I really felt in November like the tide finally turned in my life and good things happened. Read on in anticipation!
I did have a sort of busy month but just at normal levels. I had time and energy to spend a Sunday arvo helping with creche kids at another church. I brought flare to the room setup.
Workwise, pretty calm this month. I normally try and achieve some stuff by the end of the year, and I was hoping to wrap up another kids book, but that hasn’t been possible and I’ve just pushed it to next year. This year has definitely been a challenge right across the college. When I reflect back on 5 years ago, we’ve come a long way in our capacity and the quality of our work, but most people I talk to are feeling pretty exhausted. The drought and now the bushfires have added difficulty to peoples work as well. I don’t feel like I can do much in emergency responses but they keep asking for volunteers so I’ve just done the Em-train courses, just in case they get desperate. But as I said, my own workload has settled back to normal routine, not stressful.
At the start of the month builders came in and knocked down some walls and put a door hole in. So the office theme has been dust. At the end of the month, we still have a door hole, hopefully doors to be added soon. The progress on this office refurb is tedious, I was racing the door build against my orchid flower, and the flower won. I feel like the list of things they want to do will drag out over the next 3 years in a hodgepodge and constantly disruptive way. It took all year to get a door. So I can only imagine the timeline for carpets, lights, cubicles. Sigh.
The state of the office:
The orchid and the door hole.
Anyway luckily (or maybe it was good planning) the worst day of construction was the day my team travelled down to Yanco for our NSW team get-together. My 3rd trip down there this year and the last for a while. It went well, I did some presentations on social media and on taking videos on phones. I was well prepared and other than having to stop for the stupid melbourne cup race, which I am not into at all, I was happy with how it went. But it was a more tiring workshop than when I just sit back and go along for the ride.
At one point during the sessions our exec videod in and amongst all the big picture stuff she mentioned that some of the highlights from our team that she had really enjoyed this year, the good stories she was telling, one was the ARTP anniversary (including the book I wrote), I think another one was the website or something I was involved in, and she also said that Tocal social media was excellent, it was “leading DPI”. So she didn’t name me but it was a nice boost that all my hard work this year has been a good contribution.
We had an excursion to a cotton gin, and I don’t know much about cotton so that was interesting. Ask me about cotton.
We had dinner one night at a local historic venue a bit like Tocal on the Murrumbidgee, which was lovely, had lovely gardens to explore.
When we got back I tried to go to work the next day, but I had a massive crash, tired and teary, so took a flex afternoon and slept, but was better after that. I think that with the health issues I have I am more prone to getting exhausted from long days. Thankfully I can sustain full time work, but when it was travel and long days, or I do quite physical things, I get noticeably fatigued. It's like a thinner wall between me and tiredness than it used to be.
I’ve been growing seedlings and although some died during my travels away some survived, so I have been able to replace my finished poppies with eggplants, and get a handful of flowers started. I wanted more flowers, not sure if I have time to try and get some more going. There have been some brutally hot days already.
Before:
Summer ready! The white poly pipe is a composting system Cass gave me, I've wanted to try direct in-ground composting for ages.
Now the best news! I am an Aunty. Lucy was born on Sunday 10 November in Singleton. She came a few weeks early but fat and healthy. I took the day off on Tuesday and visited with Mum. Julia is already an amazing mum. She can wrap that baby like any midwife, I call it burrito. I gave them a bag of snacks and I ate Luke's lunch, which wasn't very helpful of me, but I did go and pick up their car. It was the day they predicted catastrophic fire conditions, so we did get cut off coming home but thankfully there were no fires along the back road so we got home in 90 minutes all up. Julia was a bit short on baby clothes the right size so that was the perfect excuse for me to finally go baby clothes shopping as soon as we got home! I have to say that Lucy is a pretty good baby.
We had a family dinner (minus Heather) the next weekend for Matt's bday, had chinese food and played Speculation, watching Lucy sleep on the baby monitor.
The trip down was horrendous. I had booked an XPT train/coach seat. ON the day there was an accident that cut the highway all day so I ended up going down on regular cityrail except it was SO MUCH WORSE because bus replaced trains on the hunter line so it took 90 minutes to get to Newcastle. But once on the train, it went smoothly and I still love the central coast line so much.
This was the food at Parliament House.
This is me and Jo with our triumphant Charlotte.
Julie was also invited and Jennifer snuck in. I met some people I wouldn't normally, like a Japanese consul economist. Felt a bit out of my depth but it was good to do.
I forgot to report on my health. Since I saw the nutritionist in October I have been cutting out sugar and taking a few supplements to lower acidity. The only fruit I eat is berries for example. And it has actually helped! Pretty much straight away I just felt brighter and better. Over the month of November I noticed less joint tenderness, less tiredness, my guts didn't trouble me (except after eating badly like a schnitty and chips). So this is my life now. I am basically eating a paleo diet. This is one of my cheats, we went to the Lindt cafe while in Sydney. But otherwise I have been really sticking to it because there is nothing like feeling good to motivate change.
The current version of the progesterone pill I changed to could have contributed but I really doubt it. It's messing my cycle around and normally that would make my guts sore and irritated, but they aren't. So there must be something in that whole thing about sugar being inflammatory, and now my gut is "healing" everything feels a lot better.
I've started going to pilates at the physio on Saturday mornings. It's good to have a workout that makes me tired and is beneficial for my back issue and is gentle and easy to get into.
This week I thought would be same same every day, but turns out there was a kids event at the college and Costa was there and I was asked to ask him to speak to a video about why biosecurity is important for the environment. It was pretty hard. But when I eventually got the time with him he was great. The video will be very useful! I'm glad I didn't know about this in advance, it would have stressed me out so much. Thankfully it was just 3 stressful hours.
Yesterday (Saturday) I went back to Singleton to visit Lucy again and I got to wake her up for her feed, and I had another game of Speculation with Julia and Luke which was a game I didn't really master the first time but this time I won. I would like to try and visit Lucy every month, so that I don't miss her growing up.
I haven't mentioned all the good things that have happened this month. Mum's health is better, good things are happening in my best friends lives, I've been enjoying Christmas shopping, I've got plans to sell and buy musical instruments next year... meanwhile I anticipate a pretty chill December.
