What is it Wednesday?

Melbourne CBD about to be lashed by a storm

No the piccie above is not my WIIW piccie.

After a long day at work I began looking through my personal archive to find a WIIW post.
Sometimes I find a piccie with minimal effort, others it take an age.

This time it was somewhere in between. However, one thing I did decide was that I have now shared an awful lot of piccies on this blog and have 1,000s and 1,000s more. 
Most of the piccies I have shared because I like them and it seems a shame to let my piccies languish unloved on a hard-drive somewhere.

So I thought I would make an effort to post a piccie most days even if I didn't have time (or energy) to do much else.

So my question is what do you all think of that as a concept?

Now down to the business of the day.
I promise that because I have already asked you to think, I will not be at all tricky with his weeks WIIW.

 So - What on Earth do you think this is?

What is it Wednesday?

Well I am home late again tonight.

Long hours are still the rule at work.

But next week I am off for a whole week+ of leave.

Yay!

In the meantime: What on Earth do you think this is?

Progress on two fronts

My new job is simultaneously hard work and very relaxing. First being a government job there are substantial differences to anything I have experienced in the private or community sectors. Things are quite simply more bureaucratic and every second word seems to be an acronym.
My new job is a reasonably senior position so there is a lot to get on top of as quickly as possible. So all in all it is quite tiring.

Now here is the good bit. The job is in other ways also very relaxing. As difficult as it might be I am not dealing with desperate people in extreme circumstances. I am not having to be continually on my toes to monitor the risk of violence to myself, my staff or the people using my services. The reality is people in extreme situations sometimes behave unpredictably, add in issues like mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse and you had to be careful. Always.

Having said that working with the homeless you more often see the best of people. But you have to be ready to deal with the worst.

So I am really enjoying the change of pace in that way. Also I seem to have landed a great team to work with: friendly, welcoming and helpful to the newby!

Now to my WIP, as I said I finished a first draft. This week I’ve been sorting all the sections written in different POV into order. I can’t help myself I sometimes get distracted and begin rewriting some sections as I go, but all in all the shuffling process is going well. I hope to be finished with that stage early next week. Then I will sit down and read the whole thing start to finish to see which sections need the most work.

Can you stay on task when it comes to writing, or are you like me and sometimes get led astray by the text in front of you?

Now finally a quick word about last weekend. As I said Deb and I went away, well we spent the weekend at Phillip Island which is about two hours drive from home. I say drive because although it is a real island it is connected to the mainland by a bridge. As you saw if you caught my Monday post we managed to cram an awful lot into two days.
One of my piccies was of a bird.
He was a Cape Barren Goose (Cereopsis novaehollandiae) or to be precise gander, a member of the only ‘true’ goose species native to Oz. They were quite endangered in the 1970s but have made a comeback thanks to conservation efforts. I am talking about them again because I had to share some piccies of some goslings.
Just as a reminder here is another piccie of dad.Now mum with some of her broodSome cute fuzzballs And some more

A Milestone (of Sorts)

My progress on my WIP continues to move along, although not as quickly as I would like. As you may know I have been working long hours recently tidying up to leave my previous job in good order and now trying to get on top of my new job as quickly as possible.

At the moment I am up at 5:30am and on the train as soon as I can get to the station. Then I am usually home late and hit the sack about an hour or two after I stagger in the door. This doesn't leave much time for anything during the week.

This has meant some things have had to slip a bit. First I have become really slack at responding to your comments on my blog, I promise I will fix this as soon as things ease up a bit.
Second I am not visiting as many of your blogs as I would like and even when I do I tend to lurk without commenting.

Part of my long day is a commute of over an hour at each end. This is normally a blessing in disguise because it gives me time to write. I'm still managing an hour of writing time most mornings. Unfortunately things haven't been as good in the evenings, with long days I have tended to sit vacantly staring at my PC screen through sheer exhaustion, plus if I leave late the train is usually crowded so I often don't get a seat for the first half of the trip.

Now that is my whining for tonight. Because despite all that I have still reached a milestone. I am provisionally saying I have finished writing my first draft of my WIP.

Relaxing Photo Break

Freycinet Penninsula (Tasmania) in evening light

Why provisionally? Well I'm cheating a bit, as I have said before I am writing each stream of POV separately with the aim of weaving them together afterwards. Well I have reached the 'afterwards' bit. Most of my narrators have finished their stories. The ones that haven't are waiting impatiently on me. If the text I have slides together nicely some of my narrators will add a few comments and I'll move on to thinking about a second draft.

But, and this is a big but, I suspect that as I go I will likely have to adjust some strands to get them to even vaguely fit. And there is some background material for some characters that I don't think I will have to flesh out if the piece sits nicely as a whole.

I hope all this is making sense. Any way apart from some frustration about hours in the day it is going well.

So what about you? Have you ever had times when your life felt like it wasn't your own?

Gratuitous Rainforest Fungi Shot

A New Job!

Well it is almost a month since I had the interview, but I have landed a new job!

You may remember I had an interview with the Victorian Public Service. One of the three person interview panel asked me to apply for another job the same day (I didn’t get that one).
Then about a month ago the chairperson of the panel had her PA ask me to apply for another job for which I was interviewed.

I thought I had done a reasonable interview, but hadn’t heard any more. Then last night one of my referees phoned and told me she had been contacted for a reference.

Naturally I was pretty excited last night and today I was phoned by the chair of the third panel and offered the third job! The delay was caused by an internal applicant appealing their decision.

To say I am relieved and happy to get the new job is somewhat of an understatement. The job is very different to my current one. At the moment I am managing a couple of charity services that support homeless people in Melbourne. My current job is very coal face, very stressful and exhausting. I love community service, but I am ready for a change.

The new job is very different, it is managing a policy team for the Department of Health. The link with my experience is that part of the role is oversight of programs that provide services to homeless and other marginalised people. Effectively my ‘clients’ in the new job will be charities and other NGOs that run services similar to the ones I am running now.

I won’t be starting for at least another three weeks because I have to give notice where I am now. The hardest part will be leaving the truly dedicated team of staff and volunteers that I manage now. It will also be strange moving away from the community sector and into a government job.

I’m not kidding myself, the new job will have a steep learning curve. It is going to have its own stresses. But in comparison to the real dangers we face in this work it will seem a refreshing change.

Now just a few piccies.

The Horseshoe Falls, Mount Field National Park, TasmaniaFungi, Mount Field National ParkFreycinet Peninsula, Tasmania in morning lightWave washed rocks Freycinet Peninsula

A Long Week and a Short Post

I had intended to post before tonight. But…

My computer has been down with a virus. Nothing I haven’t been able to deal with but with thousands upon thousands of large photo files on my hard drive scanning for problems takes for ever. It seems to be all fixed now. But it has taken what little posting/commenting time I would have had.

Also I have had a verrrrrry long week at work. I sooooo know why I am looking for another job.

My job hunting is still going on. As I said I had an interview earlier in the week.
I don’t think it was great, unlike the others I have had I did not come away with the feeling that I particularly impressed them.

I also have some mixed good/bad news on other jobs. If you have been following my job hunting you will remember I had an interview for a Public Service job back in March. I came away from that interview feeling I’d blitzed it then one of the panel phoned me the same afternoon and asked me to apply for another job.

Well I still haven’t heard about the other job. However, the head of the first interview panel phoned me yesterday and said they had unfortunately decided not to give me the first job.
But there was good news too, she said the person who they just gave it to ahead of me is a really experienced senior public servant and they felt she just edged me out. What she said was that they were very impressed with me, and while she couldn’t promise anything if something came up in her unit she would ask me to apply. She is a senior, very no-nonsense person and unless I have totally misread her she was very serious.
The fact that she chose to ring me, rather than the usual thanks but no thanks email also convinces me I came very close.

So we will see.
Now I am just home at 8:30pm so that is it for me for tonight.

I will try to do a proper post tomorrow, but failing that I’ll post the next extract featuring Valentina on Sunday.

Odds and Ends

First of all thank you all for your supportive comments. Your gentle support means a lot to me.

Thank you.

Now I haven’t posted for the last few days because I have been busy.

Work is as crazy as ever, it has been somewhat easier now I have made a decision not to stay for the long term. Although I have to say I am kind of missing the people there even though I haven’t left yet.

I have been putting together an application for a job, something I’d actually really like to do. It’s a managing position looking after a couple of mental health programs in something called a Community Health Service. I’ve had similar jobs before so I think I’ll be in the running. It’s senior enough to have almost no client contact, but close enough to the community to keep a feel that I’m achieving something ‘real’. It feels right, the application process closes on Monday so wish me luck.

The other thing that is keeping me busy is my WIP. Unfortunately due to a minor computer problem I lost about ten hours work. I am usually absolutely paranoid about back ups. This time I was a bit slack so of course this was the time I had problems. That’ll teach me :-)

I’ve been threatening promising more posts about our Tassie trip but just haven’t had time to pick piccies to share from the (literally) thousands I brought back.

So instead I am going to inflict a section of my WIP on you. In case anyone is reading Veiled in Shadows on my other blog I will also post a chapter of that tomorrow.

I’m not sure how popular these chunks are because I seem to get almost no comments on them.
Anyway I enjoy posting them so here goes.

This is (as usual) a first draft although it was not typed today. It follows on from the last section where Ronnie and Valentina crashed into each other at a Berlin Airport.

Valentina Meshcova
Berlin 1948
As spring eased into summer and the weather warmed up I began taking Natasha a beach at Heddersee. Sunday was our day, just the two of us.

I had never managed to find out her German name, if she remembered herself she never said, so she was Natasha. I had thought briefly of calling her Raisa, but my Raisa had died at the hands of Germans so I was not sure.

Of course no trace of her mother was ever found so Natasha lived with me in my apartment as if she was my daughter. She was the first child at our orphanage and she had saved me as surely as I had saved her. So it was not surprising she was my favourite.

She was a serious seven year old, but she seemed happy enough. I thought she was very clever, but what mother does not think her child is special. She had learned Russian very rapidly, even quicker than most small children are with language. She still spoke German when she played with other children, but most people guessed she was Russian.

Before the airport I had stopped thinking about Ronnie every day. Now I knew how desperately I still loved him. I re-enacted every moment of that brief encounter again and again, always ending with his expression of hate.

How easy to live with a love who was gone for ever. How hard to be hated by one's desire.

Without Natasha and the focus of the other children I could never have managed the next few days. But eventually I began to feel something like normal again. Thoughts of Ronnie did not distort my thinking at every moment. The incident seemed to have caused no trouble for me either, neither my driver or aide seemed to have mentioned what had happened to anyone.

I lay on our blanket and watched Natasha as she played at the water's edge. She kept as close an eye on me as I did on her, she didn't mind playing on her own with someone watching, but being left alone held a terror for her. She was one child I never had to worry about wandering off.

Sunday was the busiest day at Heddersee with the residents of Berlin making the most of the weather. So I was not surprised when a woman spread a blanket next to mine. With my focus on Natasha, I did not pay much attention to her, I had an impression of long, milky white limbs and black hair.

A voice in German, 'Excuse me.'
I glanced over at her she was holding a bottle out in my direction, 'I don't suppose you could put a bit of this on my back could you?'
I looked at her more closely. She was beautiful, physically beautiful the way Raisa had been, so that people would notice when she entered a room. Tall, dark haired, pale skinned, striking grey eyes.
I knew her from somewhere, I was sure. Yet I had never seen her before, I was certain of that.

It was oil, thin and clear and with an odd earthy smell that was still pleasant and somehow familiar. She held her long black hair up on the back of her head as I rubbed the stuff into her back. How strange, to waste precious oil on the skin. But looking at her she was not by any stretch of the imagination poor. Her bathing suit was clearly tailored, not the home knitted thing most people made do with if they could get hold of something to knit. 'What is this stuff?'
'Coconut oil, it helps me cook myself.'
That explained the smell, dried coconut was something I knew from before the war. 'You will have to be careful, you are very pale. Half an hour, any longer and you will burn.'
'Alas, I have not had time to lie in the sun for years now.'
'I can see that.'

Natasha looked across to check I was still there. She frowned, almost alarmed when she saw my blanket empty. Then her smile when she saw I had not abandoned her. 'She's a pretty child, is she yours?'
It was not a question I had been asked before. 'I am not her mother, but yes she is mine.'
'I always wanted a daughter, but… the war.'

I glanced at her hands, there was a gold band, but on the left. Not married then, but presumably she had been engaged. It was awkward, but I asked the question anyway, I had not had a casual friendly conversation since Raisa was killed.

Before the end of the war I was driven by circumstance and after... well I was a Soviet officer and officers do not have nice conversations with their subordinates. I talked to children and gave or received instructions from other soldiers. 'Your fiancée?'

She laughed and held up her hand, the gold bright in the sun, 'Husband, we do it differently in the west. Here, the wedding ring is on the left. He was killed.'

I felt cold.

The hate, of Germans and Germany was never far away. She must have sensed it, 'Don't worry, he didn't fight against your Russian boys. He was a pilot, he died in France.'
'I'm sorry.' To my surprise I actually was sorry, I felt her grief. She wasn't just a German, she was a fellow human.
'Do you have someone?'

It was foolishness, madness to say anything to anyone. But perhaps after all this time I needed to reach out to someone more mature than a small girl. 'There, was a boy, an English sailor...'
She was curious now, 'Did he die?' she meant to seem casual, but I knew she really wanted the answer.
'No, he was sent away. The NKVD...I was arrested. They told me he was a spy and if I ever saw him again I would be shot.'

Her response took me entirely by surprise, 'Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be happy in the end.'

I did not have a moment to ask what she meant, Natasha came running across, all wet and excited. 'Valentina, I am hungry! Can we go and get some bratwurst?'
One thing that was still very German about Natasha was her love of sausage, of any kind. As if noticing the stranger for the first time she asked in her direct way, 'What is your name?'

The woman hesitated just a moment, 'My name is Penelope.'
'That is a funny name.'
She smiled, taking the childish criticism in her stride, 'Yes it is a funny name, it is a very old Greek name.'
'You aren't very old.'
'Compared to you I am ancient.'
'Valentina can we go now?'
I smiled at the stranger, 'Perhaps we will meet another time?'
'I shall look forward to it Valentina.'

Al at a Crossroad

Some days ago I mentioned I wanted to talk about something personal but I was distracted by events in Oz.

So tonight I want to go back to the personal.

You may know I have been working for some time managing a couple of charity programs that provide a number of services to homeless people in Melbourne.

In fact I have worked for a number of charities in disability services, mental health and homelessness for well over a decade.

I choose this work because it is immensely satisfying and personally rewarding.
At the same time it is challenging, frustrating, and dangerous.
I say dangerous because in Oz after the police, workers in social/human services are the most frequently assaulted profession.

Stress and burnout are occupational hazards. Yet I have stayed in this area for many years.

Why? Because I love my work. You see the worst aspects of our society, but again and again you see the absolute best of people.

Just two examples: a woman in her 80s who volunteered for 10 hours every week because she wanted to give something back and felt she was letting everyone down when her health prevented her continuing; and a homeless man who gave his coat to someone who was colder.

Having said all this I have decided I am not carrying on in my job.
Perhaps, I am after all this time burning out, but I spend too much time worrying about the worst. I have been assaulted 3 times in the past 10 years and have dealt with dozens if not hundreds of incidents which could have resulted in violence (more often directed at someone else but it is still stressful).
I find myself dwelling on how to support my team when something terrible happens. Don’t get me wrong, I am good at supporting people as they do this work and I enjoy being able to do this. I always have very low turn over rates in my teams, the key is making sure people are not only supported but feel supported.

Usually I am good at looking after myself through all this. I have a very simple philosophy, that in this work if you don’t help yourself you can’t help anyone else.
Using some mental tricks I generally leave work at work. And when I can’t I seek the appropriate support for myself. My self care regime usually works a treat.

But unusually when I came back from my holiday in Tasmania I wasn’t ready to go back to work. Now when I get to the end of a weekend I dread going back to work. This isn’t me, maybe this is burn out.

So where am I going? Well I am now looking for another job.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to go for but it certainly won’t be coal face in human services.

I hope I will find something related but in a more admin type role.

Time to recharge.
Now 'cause I need to cheer up a bit.

A native orchid in from Cradle Mountain National park Tasmania

Tired

Well I haven’t posted for a few days now.
I have been coming home from work tired.
We have had some very stressful incidents over the past week or so.
Attempting to deal with such issues and keep everyone else safe and well at the same time takes it out of you.

To keep the bureaucratic arm of our organisation happy, we have at work what are called “critical incident” forms.
These forms are to record instances where there was either some form of illness, harm or the risk of harm in the workplace. In theory they are to help us as a team and our OH&S staff at head office to improve workplace safety.

As you know I work in an industry (services to homeless people) where there are probably more than the fair share of incidents. So on average, as a manager, I probably fill in about one of these a month. Since Tuesday last week, I have filled out no less than six of these forms, and strictly it should have been seven.

Here is my list of misadventures and close shaves for the week.

A fight where one client (I’ll call him Hacker, he is actually known by a nickname) attacks another. The victim turns on the attacker and begins to beat him up. Greg and I intervene and manage to talk them down. Result Hacker and the other guy banned from our premises for three months.

A psychotic episode affecting one of our female clients. One of our staff (I’ll call her Jane) is threatened. Result Woman escorted off premises, psych crisis team called (they don’t arrive until after she has left the area, surprise, surprise.)

A psychotic episode (probably drug induced) affects one of our male clients. He threatens a guest psychologist (I’ll call her S). Greg and I intervene. We get S into a safe room. Greg and I continue to try to talk him down. The guy continues to escalate. I instruct Greg to dial 000 (our equivalent of 911 or 999) The Police take fifteen minutes to arrive (their station is maybe 100 metres away). By then the guy has calmed somewhat. The police elect to not arrest him but just move him on.
S has been a psychologist in the city for over ten years. Yet this is the first time anything like this has happened to her. Greg and I spend a long time trying to reassure her. We then walk her to her car (our shift was over by then). I then spend a long time on the phone to her boss trying to ensure she gets a proper debrief.

Hacker (see point 1 above) turns up after a couple of days. He waltzes in as if nothing has happened. I remind him of his ban. He becomes verbally abusive and threatening. Greg hovers nearby in case thing go wrong, but in the end Hacker listens to me and leaves.

Two of our guys argue. Neither wants to back down. It looks like another fight is in the offing. Greg and I intervene. Between us we manage to talk them down. Both are asked to leave for the day, neither is banned.

Finally, yesterday at breakfast one of our volunteers (I’ll call him Larry) suddenly complains of Chest and abdominal pain. Larry is a guy in his mid sixties and his health is not good. I dial 000 for an ambulance and stay with him until they arrive. Larry is taken away by paramedics.
We have to reassure the guys that Larry will be OK (while being worried for him ourselves).
Fortunately Larry was not too bad as it turned out. He spent the day in hospital while tests were run. The diagnosis – kidney stones.

So as you can see I have had a busy week. These sorts of incidents cause a lot of stress for all involved.
No wonder I am tired.

Now to finish on a positive note or two.

Veiled in Shadows is proceeding, albeit a little slowly at the moment. I am almost ready to upload my files to the printer.
However, I have found a few last minute formatting errors so I am checking the whole thing once more.
I have also just received a National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry.
This thing is getting closer and closer.

Finally my youngest’s school has asked if I can be at an open day to meet with prospective parents to answer questions about how we as parents (and our daughter) find the school.
I am only too happy to help out. Lu came to the school last year (in what we call year 10). This is the first school that has come close to meeting her needs and the first school she has ever been happy in. They are clearly doing things better than any school she has ever been to before.

Hmm. I think I have enough for another whole post there.

Enough for now.
I’ll finish with a piccie of some of the high country north of Melbourne. Unlike the Upper Yarra Valley which has featured a lot on my blog this piccie taken a couple of weeks ago shows much more typical Aussie summer colours.