yumi wasn’t feeling well and we had to leave before dessert. She was fine again later that evening and the food until then had been wonderful!
The 50-year wedding anniversary
One of the main reasons for us to come to the Netherlands was Yumi’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was Yumi’s parents, her brother Kenji and sister-in-law Roos (Rose) and their two sons (15 and 13) plus me and we had a wonderful time together. We travelled all the way down to the most southern part of the Netherlands, near Maastricht and stayed in a farmstead-style hotel with a great restaurant and beautiful surroundings.
Yumi’s dad, my 13-year old nephew and I went for a walk when we arrived and passed a hill that had some pretty impressive stairs. Of course we needed to go up those! That was probably the dumbest thing I did in a while. Not for my nephew and me, but Yumi’s dad (remember how I said he’s now 74) still has the spirit, but not the body for those sorts of shenanigans and at some point on the way back I was really worried that he was going to have a medical emergency due this blood sugar. He walks 3 hours multiple times a week, but going up hat turned out to be THE LONGEST STAIRS in the Netherlands was not a smart move. Fortunately we made it safely back down, after, of course, getting rained on and back to the hotel but I was really shaken to see how he’d become frailer since the last time we met. Food is a big thing in the Stamet family so we had a 6 course dinner and just enjoyed each other’s company a lot.
The next morning we got up on time, well, everybody else slept in to about 7am, while I got an early morning walk in and came up with the idea to go to the three-country point. It was really close by and the fun factor there is that you can be in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands all at the same time. It was another one of those cheesy things that you never quite get to do, but since we were so close, we diverted from the plan a bit and made a quick stop to get the photo opportunity for posterity. It was just as cheesy as you’d imagine, but fun all the same. From there we continued on to an American War Memorial (the place is full of them!) which had a similar atmosphere to the bigger ones in Normandy, France. They always make me sad about the needless waste of lives and all the sorrow war brings, but it was good to see the interest the boys had and Yumi’s dad was completely in his element explaining how the liberation and D-Day all happened. From there we continued on to something that doesn’t quite translate, but let’s call it a pie-baking workshop, again, completely vegan, especially for me. I wish we hadn’t because the workshop was great fun and the pie we ate while waiting for ours to finish was also very good, but none of our eight pies turned out to be very tasteful. They were well-baked and looked great, but taste-wise, a bit meh. Ah well, the process itself was fun, the end-result didn’t matter too much 😊.
Visiting more friends
The day after we came back from the family get-together we went and visited my other best friend, Just, who I’ve known for 26 years and change now. Him, his wife Marit and their son Jurre moved up north about 3 years ago and they live in the Green Heart of the Netherlands. It is truly beautiful there! We went for a big walk through the old growth woods and had a lovely lunch without their very energetic 10-year old boy (he stayed with grandma and grandpa so we could have a conversation longer than 3 minutes and then hung out at their house before making a taco dinner and going for ice-cream later that evening. It was good for the soul to see them again!
Wrapping up and going home
The last day of our stay we went for a long hike with Yumi’s dad, or that was the plan! But it started pouring down with rain (again) after 45 minutes, of course, just when we’d reached the point of no return, so we put up our umbrellas and soldiered on. It was a good, shared experience, but was it fun? No, not quite but we had a good laugh about it when we got back! We warmed up and dried our clothes over lunch and miraculously, no one got sick, ha!
The next day was one of those long travel days where we left Arnhem, swung by Yumi’s parents to say our goodbyes, drive back to Rotterdam to drop off the rental car, stopped by at my mom’s work (she works in a clothes store) to say goodbye, hang out with my dad for a few hours and then got dropped off at the airport to go home. The trip back was uneventful and we arrived without issues on Wednesday morning at 7am. We thought of taking the train, but ended up splurging on a taxi as we were ready to go back home. It was good to be back with Dash later that morning and it didn’t look like had missed us all that much, haha.
Finishing up at UQ
We came back on Wednesday and on Friday I resigned from work at the University of Queensland. Before we went on holidays I already felt like my best work was done and I needed to go somewhere else. The time away made it clear this was the best path forward so into my new manager’s office I went and set the date for Friday 8 September. I really wanted this to be the job that I stayed in, but it wasn’t to be. I said I’d stay at least 12 months and I achieved that. I also wanted to feel like I explored all possibilities and I also feel I did that. There were many things I am proud of having made them happen, but there’s just not enough to work with to make change happen. Which is ironic if you think of it, as the university slogan is: “Create change”.
When I started, there were 25+ change managers. A year later it’s closer to 10, that should tell you enough about how the role is valued. Perhaps in a few years from now they’ll rethink their approach, but for now our ways will part. I’ve left them with a complete training module for staff in 20 parts that we created as a team, let’s see if that helps! I made some very good friends, built my network, had many opportunities to speak about change and help others, so on balance I feel like I did good work. Over the past three months and with new leadership I could just see where my role and the main project were going, so I stopped on a high note and got out of the way of the new direction. I’m sure they will do fine without me, as they’ve done for a long time, but they’ll know I was there and made things better too.
My team had organised a very nice send-off and a card with lovely words. Instead of a gift that is nice but not all that useful, they did a collection and donated $150 to the National Homeless Collective, which is the best gift I can think of. I had the opportunity to finish it all off with a team lunch that was already planned, hand in all my equipment and badge and was out the door at 1pm on 1 September with a week of paid leave to give myself a bit of a break.
Things I do when not working
Of course I have to go and find a new job to keep me entertained and there’s been some interest but it’s all for the jobs that I always do and I’d like something a bit more senior, to really build a new practice, help lead a significant project or do something extraordinary and that’s a bit harder to find. It’s strange to hear so many people (really, at least 2 dozen or so) say that I’ll have a job in no time and I guess it depends on what they mean by “no time”, but I don’t see it happening any time soon. I do the work, I am active in the online change community, volunteer for CMI, speak at conferences every now and then and have quite a few followers on professional platforms but somehow people who hire change managers don’t see me as the logical choice. I’ll have to work on that somehow but it’s not clear to me what ‘that’ is exactly. Oh well, I have nothing but time to figure it out.
Over the past few weeks I made a list of the things I will do when I am not working, so I don’t end up wasting time and it’s been going well so far. I’ve updated my online profiles, wrote a bit about change management, washed the car, mowed the lawn, found a new energy supplier (more solar!), bought new shoes, recycled 277 bottles collected on my daily litter picking trips, updated our administration, cleaned up my digital files and did a ton of other chores so they are out of the way. I also cleaned up the garage and that was fun to do. Yumi was away for the day doing dog things so I went through most of our stuff and finally got rid of a lot of books and other heavy things that just stood there gathering dust. Went from 7 random boxes down to 3, so when the next move (let’s hope that doesn’t happen for a while) comes around, we’ll have less to carry. We’ll drop off some books at a charity book fair, but all the Dutch books I just threw out, we hadn’t looked at them for 10 years and most were 25 years old. Time to go!
This week I’ll start some online learning about Digital Transformation, which is fancy speak for change management in technological spaces, I won’t bore you with the detail. It’s about 40 hours of learning, so that’ll keep me entertained for a week or 2 and fill a gap I feel I have in my professional profile. I’ll probably find there’s a lot that I already know, but I hope to learn some new things too!
Yumi’s work and volunteering
Yumi’s been keeping busy, but perhaps not as busy as she likes. She’s going through the process of finding new clients, doing interesting work for existing ones and coming up with new ideas for the business. I think she’ll come up with something new that works for her, she always does and there’s no hurry. I’ve learned that it’s something she has to do for herself, so I try to be supportive and leave it to her 😊.
Her other job, coordinating the grey hounds across Southern Brisbane is keeping her busy too. There are always new dogs to get to a new home, markets and walks to go to, yards to check and administration to keep organised. There are some changes to Queensland legislation about putting dogs down, making it much harder to just euthanise ex-greyhounds, so they expect to get even busier. I just drive around, help with the logistics and go for the occasional walk, but she’s full-on invested and I think that’s great. I always knew she’d do well and she’s 100% acing it!
Jessie the visiting greyhound
We’ve got a house guest for the next couple of weeks as she recovers from a urinary tract infection. Jessie is a three year old ball of lovely energy who came into the world a hermaphrodite, so she had girl and boy parts. When she got desexed they removed most of the boy parts and now she’s a girl for most of it. She’ll never have puppies and is a bit bigger than most girl dogs but she’s just as lovely as the rest of them. She and Dash get along very well, a bit too well sometimes because this week their play got a bit rough (she always starts and Dash bit her too hard on the neck. A big yelp and a small puncture later they were both in their own corner, very confused about what had just happened. She’s fine, it’s what happens with dogs!
The first few days she was in pain and she would pee all over the house, but the next day we got her on medication and she immediately improved. She as supposed to go to a foster carer, but they said they couldn’t handle a sick dog, so now we have her until the end of the month and then she has a family waiting to adopt her that Yumi found at a market event last week. She was planning to bring Dash, but decided to bring jessie for some extra marketing and good thing she did because this family fell in love with her. Good times!
We’re experiencing what it’s like to have 2 dogs and we’re not really enjoying it, but it’s okay for now. It’s just so much more hassle going for walks, getting in the car, sharing the sofa, the house smells of dog all the time and there’s beds everywhere. It’ll be fine for the next few weeks but one dog is more than enough, thank you. I marvel at how people with three kids have 2 dogs, 2 cats and more! Yikes! 😊
SES training
I am still not completely at ease in my new SES unit but am slowly finding my way. It all just feels like a huge waste of my time to have to redo all the training, or at least all the ones that matter. Then again, people are slowly coming around to the fact that I am not completely new and have done more jobs than probably 30 members combined. I know it’s not just me being precious because my friend Michael, who is quite different from me, feels the same way, but we can’t quite put our finger on what the issue really is. We’ve made a pact to stay at least one year, so a few more months to go and then we’ll revisit the whole thing. Maybe this is just what SES volunteering in Queensland is about and this is as good as it gets. I heard that Melbourne got slammed with 500+ jobs and that always makes me want to go and help!
We did a useful training course last weekend, to enable us to go on searches for missing people and to assist police with forensic searches and I thought it was okay. Didn’t learn anything new, but at least it wasn’t boring. I’ve also put my hand up to use my trainer qualifications for the sake of the unit and get involved in the train-the-trainer course. Let’s see how that turns out and what they are after. I’d prefer not to be in a leading role, but I do believe in education and building capability, so if that’s a way for me to use my experience and help out, that works for me. Michael said the other day that we have to find something that connects us to it all and I think he’s right because in VICSES it used to be the jobs we go on together, but here we go without jobs for weeks if not months on end, so it’ll have to be something else.
Lots of small things
You’ve been reading for a while now, so I’ll keep the next section a bit shorter and make a lot of short mentions of other things that have happened over the past few weeks.
Yumi’s dance performance late July was good fun. They really did a good job at entertaining the audience and put in a lot of hours of practice. I thought it was going to be so-so, but it was pretty good, considering that none of these people are professional dancers and I would not go on stage in a leotard to save my life! Her next big performance is next week at Brisfest and of course I’ll be there to take pictures for future generations, haha!
Next week I’ll help my SES buddy Michael and his family move house. They arrived a few months later than we did but have already bought a property in the neighbourhood because they like it so much here that they intend to stay, yay! It’ll be a fun day of moving stuff down the street with a truck because they are quite literally moving 500 meters or so.
I am still enjoying the online teaching I do for Deakin, although it was a bit disappointing to agree to stop doing the masterclasses. Not just because they make me really good money, but it’s the different type of interaction that I enjoyed. However, the self-paced course we built and recently updated is outcompeting the Masterclass offering, so one has to go and that’s that. Oh well, the other is fun too. I had two papers to grade last week and one was very good and the other okay, which is a big improvement over other months where the quality is just not there and it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
I’ve been keen to go diving again, but things (dog things) keep getting in the way. The downside to where we live is that all the diving happens on the other end of town. We’ll have to consider that when we move house again, but right now it just means we have to get organised around Dash and Yumi’s many other obligations. It’ll happen, hopefully in two weeks!
This week we did another event with the Change Management Institute where 20 or so change managers all meet up at 7.30am to talk about topics that are on our mind. It’s always such an energy boost and I get a lot of ideas for new events there too. This week we’ll organise networking drinks which are always entertaining and a good excuse to get into the city. We’re thinking of also organising an end-of-year event but I’ve been trying to get everyone organised and they just keep putting it off and delaying so I am fine if it doesn’t happen. I’ve been doing this long enough to know when it gets frustrating and I’ll just step back a bit for now 😊.
Speaking of stepping back, I’ve stopped volunteering for the shark and rays people. I would have loved to stay on but the way it was run was not going to work for me. We’ve also stepped back from the landcare volunteering as the timing generally didn’t work for both Yumi and me. Oh well, we tried it and there will always be some other thing to do.
Last month and this month we celebrate(d) living in Brisbane for a year already! Where did all that time go?! I can easily say it’s been another good decision for team Stamet/Kruidenier. It’s a great place to live and work! The next year will be equally interesting to see what comes our way and what will happen next. We always say that we hope this year will be a bit more relaxed and calmer, but that’s not been true for, well, forever, so perhaps we should just stop saying it altogether, haha!
I’ve been enjoying the extra time I had to read, write and do lots of gaming. I am almost done with a game called Dark Souls 3 which is one of the hardest games to play. You play as a knight, defeating big bosses and they are like puzzles that you have to solve. They can be beaten, but some take as many as 60-70 tries and I always feel a strange sense of pride when I get it done. I only have the final boss to defeat and I know I can do it, it’s just a matter of sitting down for 2-3 hours to get it done and I’ll use my time for other things first, I think. In the meantime I am replaying a game from 25 years ago and it’s just the best fun. I don’t remember much of it but because they added some features it moves a lot faster and you get to enjoy the story more, which is just what I wanted when I played it in 1999. Geez, I am getting old!
There are plans for me to write another book about change management with another change manager from Sydney. Her and I get along very well and both have ideas about the ethics of change management. Right now it’s only the germ of an idea, but these things have a tendency to happen, so let’s see where it goes. I’ve started compiling lots of reading material so we can build the framework, then add the cartoons and colours and see what we can create. That’ll be a 2024 project.
My friend Peter and I ran an online ‘Murder Mystery’ two weeks ago for a change management conference that one of friends organised for the 4th time around. It’s a bit like Clue, with funny weapons, suspects, locations and a complicated schedule of who did what when and how. It was hilarious and we enjoyed creating it nearly as much as the people playing it. At some point we might have to get serious about the Bad Change Company because we have a lot of content and could probably set up a real business around it. That’ll also be a 2024 project!
Losing weight has been going well too, just the other week I saw 85kg and my goal for this month is to hold onto that on my way to 82.5 by the end of the year. I’ve dropped close to 8 kilos so far and it didn’t really feel all that hard. Now that I am not working for a bit I’ll have to take extra care, but so far, so good!
Okay, that’s it for now, I hope you have a very good day on your birthday and will write to you again in two months from now.
Be well,
Gilbert
