Champagne and Socks

So it’s the weekend after my first week of … not going to a day job. Technically, I’m not working/studying yet but I’ve been trying to get work done where I can. I’ve not been well, and that’s dragging on so I’ve been still struggling with lack of energy. And normally I can at least work on the laptop or read or even craft but at the moment, I just have No Energy. I don’t like it but fighting it or pushing through it doesn’t seem to be working. At the moment, I’m just having to reduce my expectations of what I can get done in a day. But I Don’t. Like. It.

Some interesting things I’m observing. It’s going to take a while to rebuild my hard edge between the week and the weekend. This morning I just proceeded with my usual routine – wake up, turn on the computer, check for email and just dive in to tasks that need to be done. And then I pulled back a bit to think about what a weekend is and why I have chosen a new path for myself. One of the reasons of which was to get back my weekend. And I thought about how nice it would be to start a new quilt project or something. And just do that for all day. And then I watched the Lizzie Bennet Diaries for a while before heading out to catch up with a friend. And then run some TPP chores. But the thought was there. And tomorrow is another day.

During the week, I realised that I’ve entered another world. I wanted to pick up the printed copies of A TRIFLE DEAD from the printer and be home before noon. I had not driven my car for 6 weeks so no surprises that the battery was dead. So C called the RAC before he left and the guy came at about 7am. He jump started my car, warned me it might not hold the charge and I left it running for about 15 minutes before I turned it off and did a few more things before heading off for the day. Whereupon I discovered that the car again did not start. So I called the RAC and the same guy came back and laughed and then replaced my battery. And then I was on my way.

I decided to fill up the car on the way and was struck by how calm and not busy the station was. I headed up the freeway, mostly after all the traffic and I picked up the books after 9 and headed home. I decided to do a food shop before getting home and again, I noticed how calm it all was. Lots of car spaces and not busy in the shops. Not a long waiting line at the cashier, no one really in my way.

And I realised something – I’m operating my life now in that other parallel world – where the whole working day is available to me to do things in. No squooshing things into my lunch half hour or the last hour before things close after work, with every other frantic and stressed out 9 to 5 er squeezing things in. I didn’t have to rush up to pick up the books by 9.15 am. I had all day to do it. And I don’t have to be stressed all the time about when I will be able to make phonecalls or appointments or get to places before they close. I realised that I need to breathe out and slow down a bit. I have the time now.

Progress has been waylaid in the last couple of days due to sickness. It’s been most frustrating, or rather, had I had the energy to be frustrated, I would have been. I’m not used to having limited energy resources. Normally I can find a way to just push through and maybe pay some price further down the line. But at the moment, there seems to be immediate payback for pushing through and ignoring my body. I’m finding that I have very limited resources in a day – if I leave the house in the morning, I need a two hour nap in the afternoon. And I’m not liking this reduction in available work time!

So I have very little to report. Yesterday I managed to catch up with Terri at a new chocolate factory down her way. It was such a lovely day and they had a really lovely green lawn with chairs and tables set up under lovely big umbrellas. And we had a really long and chatty catch up, which was really great. I also really enjoyed the drive there and back – she only lives about 20 minutes away from me but for some reason, I much prefer the scenery between Rockingham and Mandurah than I do Rockingham itself. There’s something much more, I won’t say pristine, but … Australian outback about it. Lots of little hammocks and developments scattered between the two and you could almost imagine one of them being Summer Bay

I then came home and spent the rest of the day feeling like I might die on the couch and then moved finally to bed. C is working long hours at the moment so he discovered my agony at 6.30pm. When I’m sick, I am the exact expression of the Yiddish term “shvach” – it looks like it sounds I was very lucky that he took charge and did a quick run to the pharmacy to bring back stuff. That genuinely did make me feel better. And seems to still be working today. Perhaps I’ll get some work done finally!

In other news, we’ve been watching Season 1 of House of Lies. I really like it!

Well, today was the second day of my “being a full time publisher”.

It’s in inverted commas for now cause I’m not quite at full steam. You see, I’m starting my PhD at the end of the month. And I ended up finishing up my work contract two weeks early to sort a few things out. So whilst I’m doing that, I’m also kind of taking a bit of a rest before starting my new gig. A vacation of sorts. Oh who am I kidding! I was planning on spending all day every day catching up on all things Twelfth Planet Press.

Yesterday, I did pretty well. I got up at normal working hours and threw myself into work and I stopped at about 4.30/5pm. I really churned through the emails and progressed a few things that had been stalling. And I also did laundry and cleaned out some of my closet. Ahem.

Today the day was not so much attacked as survived. And I might call that a win still. Much less was achieved and that was mostly due to my computer playing up. I see now that after finally starting to clear space on it, it hasn’t played up in hours. But it took quite some time to pinpoint the issues.

However, things *have* moved along. The ebook format for ASYMMETRY, vol 8 of the Twelve Planets went out to ebook subscribers last night and should be available for purchase on our website later tonight. And other awesome online retailers later in the week.

And tomorrow, I shall pick up the printed copies of A TRIFLE DEAD and send those out to preorders, my car battery be willing.

Other than that, I’m very scattered and hard to focus. I’ve started reading 2312, starting listening to The Drowning Girl, knit one mitten in the flamingo pattern and started one mitten with beer glasses on it. That kind of thing.

But, my plan is to pick up blogging regularly again now that I have the time and now that I feel like I have freedom to read more widely and think more creatively. We shall see. We shall see.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve noticed the puppy locking himself in the bathroom on purpose. Sometimes, he can do it accidentally if something he wants is wrapped around or under the door and in the process of trying to get it out, the door gets swung shut. But lately we’ve noticed that he’s been deliberately shutting the door on purpose, leaving him he locked in the bathroom.

After some time exchanging puzzled looks, we’ve been investigating what he’s been doing – he knows how to open a door by jumping on it if he’s on the right side of it, and we thought maybe he was doing that by accident on doors that swing in. But then  I started clearing all the space around the door, making sure there was nothing at all behind it and pushing it completely open. There should be no reason he would want to be behind it or to accidentally swing the door closed.

Which is about the time we realised that he was deliberately closing the door for the reason of closing it – well actually, we think he’s conducting experiments to teach himself how to open the door when it’s fully shut. We’ve caught him swinging the door gently shut and then trying to maneouver it with his mouth to open it. It’s a swing door with a doorknob, not a sliding door so he won’t actually succeed but watching him conduct experiments and checking replication, is really very cute.

We have our very own scientist in the house!

I spent my birthday at postgrad orientation day. I was intending my birthday to be really low key but it ended up being one of my favourite ones so far. I met Helen at the train station and headed into uni with her where we had a long good catchup chat over breakfast before she escorted me to the lecture theatre where I would be spending the morning.

I was determined to sit by myself, engage with noone, and focus on getting the information I need. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t there to make friends or slide into “university life” – I’ve done all that before, the first time round, and am well aware of how much that gets in the way. So what happens? Someone sits next to me, and we get talking, and the next thing I’m doing is sending him to a TED talk that I think will be useful for his PhD topic. And some other people sit down near us. And we have to do that forced group interaction thing and I find out all three of them are doing PhDs in sustainability and planning and I realise that I have not run very far away from where I was at all!

But the day was super useful. I’m not sure how long it’d been since I’d been so intellectually stimulated – I had that complete drained exhaustion when I came home at the end of the day, like after a really hard exam. And I’d gotten a really good idea of what is required for the candidacy proposal I now have 6 months to write. And where to start on that. And some more thoughts on troubleshooting my topic and guiding where I might want that to go. All that stuff.

Sitting there in the workshop, I realised how excited I felt – I had that feeling you get, you know, when you fall in love or you win at something you’ve been working really hard at – elation, excitement … HAPPINESS. What an awesome birthday present to get – Helen spent quite some time lobbying me to even consider a PhD and helped me so intensely with my application. And there were moments where tears threatened at the back of my eyes, I was so overwhelmed at how lucky and excited I am to be able to spend the next 3-4 years on something I love so much. And how much I don’t want to waste any opportunities.

It’s a very strange feeling to be changing career tracks. And something I’ve been wrestling with for a while. I’ve been passionate about the environment since I was 14 or 15. When I first learned about global warming, and the large mammals under threat of extinction (elephants, cats and rhinos) and then the Biodiversity Act in Rio, I knew I wanted to work towards conservation. To making a *difference*. I was driven to act. I didn’t want to be on the sidelines watching the deterioration of the environment without at least trying to do something. And then my physics teacher found me a new degree at UWA – environmental engineering – which seemed to fit the bill. And that’s been my thing, what defined me, for a very long time.

It’s not that I feel like I’m betraying that. Well not necessarily. But I have been thinking about whether it feels like I’m giving in, or turning my back or … maybe it’s just that I’m sad to be moving on? Like, there’s nothing wrong with one door opening when one closes, but it’s still sad to be closing the room behind that door.

It’s not like I can’t still be active in conservation – there’s lots of other ways to work for a good cause.

And it’s also not unheard of to get burned out when your day job is something you’re passionate about but you very rarely get to win. And sure, part of my job was to fight the fight, if only for public record. I did have some small wins and worked towards one or two larger ones, and I have left some legacies by way of tiny tweaks to larger policies. But in all, I’m pretty jaded and cynical and some other stuff that’s mostly political and not for this medium. I shouldn’t really be there any more.

When I sat in that lecture theatre and later in the morning tea break talking to the other students about their PhDs in sustainability and I listened to their enthusiasm and passion to change the way things are, I wondered if I was doing the right thing? I wondered if this was some kind of cosmic sign about what I should be doing? I felt guilty, I guess.

I actually mulled it over for a while, until I realised that it *was* a sign, it was very *pointed* sign. That it was ok to hand over the baton to someone else, someone with the energy and enthusiasm to carry it the next round. And that in what I am doing now, I feel like I make a difference.