Wow. Almost 2 months. It’s been that long since I last blogged.
For good reason too. I’ve been super-duper-ultra busy.
Aside from our short trips to Canberra and Tasmania, we’ve had some of Shirley’s relatives over, and then there’s the matter of me working up to 4 projects at once.
So here’s the chronological break-down of what went on.
Feeling a little adventurous, we decided to drive to Canberra for the Easter long weekend. A brief, uneventful 8 hours and a few small towns later, we were in the political heart of the nation.
Canberra is not without its reputation, and that is not without reason. Perhaps a good way to sum up Canberra was this little nugget of advice from a travel website – “When you visit Canberra, don’t go to the toilet in the morning. That way, you have something to do at night”
That said, some of the sights were fairly interesting. I use the term fairly very loosely. The top attraction listed on the travel websites was the science centre.
I’ll see if I can dredge up some photos from our trip there but I think the highlight for Shirley was the oodles of cable TV programming in the hotel room – which led to renewed calls for cable TV at home – which led to our new satellite dish being installed on our roof. Enough said.
Along the way, my job status also went from permanent employee, into consultant. Yes, my stint as a full-time employee was somewhat short lived as I transitioned into a consulting role with my former employer, among others.
Having anticipated that the transition was going to happen, I went back into business development mode, getting in touch with my contacts again, sourcing for projects.
For some reason, the Australian economy seems to be going quite strongly, so much so that almost every client I had worked with before had a project that they wanted me to be involved in.
Billing by the hour meant that I had an added incentive to work overtime. At times, I had to juggle meetings for all projects, splitting my time between three different offices and racking up a lot of work-related km.
Leisure time became a luxury, and if I didn’t need to sleep, I’d rather have been working.
Then. Shirley’s family popped in for a visit.
Once they got off the plane, we got on another one to visit the ‘malaysia’ of Australia, which was Tasmania.
Tasmania kind of feels like it’s somewhere between an Australian country town, and New Zealand. The people are nice and friendly, there aren’t many shops around, and food options were fairly limited.
Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to finish the majority of my projects by this point in time. I completed one, had two extended, and the fourth one was still slated to be going on (and will keep going for the next couple of months at least)
So every night, just before going to bed. I was crunching away, at work.
The past few weekends were taken up by the obligatory tour-guiding and sight seeing – dropping in on the fairy penguins again, and some of Melbourne’s staple tourist haunts.
And that’s been the story so far.
I’ve come to accept that for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be lacking in sleep as I’ve already got another two projects in the pipeline that I’ve had to defer for lack of available time.
So for those I haven’t had a chance to keep in touch with, I hope you’d understand that it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just hard to type when I’ve fallen asleep, face first on my keyboard.
:) Hope you’re all well. Will get around to catching up on my emails soon.
