Hi Marlis,
I hope you are staying cool and that the warm weather isn’t keeping you inside too much. It’s sure been a true Queensland summer for the past few weeks with high 30s temperatures and humidity thick enough to cut. Well, we wanted to live somewhere warmer and that it certainly is 😊.
Like every time I sit down to write you a letter, I always think that not much has happened, but going by this letter, it’s been another fun-filled, busy two months full of change and developments, so let’s get into it! That being said, I think I missed a month, I am very sorry about that! I really thought that this month was the next time to write but I missed it. Oops!
Christmas trip
After wrapping up the short-term job with Griffith University, which went really well and they even paid me before my last day on the job, we had some time to take a break and go on a trip. In the end it felt more like Dash was on a holiday and we were there with him, but we had a good time all the same. Yumi had found a fun-sized self-contained unit in a tiny town called Bauple, about 200 kilometres north of Brisbane, or 50 kilometres up from Gympie if you are familiar with the area.
On the way up, we stopped by Diane and Peter, two of Yumi’s greyhound friends who now live near Sunshine Coast. They moved house to retire into what I would call a building site, but the inside looks very nice and new, the outside is a right old mess of building materials, flattened structures and unfinished foundations. They seem to be doing just fine and so are their two greyhounds. They are lovely people and after two hours or so we continued on into the regional farm and bushlands.
The accommodation was another good pick by Yumi (she always works hard at finding just the right thing) and we had everything we needed to live comfortably for a week, enough space for Dash and wallabies out in the yard which was of course very, very, very exciting for Dash. At first, he didn’t know what to make of them, but when they started hopping of course he just wanted to chase right after them! The lady who owns the house was very much into self-improvement and new age beliefs, going by the 50 or so ‘art’ works around the house sharing deep and meaningful insights like ‘strangers are just friends you haven’t met’ and ‘the universe will provide’. Not exactly my cup of tea, but live and let live I say!
The town itself is really just 600 or so people, living on a grid of streets with houses of all different kinds and in various states of disrepair or construction. On my morning walks I reckoned that every street with 15-20 properties had at least 4-5 building projects going on at the same time. It was good fun to see what people do with their land and how some make it into a well-kept and organised space and others just let the bush take over. The only thing outnumbering the building sites were the wallabies that were literally everywhere you looked.
We made a lot of daytrips to the Fraser Island area, national forests and beaches, including to Rainbow Beach, so named for rock formations that kind of look like a rainbow if you have a few beers and squint your eyes, I guess. The fun part for us was looking at the 200 or so cars parked on the beach and people living their best lives, ranging from a guy on a towel with his dog to a family with a kitted-out ute that had a fridge, 4-burner barbecue and extensive sound system. Same beach, different level of luxury. We liked the towel approach better. Dash had a great time, even though he’s not so much a beach dog, but there lots of smells and the waves were far enough away. Another trip was to a town I forget the name of, but that’s where Dash was very brave and walked into the water up to his chest and seemed to enjoy it, but then he got so excited about it that he broke free off the leash and ran around the small beach trailing his lead and a long streamer of plastic poop bags. Everybody just stopped to watch him run like the wind and he had a good time before he came back totally poofed after a minute or two of running all out, haha.
We had some interesting stormy weather passing through, with most of it missing us, but on a tin roof everything sounds that much worse and the thunder was mighty impressive. So much so that I sat up with Dash for part of the night because he couldn’t settle down. We had great internet, so I just watched some videos and read a book until it all passed.
We visited another pair of friends, Wendy and Steve in their new wonderful home with 450 lime trees, which technically makes them farmers. They bought 10 acres for the price of what would buy you a shed in Melbourne and have wonderful views in what feels like the middle of nowhere, but is only 15 minutes away from Gympie, the regional hub. I used to work with Wendy at Deakin University and she’s a wonderful and smart human and when she contacted me to ask if we could meet up now that she lived in Queensland, I realised we’d be very close by, so we offered to stop by their house. Sadly, they lost their great Dane on the way up (old age), so they were very happy to have Dash trotting around the house and he got lots of pats! They also showed us their impressive sword collection (I know, right?! I had no idea!) and we had a nice meal. We thought to stay for a few hours but ended up staying nearly four hours.
We enjoyed being away, but it also felt good coming back and overall, I think Dash would have preferred to just stay at home with his favourite toys, beds and smells, but at least now we know we can holiday with him if we want.
The New Job
On Wednesday 3 January I started my new role with Super Retail Group, the people behind Rebel, BCF, Super Cheap Auto and Macpac clothing and I am really enjoying myself. The whole process of interviewing and induction was a very good experience from start to finish. I am part of a real team of change managers, my manager knows what he’s doing, the organisation is very energetic, and I work on things that really matter! And the pay is very good too, nothing to complain about! Because it’s retail, we have a lot of stores (750) and logistics to look after, but that’s what my colleagues are doing, so I am assigned to the back office, what we call ‘corporate’. My main focus is Human Resources and Safety (the people who look after people and their wellbeing), who are going through a huge amount of change, and I have about 6-8 projects to look after, not all equally big thankfully.
The first 5 weeks have been very good, with me just running around trying to figure out how all the parts come together, but I’ve managed to help some people and projects already and they seem to enjoy having me around so we’re off to a good start. The variety of the different projects will keep me entertained for a good while and it’s great to be part of an actual team of people with experience in change that I can learn from too. I hadn’t realised how much I missed that until it was available again, yay!
The first two weeks, when it was still school holidays, I travelled to work by car, but the past 3 weeks I chose to go by train (writing this letter on the train right now) because the commune is about as long by car as by train, but on the train I have my hands free to read, write letters to you, do some work or let my mind wander, which are all bad ideas and really hard if you’re driving 😊. The train station is only a 10-minute walk from the office, which is really nice too, and by the time I get home I am done with work and can enjoy my evening. By the next time I write I’ll probably have figured out what I am supposed to do, and we’ll have welcomed a new person I recommended so I will no longer be ‘the new guy’.
Artificial Intelligence
You probably heard or read something in the news about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a software program that you can use for all kinds of things. Think of it as a very, very smart friend who knows a lot about virtually anything you can think of. I’ve been playing around with it for a good year now and it’s helped me with so many things that I can’t imagine not using it. It still makes mistakes, and its creativity has limits, but it does amazing things in seconds that would take me hours or even days to figure out.
I know technology is not your friend on most days, but I think you’d enjoy having it around. You can ask it all sorts of questions, learn things check facts, create unique images, ask it to write things for you (I wrote this one myself, I promise!), create recipes and 1 million other things that we can’t even imagine right now. It’s amazing in what it can already do, the problems it solves and support it offers. Of course, there are always sceptics, who fear it will become sentient and immediately destroy the world, but that is impossible, it’s not nearly smart enough for that. They don’t seem to understand (or don’t want to, more likely) that it only LOOKS smart, it’s still just a very smartly written software program that does simple things (for a computer) extremely fast. I think eventually we will see AI become sentient, but that’s perhaps still 10-15 years away, so I’ll report back to you on how that’s going then. 😊
Weather and floods
We’ve had some pretty wild weather in Springfield Lakes with 3 separate storms passing through causing quite a bit of damage. I finally got to go out with SES for some actual jobs and help the community get going again. The week before and during Christmas we had the biggest one and that threw trees and all kinds of loose items around, even injured and killed a few unfortunate people. Some really made poor choices like going into storm drains or driving through flood waters but you never hope they meet their end that way of course.
We were lucky not to get it as bad as up North in Cairns and Townsville where things got really exciting, after a few days all the water was gone and aside from massive heaps of wood chips from all the mulched-up trees and branches, things were back to their sunny usual self until the next storm hit. Gotta love Queensland! We also got to support SES in Mt. Tambourine, which got hit by a severe storm and it reminded me of the storm that raged through the Dandenongs in Victoria in 2021. The devastation wasn’t quite the same, but it was serious stuff and then those poor people got hit by floods not a few days later. We did what we could, but by the time we got there most of the work had already been done. We helped re-tarp two homes and did a good job there at least.
Springfield Lakes has the best water management infrastructure that I’ve ever seen, so I am not worried about us getting flooded, at worst we’ll be cut off from town and we have food and water for at least 10 days so that should be fine. It was very impressive to see the water come up from the 2-3 meters below the footpath and rush by in a raging torrent for a few days. A few days later Yumi found a fish in an isolated puddle and mounted an expedition to save it with a bucket and bottles of water, which she promptly did! We tell ourselves that it’s still happily swimming around Springfield somewhere to this day!
SES/RFS
After 12 months of not feeling like I would fit in and mostly being frustrated with how little I could actually do, I bit the bullet and handed in my SES gear last week, calling it quits on a 7-year career as an SES volunteer. It felt really weird and in my head, I still am that person who springs into action when the pager goes off, but in reality I won’t be going on any SES call-outs again. Maybe I will re-join at some point in life, but for now it’s okay that we’ve gone our separate ways. I received a very nice token of appreciation from my old Altona unit, a key ring with the SES logo on it and every time I see it, I am reminded of the wonderful time I had with them, and that is how I prefer to remember SES.
But no need to be too sad, I’ve already joined the Rural Fire Service and it’s such a different experience! From the very first day I felt welcome and that these people know what they are doing and talking about. It’s mostly blokes and some are a bit rough around the edges, but they are a good bunch, and I am excited to learn a lot of new things and become an actual firefighter, that’s pretty cool if you ask me. The extra cool part is that my mate Michael (from Altona SES) is also leaving SES and joined RFS, so we can still share in the experience and have each other’s back when thing get ’heated’, sorry, that is a terrible pun 😊.
Yumi’s Work and volunteering
Yumi’s been busier than ever with the greyhound volunteering. She’s now looking after 8 dogs, helping others out with theirs and also co-organising two events in the next 6 weeks. She’s really enjoying it though and while she complains about how much work it is, she’s quick to jump in when there’s a crisis and gets things sorted soon as. The charity had some setbacks working with the Queensland Racing organisation who weren’t very good about delivering on promises and suffered spontaneous memory loss when things didn’t go their way. In my opinion they are a bunch of amateurs trying their best but failing to effectively support the smaller charities they are supposed to help. Yumi take sit all in stride and makes new friends and connections as she goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up working in this space and I’d 100% support her. She’d be able to do so much good and would probably get a lot out of it for herself too.
Speaking of getting things, she’ll be loading up the car with 25-30 bag of free dog food again today, so I get to stack that in the garage when I get home, haha. It’s a food supply program for charities run by Petbarn, who have to get rid of stock they can’t sell, but instead of throwing it out, they give it to charities. This really is very generous of them because it runs in the thousands of dollars what they give away for free and it really helps charities financially.
Workwise not much is happening for her at the moment. She has a small project about to start if that all goes through and she applied for a role with the Queensland Mental Health Commission that I think she’ll be really good at, but it’s one of those wait and sees with many hurdles and tollgates before you get anywhere, but that’s government for you. Well, I’d rather she goes for roles that make her happy than ‘just a job’. In the meantime, she’s doing some studying, the same course I did three years ago for Company Directors, so she can join a board for a charity or not-for-profit. I think she’ll ace it. I did really well on my exams, and she generally does better at anything I do, so they’ll probably give her an award, name a building after her and erect a statue in town somewhere when she’s done…
10 years in Oz
Yesterday (6 February) marked 10 years in Australia for us, quite the milestone. It’s funny how I remember us arriving in Sydney like it was yesterday and it doesn’t seem that long ago, but it’s really been 10 years. I’ve started pulling all the blog posts and letters to you in one big document and it’s already grown to 375 pages and close to 100,000 words. I might just print it all out, just to see what it looks like!
I can honestly say I’ve never regretted coming here and starting life anew, not a single day. We’ve had so many opportunities come our way, lived in wonderful places (okay, maybe not Brunswick) and met wonderful people like yourself who became new friends. We travelled the country from top to bottom and left to right and there’s still so much to see and experience that there’s really no other option than to stay for ten more years!
We went out to dinner to celebrate and while the Indian food was good and the company pleasant, it didn’t really feel all that festive somehow. We both felt it the same way and decided that it’s probably because this is now our regular life and 10 years plus 1 day is just as special. We have started the citizenship process in earnest now, which is really just requesting 2 documents from the Dutch government for me and then putting it all together in one big file. Shouldn’t be too hard, so maybe by the end of the year we can call ourselves true Australians, whatever that means 😊.
Small things
• Dash’ birthday
Dash turned six on 26 January so instead of getting involved in Australia/Occupation Day, we went for a nice walk in the woods near where I used to work on Mt. Gravatt, and it was great. Very nice walking paths, very well-maintained bushland and some new flowers and trees I hadn’t seen before. Dash was having the best of times, despite it already being 28 degrees at 7 in the morning and many trees, rocks, shrubs and poles were sniffed and watered. He got even more snacks than usual.
• The Fine
I got a really, really big infringement notice for…hold on…$1,106 and 4 demerit points and it’s the silliest story ever. I got the fine for having my phone on my leg in the car. I don’t recall why I did that or how it happened, but the law is clear on that being illegal, so the government took that opportunity to remind me of my responsibilities. Ouch. Fortunately, I had just sent an invoice to Deakin for my teaching activities for $1,150 so it won’t hurt too much, but what a colossal waste of money for a few seconds of inattention!!
• Freya
Our friends the Shimmins family have gotten themselves a German Shepherd named Freya and she’s just the cutes little ball of fur. She’s only 9 weeks old and mostly just paws and teeth but hopefully when she grows up a bit her and Dash can be playmates every now and then. I was hoping they’d adopt a greyhound, but they can look after Dash every now and then. This is her being super cute:
• Puzzles
Yumi and I went to the Brisbane Bookfair to get…you guessed it, puzzles! And not just a few, 25! And we got a great deal of 2 for $10. Yay! We also handed in about 30 of them to be resold for charity, it’s not very likely we’ll redo any of them and it’s for a good cause so everybody wins. That’ll keep us entertained for a while, I think.
• New PlayStation 5
Early December I finally bought myself a PlayStation 5 gaming console after waiting for 2 years since it came to market. They aren’t cheap but I use it so often that over it’s 5-6 year lifespan I’ll get my money’s worth and then some. To really benefit from the new technology we should also buy a new tv but it still works and I don’t think it will make such a big difference so we’ll hold off on that. I bought my first PlayStation in 1997 and just typing that makes me feel really old, haha!
• Change Management Institute
Things are underway again after almost 2 months of not much activity and we’re coming out swinging with lots of new activities and ideas. I was named the CMI 2023 Australian Volunteer of the Year and even got a fancy certificate! It was very unexpected, but much appreciated. I did apply for a national volunteer role to coordinate things in different ways but after the interview I decided that I am good where I am as ‘just’ a general member, I can do a lot of good that way and don’t have to think too much about what I can and cannot say, just the way I like it! They’ve also asked me to write regular book reviews and be part of an informal thinktank, so I’ll have plenty of things to keep me entertained for a while.
• Wealth Management
We’ve had some additional money come our way and now that we’re getting more serious about buying a home, we decided to talk to someone about what we should do with our savings in a few weeks from now. It’s so weird to think of ourselves as people who might need a wealth manager, but maybe they have good tips on how we can make our money work for us a bit more, so we can get our very own home organised sooner.
I think that’s all the important bits for now, I’ll write again in 2 months’ time and will make sure not to be late this time!
Be well and stay cool,
Gilbert
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