It’s better to give than receive

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We had dinner with a friend recently. Someone my wife and I see through my work. It was a fabulous dinner with maybe more wine than we should have consumed for a work night with an early start the next day, however it was fun.

Whilst much of our talk with our friend has been about where I’m at with my life, this time as the conversation and wine flowed we turned to where my wife was at with her life.

Too often this involves running around after our adult children. Bluntly she seems to be their unpaid PA! Whilst I know she is happy to take on that role it seems that she doesn’t have enough of her own time. That was a theme we discussed at length.

Through the conversation my wife talked about writing.

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Quite possibly the craziest thing I’ve ever done!

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This wasn’t an impulse, but after a week if feels like about the craziest thing I’ve ever done.

Enrolling at Uni whilst still working fulltime seemed straight forward. I’ll use a days annual leave this semester and then revise my working arrangements for next semester. I can fit the other seminars in around lunch and that should work just fine. So I thought!

Week One and I’ve had a full day at Uni, finding my way around only after my daughter, a third year student, came to show me around. The Workshop was daunting, I couldn’t turn my computer on or save a file without help; that was before I even considered the Workshop content! Then the three hour Seminar – I was exhausted only to be go confronted with a large reading list. That was just Monday!

Then it’s been late home from work every night, followed by a work event every night bar Friday where I thought it would be good to spend time with my wife and daughter. After we’d had dinner it was just relax in front of the TV and a movie, Cast Away which I hadn’t seen for years.

At least now I’ve got a long weekend to do my Uni reading, write my monthly article for The Adelaide Review and catch up on some work.

It all seemed easy last year when I experimented putting Herminia Ibarra’s fabulous book, Working Identity into practice with a couple of undergrad subjects at Uni. The reality of commencing Honours with an eye to a PHD is quite different – this is serious in fact crazy.

Let’s face it, I’m a petrol head!

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We live about 250 metres from Adelaide’s Street Circuit. Each year in late February it comes alive to the sounds of V8 Supercars. For many it’s a time to get out of the city, but for me it’s an added bonus of living in the city.

Adelaide for a short while hosted an F1 Grand Prix which was lost to Melbourne quite controversially in the late 1990s. The loss of the race is something South Australians still regard as “dirty darts”, Continue reading →

I’m entering the Twilight Zone

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I feel like I’m entering the Twilight Zone, a place where I will be in two worlds both of which in their own ways will be all consuming.

The first is my job and the second is one I’m both excited about and very nervous about – University!

I’m used to the ups and downs of my life in professional practice as well as it’s demands. It’s been my life for the last 35 years, but University is different. Whilst I completed some post grad study about ten years ago it was quite straight forward as was dabbling in study last year, just a subject a semester.

It already seems that I need to operate in a parallel universe. Scheduling my time is already a nightmare but would be so much easier if I operated in two universes. For example, I could be in both Sydney for an important client meeting and on campus learning about the approach to research at the same time.

If I operated in parallel universe I could attend to my work emails, proposals and client demands in the evening whilst also preparing for next week’s seminar.

It would all be so much easier with effectively 48 hours in one day, but alas that isn’t going to be the case; I’ll be stuck in the twilight zone flipping between two equally demanding universes.