mja blog

  • Christmas lunch meeting

    It’s my day off today but I’m heading into “work” anyway – Ros has called a special Christmas exec meeting lunch at a local pub. Something different.

    I’ve been feeling so cranky and bad tempered the last couple of days. The thought struck me today while I was in the shower, this is something I’ve been preparing for in all the mindfulness exercises I’ve been doing – I need to acknowledge the feeling, and let it drift like a leaf on the stream.

    Since I had this thought the weight has lifted a little, the cranky old bag is having a better day.

    After lunch I’ll probably head to a shopping centre and do a bit of christmas shopping, how good is it to have a day off in the middle of the week, and avoid the worst of the madding crowds.

  • Worry time

    Visit number four at the psychology clinic last week, where I’m being shown various techniques to re-train my thought processes from the punishing cycle of self-defeating, emotional reactions.

    One of these involves guided meditation and mindfulness exercises like those demonstrated by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the Google workshops. I was guided through another of these last week, in which I closed my eyes and visualised myself sitting on the bank of a stream, watching leaves float downstream away from me. Each leaf represented a distracting thought which I had to let go of as I focused on the stream.

    I was also given an exercise called “worry time”. The idea is to distance myself from worrying thoughts during the day by writing them down as they occur, then reviewing the list later on, at a fixed time each day for no longer than 20 or 30 minutes. I don’t always have the time or means to write things down, so it hasn’t been going so well. I tried writing things down for the first time yesterday, on a scrap bit of paper. It didn’t really have the desired effect. But I’ll stick with it for a while and see how it goes.

  • Filling my head with rock

    Got myself a couple of new CDs recently – Kiss (Revenge) and AC/DC (Back in Black). Feel and sound pretty wonderful on my car stereo. A good bit of head banging music is great for getting you into an energetic mood on the way into work, and helps you unwind at the end of the day by taking your mind off everything else.

    Rediscovering Kiss has  been a bit of a nostalgia trip for me. I was a kid when the Kiss Army first reached Australia, and like all the other kids I went a bit wild over them. Musically, they are a fun and sexy band and it is great to see they are still going strong thirty years on, with or without the makeup.

  • Vegie garden – week 7

    In all the rain we’ve been having in the past week I missed taking a photo last week, but here it is in week 7.

    All the tomatoes have flowers, some are bearing small green fruits. The capsicum plant has a lot of new little babies, the first capsicum is now bigger than my thumb. The cucumber vines are starting to spill over the side and there are a few baby cucumbers appearing.

    Radishes aren’t doing so well, some of them seemed to have burst – maybe too much water.

    The lettuce barrow is doing ok, we’ve been eating the odd lettuce and rocket leaf harvested from the plants, some of them don’t look too healthy – mostly the ones planted around the edge. In a few months I might plant something else in the barrow – herbs perhaps.

  • Credit transfer

    Saw my trainer today, organised to transfer credit from my last Cert course to two subjects in the course I’m undertaking now. Nice little short cut.

  • What does it take

    Tonight I’d just got back from the vet with Spook, who had cut open her foot and needed stitches. There was a text message on my phone from Ludelle – “Call me re lease please”. Annoyed, I thought I’d put an end to getting messages like these. Considered just ignoring it, but gave in finally, in case there was a legitimate reason she needed to talk to me. Maybe something I’d forgotten to pass along.

    Well it seems she just wanted my opinion on a situation with the lease of pens at the old pound. One of the cages needs repair, and when Ludelle asked council to attend to it they refused, claiming that under the lease agreement the tenant is responsible for repairs to fixtures. She thinks this is just council employees throwing their weight around. She’d brought up a similar situation at the meeting on Saturday, problems with vermin and council refused to provide rat traps.

    I pointed out that she had the copy of the lease agreement in her possession and suggested that she read it herself. I don’t remember anything that specific in there. Reminded her that I had resigned, it was nothing to do with me anymore. She said the lease was too full of jargon for her to understand and she was contacting me about it since I had been involved from the start, had attended a meeting beforehand with council to go over all the terms (she had also been at that meeting!)

    Far out.  

    I was annoyed at first that she was trying to draw me into one of her crazy fights with council. The more I think about it the more I wonder if she trying to hold me responsible for all this.