Landed.Running

The week is off to a rushed, stressed-out start. (Note to self: when on holiday, don't go back to work...) It started way before Monday hit though.

A while back I agreed to take chapel at my son's school, date to be determined later. The principal rang to remind me 3 times last week that it was today. On my office phone. While I was at home. It's a good thing he saw me at the marathon on Friday! Unfortunately, I've been particularly uninspired lately, especially when it comes to chapel-ly type subjects. Yesterday I finally threw together a few visual aids and words in the line of "care for the earth because God gave it to us as our home". Although I started to lose the little kids after about 10 minutes, it went OK.

Once at the office, it was all dive in! 93 emails to trawl (not a lot, really), website to update (thanks to a power failure on Friday my home computer is stuck in permanent restart mode, so couldn't do what I needed to from there), 9:00 meeting (with even more work added). And during that meeting, the dreaded "R" word was brought up. Retrenchment. Or, as the head honcho calls it, "creative redeployment of personnel". In other words, we'll be working our rear ends off in various different jobs, for the same pay.

And it's like my gut contracted as that hit home. Not only do I get more of the same this year, I get more of everything else too. I'm not sure I'm up to that. With new management, a lot of the working environment is being tightened up. More control, more layers of power - quite the opposite from trends happening all over the world, trends creating more efficient and pleasant work places! I feel like we're taking a big step back as we try to move forward, circling inwards instead of thinking outside the box to make Big Change happen in positive directions.

So I emailed the guys advertising the olive farm again. Sent a couple of emails, no response. Could it be a sign?

After the meeting I got stuck into a lot more work. Suddenly it's piled up, where usually I get time out about now in the year to think and plan and start work on another big project (like the re-design of the website. Again.). But I'm barely keeping up with all the other things that need doing, and that's frustrating me. More and more I find I want space to breathe, to find new and better ways to work, to improve systems and functions and environment, to rethink where I'm heading and why. It can't happen when you spend all your time stomping out fires.

I guess the holiday has truly ended. All that supposed relaxation (which didn't really work) over and done with.

But I did get out this weekend, away from my usual environment. Want to guess where we went?

Here:


and here:



Bit of a morning out, it was!