It’s been quite the year …

I have some thoughts swirling in my head that are demanding to be let out.

The last time I blogged was July 30, and at the time I was all about good intentions and WordPress Wednesdays being in the calendar. I noted that I was juggling a few things and made this bold prediction for the coming week:

Next week, for example, I’ll be (briefly) juggling two subjects + a writing course + research + private tutoring + 2 jobs (including a mandatory appearance at a Sydney campus). And, breathe.

Instead, my Father-in-Law fell out of bed the following Tuesday and broke his hip. That was the day I was supposed to be heading up to Sydney in the evening so I could go to mandatory training on the Wednesday. I felt pretty uneasy about the whole thing and insisted that I was cancelling, despite my husband telling me everything would be fine: “Dad” would sail through surgery on Wednesday and I’d be back on Thursday to go visit him.

It was lucky I cancelled. On Wednesday morning the surgeon called and said he was too unwell for surgery, and that an untreated broken hip in an 87 year old was likely to be a life-ending event. Chris proved them right on the Thursday.

The Wednesday was also Day 1 of the four-week intensive writing course. And, as noted above, I was doing two jobs and two concurrent Uni subjects at the time. I got an extension on the final assignment for one subject, muddled my way through, and (somehow–I genuinely don’t understand how) kept up with the Creative Writing workload.

Three weeks later, I was down to one subject at Uni + the CW course, but I started doing marking on top of my day job and my other, smaller Uni job. So 70 hours or so per week of paid work. It was in the final week of this–and the first week of the longer term Creative Writing course, in an uncanny echo that made me very uncomfortable!–that my own Dad was taken to A & E via ambulance. Twice. This has led to some pretty invasive tests, which are still ongoing. One surgery was scheduled for literally the middle day of HSC Marking season, where I was once again working 60+ hours a week. My parents live three hours away. He needed transport to Nepean hospital, which is 2/3 of the way there.

I got them there.

Reader, it’s been a time.

I had moved on to the full year Creative Writing course and was managing (again-somehow) right through the HSC period but then they moved into a new rhythm and I’ve not done anything for about 2.5 weeks now. This is not good. My pop culture research all has to be undertaken outside of work hours because of the nature of the way my job is funded. So last weekend, I did the final edits on one chapter, due out next year; somehow, I also have to watch about 60 hours of footage and write a journal article by January 6. I have two Board meetings between now and the end of the year. My final Uni assignment is due Monday, so I’m trying to get that in and out of the way; I am continuing to plant and maintain the flowers for my daughter’s bridal bouquet and table decorations because obviously, another low-pressure thing needed to be added to the mix. 😉 Oh yes, and we’re hosting Christmas.

I also did a sustainable floristry workshop in the middle of HSC Marking, because of course I did …

These are all things I like doing, but dear Lord, when they all hit at once …

And so, we have limped through to the Silly Season. It is December 4 and my lights and decorations are not done, and if you know me at all, you are probably as alarmed by that as I am right now. But we had unpainted timbers on the front verandah after Jeff fixed our twisted verandah poles. Having paid for the roof and windows to be cleaned, I could hardly hang lights over moldy and/or unpainted poles, now, could I?

Three days of climbing up and down a painting platform before and after work (thank you, Daylight Savings) has reminded me why I paid someone to do the roof and windows. I can barely walk today.

Sadly, there is more painting in my immediate future. On Monday, Child the Younger told us that he and His New Love were looking for a flat together. By Monday afternoon, they had secured one and he’d given notice. So when Open Agent called, I spoke with them, rather than putting them off as I usually do, and now it seems we need to sort out a Contract for Sale and get the place spruced up PDQ.

So, the obvious question is WHY? Why do I do this to myself?

And the answer is: because I am once again getting unemployment for my birthday this year. Does two years in a row make it an annual tradition? Both work contracts end in December; I have 6 more hours to work in one Uni job and 9 more days in the other.

This is why I take on the marking shifts and subject myself to working days, nights and weekends at least three times a year, for two to three weeks at a time–those are WFH jobs I might actually retain next year, when my “main” jobs over the last three years have been extremely insecure. Why push the sale of the flat through so quickly? Same reasons. We’re making hay while the sun shines–I’m not going to have any salary come January, so settling on the flat puts money in the bank that we can then draw down for living expenses.

And why add the study/gardening/creative writing/sitting on Boards to an already-full plate? Well, if you’re going to have early retirement thrust upon you, you’d better have some stuff to fill your days …

What’s one more side project between friends?

So, no promises around what may or not be achieved, let alone what may or may not be published, over the next three weeks. But as they sing in the Rankin Bass Christmas classics; I will put one foot in front of the other …

Starting Over … Again!

It’s been so long since I’ve added to this blog, that I wasn’t able to log-in for a hot minute there. Mind you, that has pretty much been the theme of the week!

In a major life update and against all odds given the current state of Higher Education, my half-year of substantive unemployment has come to a close. I have a half-year contract doing what I did before, at the same level, which feels nothing short of miraculous. It is a Catholic university, so perhaps that is appropriate.

If you’re playing along at home: yes, that does make four universities in under two years!

In the interim, I cobbled together what work I could, which I hasten to add was nothing like a living wage. I did manage to slog my way through to get my teaching number/s reactivated … but didn’t get any work. By the time I was offered something, this 6-month gig was on offer. Since March, I have also been doing some casual delivery of literacy programs and marking at another university. Both contract jobs are based in Sydney, but are very sensibly allowing me to work remotely where that is appropriate, which is the bulk of the time.

I did NAPLAN marking — which was a disaster, and I quit after a week of not getting within a bull’s roar of minimum wage on any given day because of their ineffectual systems and poor communication causing unnecessary delays. I did GAMSAT marking, which started around the same time and is, mercifully, professional, organised, and generates appropriate remuneration. I continued my Board work, and I extended my studies from an Undergrad Certificate, enrolling in the Diploma course.

I am now wondering how to juggle all of this along with a “real” job 4 days/week, but I guess I’ll figure it out, because I always do.

Higher Ed, however, is still a mess. Every day I hear of further job cuts at one institution or another. There is no respite in sight.

Yesterday, both universities were impacted by IT issues and I was struggling to log in to anything. The new place is like working in two half-universities. The team and discussions about work are fabulous and get me very excited about what we can achieve, but then whenever I try to find my way through any system (you know: email, pay, super, induction …), I wonder what in the 1978 is going on. They are evidently still recovering from a past cyber incident, but in my case, issues could also be because someone has not yet triggered my access. It is only Day 3. It would be reasonable to think that further clarity may yet arrive.

Research is going OK. One chapter is with editors, one is off to the publishers, and I was approached to submit a journal article for a special edition on Teen Wolf, which looks like it is going ahead.

Father in Law has had a long hospital stay this year, but is doing well now. One of his other kids is coming for a visit this weekend, which will be nice for him.

Spousal Unit has been doing casual teaching days, because he’s very bad at being retired.

Child the Elder has settled in to her new place and we spent some time with her on the weekend to distract her because the Son Out Law was working away.

Child the Younger has a one year teaching contract and has suddenly become too diligent to spend time with us!

Callie is now on anxiety medication, which has helped my anxiety because she has stopped peeing on everything that doesn’t move (and once, famously, on something that does: me. Lying in bed). Clover is my devoted shadow who tries to race past me and hop into bed with me each night. Unfortunately, her delighted purring if she succeeds is far too much for this insomniac to handle.

The chooks are fine, but in unproductive Winter mode.

The fish are back in the television fish tank, thanks to our amazing builder, Jeff, who can turn his hand to anything.

So: yeah. We’re still here. And I’m still very regional, despite working for metro employers.

Update

Well, we all survived the mid-October mess. Except the 19 year old cat. And I have zero interest in revisiting how that all played out. It was not a fun time.

With regard to the Father-in-Law, we had five hours of debate around consent and who could give it (he has two POAs –both in Queensland; one is MIA and the other was in communicado). One nurse helpfully explained to him that they were just trying to protect his best interests. I pointed out that it was in his best interest to have the festering tumour removed from his head. His surgeon agreed with me.

Luckily, the Nursing Unit Manager is someone I’ve known for years, who has a great deal of common sense and knows it would be out of character for me to be somehow trying to leverage personal gain from an octogenarian pensioner with cancer. He put the case to the Director of Medical Services, who also agreed that maybe removing the tumour was the better option than just letting him walk around with it or trying radiotherapy which would knock him around more (and presumably also require some form of consent!).

He’s healing well, and the skin graft has taken beautifully. He has his follow-up next week so we have digits crossed for clear margins.

Work continues to be difficult. I have been marking, on an impossibly tight deadline that kept becoming worse because of systems that didn’t work as promised, and students who were upset about things that had bugger all to do with me (like 73 being less than 75; or that I had marked the assignment that they uploaded, as opposed to the one that they meant to upload but didn’t).

It is equally excruciating to sit in meetings planning for next year, knowing I will not be part of it. I keep reminding myself not to offer opinions since I have no horse in the race.

Meanwhile, well-meaning people both internal and outside the sector offer platitudes: with your skills, you’ll get another job.

Facts not in evidence, Your Honour.

The Higher Education sector is in chaos. There are hiring freezes seemingly everywhere … which seems very mild, when you are securely in employment, but is quite scarily relevant, when you are actively seeking to be hired. Worse, some universities are shedding jobs–regional universities, in particular. 600+ at ANU, 200 at Canberra. Closer to home, more than 300 at UOW (where some former colleagues I rate highly, and indeed whole schools, have been told they’re on the hit list …. but they can still make an argument to be saved. Bring a support person).

I was asked if I was really trying to find a job.

I am not yet 52, and while I was hoping to transition to retirement in the not-too-distant future (my husband is already past retirement age, so we will need to have some adventures together before I hit one of the magical Super or pension ages!), I did not have complete unemployment in my early 50s on my life plan. So of course I am trying to find a job. I am, however, also a realist who is currently processing that I will more than likely never work again in the field of Higher Ed to which I have devoted myself for the past couple of decades.

Nor am I prepared to sell up and move to another city or state after we both worked so hard to set ourselves up for retirement here. Because, yes, we have thought this through; we continue to do so.

I could, for example, go back to school teaching. All I have to do is find all my qualifications, get them certified, pay a fee I don’t owe but was arguing with NESA about plus a new one, and then wait to see if my qualifications are deemed ok. I may also have to prove I’m literate and numerate, I think. I will be considered a provisional graduate, meaning my thirty years of experience will not count, and I will be on a starting salary that is a fraction of what I am on now (although, admittedly much better than the $0 pa I am currently staring down). And if I don’t get enough days to produce enough evidence to jump through the required hoops within two years, my teaching number will be revoked again. (So don’t believe the stories of a “teacher shortage.” There’s a shortage of teachers in schools. There is, however, a surplus out here of teachers who are no longer employed in schools–for more than thirty years, half of all beginning teachers have left in the first five years!–doing Cost Benefit Analyses because the system is screaming at us that what we have to offer is not valued. Like, at all).

I probably will end up doing the necessary admin to get my number back, because as much as casual teaching remains, in my opinion, the worst bits of teaching, I’ve been assured that there might be some Inclusive Ed days, which would bring me more than just a paycheque. And for better or for worse, I am someone who has always needed more than just a paycheque.

And so it is that every Wednesday, we check the school education jobs email. Occasionally, up comes a shorter-term contract in a hard-to-staff school with sign-on bonuses, and potentially jobs for both of us. But when we start to work through the logistics, it just doesn’t seem feasible. What would we do with the house? The cats? The chooks? The Father-in-Law? (“Hard to staff” is code for miles and miles from our current home, lives, and responsibilities). Or does one of us stay here, and we lead a separated life (we tried that once before, and lasted five weeks, if memory serves). In that scenario, the sign-on bonus won’t touch the sides of what it costs to run two households, anyway.

The remainder of the local jobs on offer are things like waitressing and motel cleaning, which I’ve done before. I’m not sure how my now-much-older-body would hold up to doing them again. Nor is my Physio. This week, she asked me why my body is so tight. I told her I think my body has been flooded with cortisol since we came back from America … eighteen months ago. She told me she thought that was probably right.

Today’s flooding cause was, ironically enough, the fish tank.

Now, I love our fish tank. It’s purpose built into my grandparents’ former TV cabinet (the person who made it has since gone out of business. I checked). Today, I discovered that it’s been leaking long enough to damage both said cabinet, and the flooring underneath it.

I am devastated. I have temporarily moved the fish, and now I am trying to figure out how to isolate and fix a leaking fish tank. (I guess the leak is on the side with the water damage?). And when to find the time to do it. And what happens if I don’t quite do it right – having to move the fish a second time would not be great, for anyone. (I’ve listed the repair on AirTasker, but no bites just yet).

The idea was to preserve this, not destroy it.

And so it goes. If I can fix the tank myself, maybe that can become my new post-Higher Ed career.

Past Compassion Fatigue, we’ve rounded into Exhaustion

28 years ago today, I went on a first date with a colleague. We went to a little restaurant on the corner of Sloane Street in Goulburn, whose name eludes me–Clancy’s, maybe?–and then to a movie. Only the movie we wanted to see wasn’t on, and neither of us thought Striptease was really first-date material, so we went to a video store (remember those?) and hired something, instead.

We were supposed to be in Airlie Beach this week, celebrating our date-iversary. Instead, he is in hospital in Wollongong, and I am once again in Goulburn, travelling back from Victoria and trying to move with very fluid and enormously chaotic plans.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my role at Charles Sturt. I have ten weeks left. The higher education sector is in utter chaos and so, come December, I won’t have a salary. The two universities for which I’ve worked have both declared a Hiring Freeze. Of course, the Spousal Unit’s contract ends on the same day as mine (also my birthday –yippee!). OK, then. We can deal with that. Somehow.

The Father-in-Law is a diabetic heart patient with a sarcoma on his face that he is having removed next week. He was scheduled to have it earlier, but came down with Covid. Noting the above comment that the Spousal Unit is unavailable, it will be up to me to get him to his surgery, and then bring him home and look after him for the first couple of days. I thought I was ready for this.

Then The Dreaded Admin started.

Yesterday was spent in four-way phone tag between me, the hospital, the GP and the nursing home where the Father-in-Law lives because apparently he needs a form filled out by the GP, and an ECG, before his surgery. Which is a week away. Eventually I managed to get someone at Aged Care to answer the phone and she asked who would be available to drive him to the appointment they would make on his behalf at an unspecified time.

“Well,” I began, “I’m currently in Victoria, and my husband’s in hospital in Wollongong, and all his other children are in Queensland …”

So after a few more phone calls, some googling, and some major rearrangements of plans, it was decided that I’d cut short my medically-advised mental health “circuit breaker” trip and start heading back today. The next admin issue was with my leave. Because Annual Leave had been reversed and some Personal Leave taken in its place, but neither was yet approved by my supervisor because she was–wait for it–on leave, the system said that I had taken double the amount of leave I had. And had maxed out the available leave, so I could not apply to reinstate Thursday and Friday as the Annual Leave that had previously been booked.*

And so, the plan became: stay in Goulburn, drive to Moss Vale in the morning, work from there (because I had no leave, according to the computer!) stay with mate Friday night, be home to relieve pet-sitters Saturday, as originally booked. Because you can’t change the dates on a house-sitting contract without a minimum of a week’s notice.

This morning, the texts from the house-sitter started. One cat, aged 19, appears to be injured and is walking funny. Should they take the cat to the vet?

Hard to say, given I couldn’t see her, and her arthritis shot is due Sunday. And so another game of admin tag; this time only three-way–between me, the house-sitter and the vet–although we rather comically managed to miss calls because one of us was calling the other one on at least two occasions.

OK, so now the plan is: she’s had a shot for pain relief. In the morning, I drive from Goulburn to Moss Vale bright and early. If she’s worse in the morning, I also drive down the mountain and take her to emergency vet appointment at 11.45am. Then I head back up to stay with S, and housesitters leave as booked, on Saturday. If she stays the same or improves, I can stay in Moss Vale as planned for the whole of Friday, but then the vet wants to see her Saturday.

And my brain is racing ahead as this is discussed, thinking: If I have to take the cat to the vet on Saturday, I can’t go and visit the Spousal Unit on Saturday, which means I’ll have to go on Sunday, which means I can’t get his Dad out for a visit on Sunday …

I think we’ve moved beyond Sandwich Generation, here, to Club Sandwich.

A colleague kindly asked me last week if I had support. I laughed.

Of my inner circle: one is in (yet another) hospital, having had a stroke in his mid-40s.

One just buried his father this week.

One has significant mental health issues in their own household.

This is not to say they are not still stepping up and checking in, because they absolutely are–I have stayed with one, and I’m about to stay with another–but obviously, under the circumstances, it is necessarily a somewhat reciprocal exercise which is more about checking in on each other.

Gen X, still raising ourselves after all these years. And it’s safe to say that we are all just bloody exhausted.

_{*in a small mercy, some of the leave requests have been actioned tonight. So I was able to book tomorrow off, and will not have to work out how to fit in 7.5 hours work around between 1 and 3.5 hours of driving plus vet visit time, in the middle of the day, plus any emotional and financial implications of vet visit time, tomorrow. We have to count the wins.}

Something Unexpected Happened …

Yesterday, I spent more than two hours arguing with my printer before eventually calling the HP helpline. Like many IT helplines, they give instructions that are very clear to them, but perhaps not to a stressed-out layperson. You know, like: “Can you type in your Printer IP address?”

Me: I’m sure I can. If you give me a minute to figure out where on earth to find it.

The second time she gave this kind of “for the new people, it’s where it’s always been” instruction, I called her on it quite deliberately.

“I’m supposed to be doing my job.” I reminded her. “I don’t work with this stuff every day. You do, because it’s your job. You can’t expect me to be as familiar with it as you are.”

So after forty minutes of me following her instructions so I could “fix” my own still-under-warranty printer-that-doesn’t-print, she thanked me because without me, they couldn’t do what they do.

I pointed out that if the printer did what it was supposed to do and actually printed, they wouldn’t need me and that would probably be a better outcome, as far as I was concerned.

The multi-stage instructions were of course complex and recursive and dictated by the sequence and colour of the in-house disco being performed by my printer, so of course when the same (or another, who knows?) issue occurred today, I have been unable to replicate them.

I do keep getting the most delightful message from HP when I try to log in so I can get out of their extortionate monthly ink subscription. This is not great value for money, since the printer only prints alignment pages. Incessantly.

24 hours’ worth of aligned pages. Is the printer now aligned and printing? Of course not. but they’ve made sure I used some ink!

When the message below came up yesterday, I told the “helper,” “hey- that could be HP’s motto!”

She didn’t understand.

She also told me they’d be monitoring my printer for a few days, which is creepy as, and also patently untrue because I’ve been trying to use it since about 11am, to no avail. I have also tried to get in touch with them, but Nope.

Today, all I can get is the above message. Help, notsomuch. A chatbot keeps asking me which cartridge error I have. None. Mate it doesn’t use English, it uses flashing lights. Which have now given me quite the headache, just quietly.

So … no idea where the receipt from 11 months ago is. (I fear it might have been sent to an email account I can no longer access). I may be able to find it in my tax documents?

I guess all that’s left to do is I lodge as many complaints as I can think of, and chuck the rubbish in the bin.

In the meantime, any recommendations for a printer that does its expected task, as is required under Australian consumer law? A different brand, obviously. You know, one that works.

Minor Life Update

For a while now, I’ve been feeling as though I have more capacity to serve my local regional community. I’m still working for a regional university–albeit with one that doesn’t have a local presence–and I’m still on the Board of Interchange Shoalhaven. But I’m no longer advocating for local students in my day job, and the Nowra Relay for Life has folded, which represented almost two decades of volunteering in the end.

So I applied to join the Board of Regional Development Australia-Illawarra and Shoalhaven.
I was pretty delighted to go to the first meeting a fortnight ago and be reunited with three former colleagues from different phases of my educational career, as well as some familiar faces from spba. I’m looking forward to seeing where we can go and how we can advocate, as a team, for our member communities.

On the work front, I’ve been doing battle with a non-sentient tool that has become the embodiment of “Computer Says No” and which makes me fear for humanity. Our uni launched a tool that draws information from an internal repository of research and then sifts through it to spit out a metric that determines whether or not you are research active, which has implications for research supervision and things like promotion. By its calculations, I’ve been a full-time employee on a typical research load for the past five years (I haven’t) and have published no research (!). I have not one research point to my name in this whiz-bag new system. Now, other people are finding this hilarious, but as the person who opened a snapshot that has a bold typeface “No” in answer to the question “Performance Expectation Met”–notsomuch.

So I’ve had to register complaints/appeals/please explains line-by-line on this new tool, which thus far have included:

I’ve only been here nine months, why do I have to meet a standard that’s based on five years of employment?
I’m not in a typical research/teaching role (that said, if someone would like to allocate me the 30% research load you’re using in your calculations, I’ll happily take it!)
Why has my 2024 publication been included but not generated any points?
Where are my other 2024 publications?
Why have you agreed to count this publication but then not allocated any actual points?
Why did you decide that this chapter, which began life in Oxford, was peer-reviewed, has a full reference list, is published by an academic publisher and is held in libraries around the world, including Harvard, “does not meet research requirements”?

.. and so it goes on.

In addition, I have to make the case for the “standard” of the publishers and journals because apparently the system only picks up publishers indexed in Web of Science and Scopus. Which humanities publications most typically aren’t. Which only adds to the frustratingly large body of observations over my two decades in academia that most systems are still overwhelmingly biased towards the sciences.

So, stay tuned for updates on my “points” over time. Thankfully, Google Scholar’s version of my h-index (which draws from more than just WoS ie) continues to rise and I keep my ORCID profile up-to-date, so it’s only a problem while, I’m ya know–employed here.

Or until the tool sorts out its teething problems. Which will hopefully come much, much sooner!

Back to happier news, and in anticipation of soon being able to secure our backyard once again coupled with my own significant impatience, I have four new companions. Joining retiree Zoe (who’d wandered out of this picture) and Perri the Isa Brown & Sally Sparrow the Wyandotte (aka the refugee from three doors up – both on the left of the photo here) are Barbara the Copper Marans, River the Araucana, Susan the Sussex, and Rogue the Olive Egger.

Our little rainbow alliance here is designed so that we will be able to easily tell the girls apart, but also as a means of producing a vibrant array of eggs. So far, Barbara has been a bit of a disappointment, since she is producing ordinary off-white eggs, rather than the lovely chocolate brown ones for which Marans are known. That said, I also got Susan at the same time–we try not to introduce solo birds; the pecking order can get nasty–and expected boring white eggs from her, but her first one appeared earlier this week and is slightly pink! River is an Araucana (like Zoe), so we are getting pale blue eggs from her, and Rogue will hopefully produce some green ones soon. It is still early days and still Winter, so perhaps colour will develop as production ramps up.

So that’s approximately where we are up to, EOFY 2023.

They paused in their fight to pose for this.

The Road to Hell

I just read back over my New Year post and gosh, I was cheery. Full of good intentions!

It’s been three months since my last “weekly” post. That probably has some significance.

Although we have moved into the extension which now has adequate means of blocking out light, and it even has an Occupation certificate, the pool build is ongoing and despite the fact that it looks finished and has pumps and heaters and fences and gates and filters and covers, it is still officially a building site until it also gets certified.

Astute readers will note it is now Autumn, in these parts.

Here’s the reason why it remains uncertified:

On fencing installation day, I heard an almighty crash. And I ran.

Then I saw the fencing guy standing there, looking perplexed, with shattered glass all around his feet. I figured I had nothing to add and went back to my desk. And so we wait.

There are two reasons why I ran when I heard the crash. Their names are Calpurnia (don’t worry; we’re calling her Callie) and Clover, and they are the most adorable troublemakers we’ve seen … well, since Tinkerbell and Scout were the same age, anyway.

Working with these guys around feels a bit like a mini-Staypuft scene.

Now when Mum (ie me) is a former English teacher with a PhD in English literatures, you get themed pet names. Cats are named after favourite book characters; chickens after the Doctor’s companions. When we had quail, they were named after characters from Bridge to Terabithia and lived in an aviary named Janice. (Geddit?). Fish have been named after Mulder, Scully, Lone Gunmen etc.

Naming the kittens proved trickier than one might think, since there is still a dearth of strong, female characters out there. I went back to childhood and in one instance, there was a seven book series featuring only two females. And they were named Jane and The Lady, so that wasn’t going to work.

For the record: Scout & Calpurnia are from To Kill a Mockingbird. The late, great, Tinkerbell was named from Peter Pan (I looked for more options from the same text, but there were very few: Wendy or Jane, or the racially problematic Tigerlily, or Nana, who was both a dog on the page and stage, and a grandmother in our household, so that wasn’t going to fly. As it were). Clover comes from What Katy Did, which was probably my earliest introduction to representations of disability in literature. Clover was the eldest sister after Katy and was described as being “pretty and clever with a cheerful disposition,” as being loved by everyone and loving them in return.

Callie and Clover were being fostered in Lithgow, and I saw their pictures on a local Facebook group and fell in love. And so I ended up in Lithgow for the second time in three weeks, having just been back for a school reunion. This time, I caught up with a school mate who hadn’t made it to the reunion, and we talked for hours. We’re booked to be back there in another three weeks, for the wedding of another dear school friend. The Spousal Unit is totally on board with this, because he reckons that when I visit, I come home happy and stay happy for, like, days.

For someone who actually lived outside of Lithgow (apart from eight months in 1978, but that’s another story) and always felt a bit Other, going “home” to Lithgow has been something of a revelation to me. When I left for Uni, I didn’t think I was all that attached –we had lived in three states by the time I was in first grade, I went to 5 different primary schools, and after going on a high school exchange, I effectively only spent nine months with my ultimate year 12 cohort–so I never had a particularly strong sense of belonging anywhere. But that year 12 cohort went a long way to change that, and I’ve since been told, on more than one occasion, that I was–and am–a “Lithgow person.” And Lithgow people have the back of other Lithgow people permanently, as far as I can tell. So when I go back, I feel very safe, and at home, and understood, and like I don’t have to give a back story because there’s a shared history there.

Adopting two wee feline babies from there seemed like an apt way to bring a little bit of Lithgow into our daily lives.

New Year, Same Me

And, as I added when I said this to my spouse in response to some God-awful ad for new year weight loss programs … “because I’m an effing delight.” Or something like that. 😉

I have managed to restart some (good) old habits with the turn of the calendar … my morning pages and my morning walk, aka the morning ritual that hasn’t been done consistently in … well, it might even be years, at this point. I’ve been in my new work-from-home role a couple of months, and the build is more-or-less finished, meaning that I’m in my study/home office, so the feeling of “camping out” while transitioning roles is pretty much gone. I say “pretty much” because yesterday was my first day back, and it was challenging. The NBN guys who came out on December 20 said it was too wet to complete the task so even though we’d moved the furniture and computer equipment into the brand spanking new study so I could work from there (Happy Birthday to meeee!), it turned out that the internet didn’t actually work reliably in there, as I discovered during my first hour of attempting to work in there yesterday. So the Spousal Unit went off to buy a wifi extender and then I spent about the next twelve hours trying to retrain the printer and all our other wifi-reliant services.

I sent my colleague a text saying, “Look what I got for my birthday!” She congratulated me before pointing out how much less fun adult birthday presents can be. Not pictured: “Real” annual present of a trip to a musical with Firstborn, who also has a pesky just-before-Christmas birthday

I was doing this “retraining” on very little sleep because I’ve sort-of moved into the new extension, but one blind was the wrong size and one shutter can’t be fitted until something else is, and so on I only sleep on cloudy nights. Which the evening of January 1 was not. So I was not in a good space to be trying to think things through, and feeling vaguely homicidal.

Lovely and light-filled … which is great *during the day*

Nevertheless, we persisted. Without a homicide that would have stopped us making it to our 26th Wedding Anniversary today. Five years ago we were in Paris; one year ago in Fiji. Today I’m in the home office and gritting my teeth as he watches things too loudly elsewhere in the house. Seems like a pretty good metaphor for the ups and downs of a long-term marriage, really.

Also, please note that it’s “WordPress Wednesday” and I’ve actually logged in to WordPress. On a Wednesday.

And now, onto my next good intention … finishing up the proofreading and Indexing of our Vampire Diaries project. It’s due in four days (five, if you count the way the time difference works in my favour). You can preorder here from McFarland in the US, or I’ll be selling them from my website – probably by the end of January, but it might end up being February.

Check-In

Time for a check-in.

The check-in is: I’m feeling a bit out of sorts, and then I feel guilty because I shouldn’t be feeling out of sorts, and then I remind myself that it is unhelpful to be trying to tell my brain what it “should” be feeling because that is not a path to better mental health by any stretch of the imagination, and I probably should go back to doing Morning Pages to process this stuff but I haven’t, and uh-oh, that’s another potential guilt trap, right there.

Brains, amirite?

And so in the immortal words of Leonard Hofstadter, I sometimes hear myself interior voice whining: “so my question is–what’s up with that?”

Pretty sure my face often looks like this, too.

I feel like I shouldn’t be feeling out of sorts because I think I actually love my new job. I’m working with a great bunch of people. It very much reminds me of when Child the Elder first switched schools and one teacher after another addressed her by name, told me how she was settling in, and said how great she was at the first Parent-Teacher afternoon. Eventually one teacher called me on my Hofstadter face and asked why I looked so surprised, because CTE is a good kid. I told him I knew–but I didn’t think her last school did, because they just kept telling me that she talked too much (in one instance, famously, while calling her by another child’s name). Same kind of energy, here–scheduled meetings happen on time, but the person who appears on screen asks, before any “work stuff”–how I’m settling in, and there’s a bit of chit-chat about our lives etc. Small kindnesses, that make you feel appreciated. It’s a really lovely thing, and I’m fascinated by how routinely it happens, especially since we’re in a very distributed online environment so there is no water cooler or tearoom in which to first establish the relationships.

And as for the work itself–I’m researching UDL with a view to creating some best practice guidelines to make subject webpages more accessible to more students, including students with disabilities. In other words, I’m back to inclusive education practices and using my training. This is stuff that I’m good at. That’s pretty cool.

In the last fortnight, I have also helped (a little) with the Teaching Academy’s online L & T conference, facilitating a panel; and on the Research side of the house, one abstract I submitted and had accepted has, just this past weekend, spawned an additional two contribution requests. I’ve also accepted a request to review a paper on mental illness and popular culture for a psychiatry journal. I’m still on the Board of Directors for a local disability service provider and we have the AGM this week, so there are a few balls being juggled just at the moment; none of them ones I would want to drop.

In the background, the home renovation project is in Week 11 of a scheduled 14. I am so incredibly grateful that we chose the team we did–I can talk to both the owner and the foreman honestly and know that it’s going to be a respectful conversation and that I’ll walk away with the information I need. Even more impressive, they’re keeping to schedule. I am stressed to the eye teeth because they are due to finish mere days before Christmas and this is throwing my usual over-planning and over-decorating tendencies into disarray, but can I just reiterate: they are scheduled to finish before Christmas. The rooms even look like identifiable rooms, now.

I do have to keep reminding myself that we need to keep the job moving, though, because that is 11.5 weeks of people being here from about 6.45am pretty much every day. That is a LOT of peopling for an introvert (and it’s also an uncomfortably early start for a chronic insomniac). I basically have a peopling-hangover every day now, but I can’t tell everyone to bugger off for a day or two and let me reboot, or the schedule just won’t be met. This past weekend was the Spousal Unit’s birthday so we had family visit, and we had tradies here on Saturday (albeit briefly) AND Sunday. Again, I am beyond grateful–and I made sure to serve them birthday cake–but it means there has been not even a short reboot opportunity this week. I’ve formed the habit of making something for the workers for morning tea, but I haven’t managed to find time to #bakeforthebuilders for the past three days, which I hope they are not taking personally–but I just haven’t had that extra little bit of capacity.

There’s also a lot of decision-making involved in a project of that size. Decision-making gets progressively harder with a people hangover. Switching gears between tasks also gets slower.

Add to all that, we’ve been hacked and/or had our virtual identities stolen, I guess, with attempts to gain access to ATO accounts (his) and Apple (mine) within the space of about 36 hours. Thanks once again to Optus for letting customer details make their way onto the dark web, I guess. Also on the to-do list: change mobile provider.

(OK, maybe there are some reasons for my brain to be screaming “stop the world, I want to get off!” just at the minute).

On Sunday, I’m heading over to the Wagga campus for the first time, before a three-day retreat and planning session. But in one of the afore-mentioned honest “how are you going?” chats with my boss, I admitted that I am feeling a bit tired and like some cylinders are occasionally misfiring. She promptly advised me to take an afternoon off and refill my cup–time to be taken in lieu of the time spent on the long drive out to Wagga on Sunday.

It’s so lovely to be shown that kind of care and grace. Now I just need to work on routinely extending that to myself.

A change is as good as a holiday …

… and if you can manage to have a holiday before the big change, that’s even better.

A lot has changed here in the past six weeks. After about two decades of working for UOW in various roles, I have moved to a new employer, still in Higher Education.

I wasn’t actively looking for alternatives, because I wasn’t looking to leave Higher Ed and I’m certainly not looking to leave the Shoalhaven. But there were a number of things that happened in quick succession that made me wonder if I should start looking. One incident, in particular, happened on a Monday. On Tuesday, a job alert landed in my in-box, and for once I skimmed it, thought “I could actually make that work, without too much disruption,” didn’t delete it immediately, and went back for a re-read. Then I sent it to my ex-boss and co-author, who texted back: “You HAVE to apply for this. It sounds like you.”

So I did.

And within three weeks, I’d been appointed with another of my alma maters, at Associate Professor level, in a more teaching-related role. And, just as I was worrying about the logistics of a part-time, fixed term move back to the area where I went to school, they unexpectedly suggested that I might like to work 100% remotely.

And so now my daily commute is to our dining room.

Happily, the builders are here and creating a more permanent home office (this was already well in train before this latest turn of events). So I’m living in utter chaos in the run-up to Christmas, but in 2024, we’ll have a guest suite for our international visitors, an office for me, and the pool I’ve been promising Tony since we moved in almost 18 years ago. It’s all happening, and all at once, and it’s thrown my Christmas decorating schedule into complete disarray. I’m still trying to problem-solve for that.

In addition to offering me the opportunity to work from home, when I was appointed I was asked would I perhaps like to take a little holiday before I started? The end of my notice period with UOW coincided with the start of what will be Tony’s last set of school holidays, so we booked ourselves flights to Bali and returned to the fantastic Nike Villas in Sanur. We had a couple of nights at Febri’s in Kuta on either side, because it’s close to the airport, cheap, and they have a spa that does amazing massages. But Sanur is a lovely home base for us; we didn’t have a dud meal the whole time, and saw some great live music, and basically did not much except a lot of swimming and reading, which just what was needed.

I’m very grateful that we had this reboot when we did. It will be some time before I can get away again, since my leave balances have all reset to zero.

Happily, the job so far is going well. I once again am working with a really nice team, and I’m offering advice on how to make university websites and subjects more accessible and inclusive, which is something about which I’ve always been passionate –but it wasn’t something I could pursue in my last role.

And, if I’m 100% honest, the thing I’m most relieved about is that I no longer have oversight of the management of four campuses in bushfire zones. Don’t get me wrong–I love our campuses and the folks who sail in them, and I most definitely still think in terms of those shared pronouns–but with a horror bushfire season predicted and how often I get triggered by the hazard alerts that are already coming through on my phone, I’m grateful that I’m no longer the first call on the phone tree. I know that I will still worry about “our” people when there are fires–in fact, there was a fire that impacted some of our people while we were in Bali, and check-ins did happen, despite the fact that I had already officially ceased employment. But moving forward, the only site I’m actually responsible for is my home, and that feels right. I don’t know that I could get through another Summer like 2019/20. It was a lot of responsibility. I suspect many of us were more traumatised than we acknowledged, particularly as we then immediately rolled headlong into a global pandemic.

Tomorrow marks one month in the new role. So far, so good.