Springfield Lakes, 10 June 2024
Hi Marlis,
Can you believe it’s winter again already?! I hope you are staying warm and Canberra is sunny and dry most days. It’s been quite the sudden drop in temperature here, with mornings as cold as 3-4 degrees, but then it still gets up to 20-22 during the day, so I am not complaining 😊.
Another two months gone and this time it really felt like not much out of the ordinary has happened, but let’s see how it went when we get to the end!
Work
I’m coming up to 6
months on the job at Super Retail Group and it’s been an interesting time to
say the least. Lots of movement in staff, new people joining, a new manager for
my manager, a bit of a scandal in the news that went away pretty quickly and me
just jogging along getting things done. I’m getting pretty good at staying out
of the drama that other people are creating and just focus on my tasks to get
done that week.
The job hasn’t become
what it was made out to be, yet, but things are far from terrible for sure.
It’s just that all but one of my team mates, who work on other big projects,
are not having a good time. And that’s what I have to look forward to, now that
my smaller projects are wrapping up by the end of this month. I do feel like
I’ve made difference and built some good working relationships. There are a lot
of very smart and capable people in the business and my team are very good at
what they do, so I learn a few new things every week.
I am also still enjoying the commute by train 3 days a week. I get to read a lot, see some funny characters and on busy days I get some work done even before I get to the office. With technology today you can really work anywhere and have everything you need, so I make the most of it on those days and others I just relax and read while ‘my’ driver gets me to where I have to go. It sure beats standing in traffic and crawling forward!
Yumi’s activities
Yumi has been busy
working with a client she’s done work with for a long time. She even went to
Melbourne twice the past 4 weeks to do a few workshops with them and meet some
new people. It might become a much bigger project, but right now they are
sitting on their hands trying to figure out what to do next, so she’s not
waiting around and looking around to see what else is out there. I am sure
she’ll find something worthwhile to do, it’s only a matter of time.
When she travels, I stay at home to look after Dash, who really lets me know that I am his second favourite human or maybe the third if you count the baker where he gets half a bread roll each week. As soon as Yumi leaves he goes into ‘waiting until my human comes back’ mode. He actually walks up to the window multiple times a day to see if she’s not already coming back and he’ll restlessly walk around looking for her in all places before finally falling asleep. It’s adorable, but I always feel a bit sad for him and want to explain she’s really coming back. Fortunately, she always does, but he keeps forgetting 😊
She’s also started her second year of the Common People Dance Project, the team dancing context she joined last year. It’s good fun to hear how much enjoyment everyone gets out of studying in new routines and putting on a show. It’ll all come together on 14 July when the various teams have their ‘dance-off’ where every team performs in front of a real jury and the winners get the ugliest trophy you’ve ever seen, but that’s all part of the show. And she also started another dance class here in Springfield Lakes (the other is in Ipswich, 25 mins down the road) for a six-week trial with some other people. I hope she likes that one, but it seems slightly more serious than the other ones but six weeks is a good period to get a sense of that, I think.
Dog things
Speaking of dogs, it’s
been quite busy with dog-related activities over the past two months. We had a
house guest for a week and a half and that was not the experience we hoped it
would be. Yumi responded to a call for help from the greyhound walking group
she hangs out with every now and then. They had lost their greyhound a while
back, put in a very detailed specific request for a new adoption and instead of
it taking five months or so, it took two weeks for a new match to be found. But
they still needed to get married and go on a honeymoon as already planned,
yikes! So, we said we’d take Bella in and I am glad we helped them, but what an
ordeal!!
We also helped out with
a market stall at a very busy Sunday market and got some good donations and
sales in a few hours. I was feeling really unwell since I got up that morning,
but Yumi needed some help, so I soldiered on and when we got back at 2pm I went
straight to bed and didn’t get back out until the next day. I was sick for the
rest of the week, probably just a stomach bug, but not pleasant at all. On the
upside, I did lose 3 kilos in weight for a few weeks, haha. The weekend after
we did a Bunnings BBQ for charity and made a decent amount for the greyhounds
again. Fortunately we only had a 4-hour shift. I just cooked the sausages and
onions for four hours straight and that’s quite enough, thank you!
Hervey Bay. I
love those stories with a happy ending!
Change Management Institute volunteering
I had a busy time with
the volunteering I do for CMI. I wanted to try a new event type, called a Deep
Dive, which goes for 4 hours instead of the normal 2, giving people a solid
introduction into change management with loads of practical tips and tricks. It
took a bit of organising and help from my change friends, but 2 weeks ago we
got 25 people together in a community hall on a rainy Saturday morning, so I am
calling that a win! We had 5 parts to the event, of which I did 2 and it was
good fun to present to a group of people who are not my colleagues. The
audience hopefully got good value for their time and it would be great if some
of them would end up working as change managers too in a few years.
I also have plans for another session just like this one, but for more advanced change practitioners. I have to be careful though, I am already doing a lot of work and I want the other 10(!) committee members to also have an opportunity to get involved. It’s just that everything is easier for me to organise because I’ve done it a few times. The eternal challenge with volunteer groups like this is that people always have the will, but not always the time and then things fall down and I end up doing it myself anyway, but at the last minute and that can be frustrating. So now I try to stick to my rule of: “if it happens it happens, if not, that’s okay too”. I plan to take my foot of the gas for the second half of the year, but not really sure if that’s going to work. I keep saying that and then I end up doing lots of things more than planned. It’s a work in progress!
I have two people I mentor for CMI and then I also write book reports every now and then for their newsletter and then there’s the events and other responsibilities, it almost feels like a part-time job at times. But I love to see how it builds a community. Since I joined the Queensland chapter, membership numbers have gone up by 35% and we’re almost the largest chapter in the world (of CMI), that means we’ve outperformed Victoria and NSW, who are 3x our size by state population. Not that it’s a competition of course, but it is a little bit 😊.
Stradbroke diving
The reason this letter
is a bit later than usual is because we were out diving on Stradbroke Island
this weekend. Maybe you already know, but Stradbroke is just 20 kilometres or
so off the coast from Brisbane, you can get there by ferry in just under 45
minutes and be away from everything for a while. We asked our friends Michael
and Kat and their two boys to look after Dash for the weekend, which they were
happy to do. They have a 5-months old German Shepperd called Freya and she is
quiet a handful. But She stayed outside most of the time and Dash inside, so
that worked out alright. Maybe when she’s a bit older they’ll get along better,
right now she’s just all over Dash and he’s not having any of it. He’ll keep
walking away, but she keeps following him and licking his face, which he really
doesn’t like, so at some point she’ll get a ‘corrective’ bite on her ear or
neck…
Where was I, oh yes, diving! We arrived on Friday evening and I couldn’t figure out the heating so the first night was very chilly but we had heaps of blankets and the shower was very warm. Good thing that Yumi figured out how to get the heater to work, she was also the most motivated to do so of course, haha. The diving was very good on both Saturday and Sunday. We saw lots of turtles, fish doing funny things chasing each other, a few very beautiful eagle rays, bull rays, lots of wobbegong sharks and there was talk of a great white shark being spotted earlier on the Sunday, but when we got that spot, it was nowhere to be seen. That would have been amazing, but better luck next time.
It’s migration time for the whales (and sharks) so we saw a lot of humpbacks on the surface, some jumping and flapping their tails and fins, which is always great to see. We also saw some dolphins just hanging around and took the Saturday afternoon to go around the island a bit but the ocean really is the main attraction. We went out for dinner but it was nothing special. Yumi had a decent pizza, but my vegan tacos were cold and really basic. And there was a large group that had 10 kids or so that kept screaming at the top of their lungs and running around so we weren’t having a great time of it and didn’t stay for long.
It was nice to get away for the weekend, swim with the turtles, go really fast in a very small boat and add another few dives to our list. Yumi now has made 160+ and I have 140+ under my belt, so we’re not exactly amateurs anymore 😊. Our diving gear is slowly starting to fall apart, which isn’t that strange after almost 18 years, so now we’ll have to slowly start replacing items or maybe just buy a new kit package. We’ve also considered just hiring gear from now on. Servicing it every year is quiet expensive and if we don’t go diving regularly it’s almost cheaper to hire than own it. Something to think about before we get to summer!
We just got our new
lease in the mail and our rent is going up by $50 a week, which isn’t terrible,
but that’s $2,600 per year for the same house and for the monthly rent, we can
get a mortgage for a house (if we add part of our savings). Time to get more
serious about finding a house to buy. The housing market is crazy in all the
capital cities though, so finding something reasonably priced is enough of a
challenge, but the longer we wait, the harder it gets. Yumi always keeps half
an eye on the market and we don’t ask for the world, but the day I will pay
$1.3 million dollar for a 3-bedroom townhouse is probably never going to come
around. Who has that kind of money?! Well, we do, sort of, but the value of the
materials is in no way connected to the sales price any longer. Still, we’ve
singed the lease and will stay here for at least another year, Springfield
Lakes is a great place to live, but buying a house here is not in the cards so
we’ll have to cast our net a bit wider in the coming months.
Short stuff
Lots of short mentions this time, here they are in quick succession:
I'm still getting students come through the course I teach at Deakin University and it is always good fun to read their final assignment change plans. Most of them aren’t very good, but every now and then there’s a very decent one. I’ve also added another section to the course which deals with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that you’ve probably heard about on the news. It’s becoming more and more widely used in the change profession, so I thought it would be good if my students understood the basics too.
· I still go to RFS ten
though it’s been 8(!) months and I still don’t have my member number. It’s
absolutely ridiculous how long this takes but at least I am enjoying the
training on how to be a firefighter. Hopefully I’ll have a number by the end of
the month and then training starts for real!
· I am almost done
gathering the documents for my citizenship application. It’s quite the process
to go through, but in a few weeks I should have everything sorted and ready to
send it off. Fingers crossed!
· As a favour to a friend,
I did a presentation to a group of 125 people working in governance and risk on
how to respond when change goes wrong. It was good fun and they loved it, but I
don’t really enjoy these things anymore, so maybe I need to stop saying yes
every time, haha.
· Friends and family are
all doing well, mums and dads are okay, kids are growing and going well in
school, lots of things to be grateful for.
· By the time I write my
next letter it will be August and I’ll give you a call to discuss if you’d like
me to come over to celebrate your birthday in September. I would love to go and
do something you would like to do. Go for lunch, go to the supermarket, just
sit and chat, whatever you like!
· Since we started living
here in September 2022 there have been roadworks going on nearby. It now
finally looks like it’s drawing to a close. And on time no less! It’ll be good
to finally be able tod rive straight down the road instead of a new detour
every week. Listen to me complain about my first world problems, I don’t even
use that road that often, but it’s been going on forever!
· I never gave it much
thought but lately I’ve been thinking I should decorate my office a bit. I do
spend quiet a bit of time in there and there’s nothing on the walls, so I might
buy some vintage posters and frame those to liven up the place a bit.
· A while back I hit the
garage door on the way out, it wasn’t very hard, so I managed to push it back
into shape. But today it all of a sudden ran out of its tracks and that was a
pain to solve. Fortunately our neighbour across the road saw us struggle and
he’d just had the same issue himself a few months ago. With his help we had it
sorted in no time and we got to learn a bit more about them too, ha!
· I finally decided to
treat myself and order new shoes. Not exactly made to measure, but I go to
choose every little detail in the design and now I have to wait 4 months for
them to arrive because I wanted a different pattern on the sides…Me and my big
ideas! Oh well, it’s not that I need them right away, although some of my shoes
are starting to age after…15 years. That’s good mileage, I think.
Okay, that’s most of the updates done. Next letter I might have more to share, it’s been a bit less eventful than usual.
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