Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:
|
|
|
Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
I don’t want to knock any particular place in the world, but when it comes to dealing with matters of conservation, Las Vegas doesn’t come very close to the top of the list.
Here’s a city in the middle of the desert where water is consumed by the bucketload every second of the day. Wait, make that the truckload
[ Click here to read more ]
Hang on, wasn’t there supposed to be Warming?
Hands up all those who thought Global Warming was about to spell the end of the world? Okay, maybe not the end end, but a time when mankind was about to be drowned under rising seas, or fried to a frazzle by heat, or see their skin peel off through the sun burning through the hole in the ozone layer
[ Click here to read more ]
I’m not the greenest person on the planet, and I’m not even convinced that Global Warming is a reality – yet. (My suspicion is that we might wind up with the same nonsense that came out of the Millennium Bug.) However, I do keep up with the green issues, and am concerned about the state of things on this remarkable and lovely planet.
So fairly regularly from now on I’m going to write about green stuff on this blog (and probably elsewhere too), partly to keep my own focus on it, but also to try and figure out what (small) things I can do to help.
[ Click here to read more ]
One of the hardest jobs while we were travelling last year was hauling our luggage around. When we had everything with us, as we did coming home (naturally there was more than there had been on the way out), the luggage was so heavy we had to get a trolley to move everything along. Painful. And believe it or not, we’d left two boxes of stuff behind that was coming by sea. Don’t go away for six months at a time.
(Those boxes haven’t arrived yet, although I believe they should be here this Friday. Fortunately they didn’t arrive while we were in the middle of the chaos of putting down the carpet. )
I saw on a site discussing travel from the Cayman Islands the other day that the theft of baggage is huge even in that relatively small country. I must say we were fortunate in this respect, or perhaps, (as the writer of the article suggested) it was because none of our luggage looked like it was worth snaffling and investigating for potential goodies. The laptop travelled with us at all times, and apart from that we had very little else that was worth anyone stealing. Whoops, forgot my wife’s Ipod, which she wouldn’t have been impressed to have had filched. It also travelled as part of our hand luggage
[ Click here to read more ]
dinnertime.’
Yeah, right. That sounds like a delightful job.
But for the person getting their feet attended to, it’s a different ballgame. (Much more pleasant than going to the dentist, in general
[ Click here to read more ]
Sometimes you have to wonder at management books. In the last few decades they’ve been a niche – and a cliché – of their own. Many of them are just plain rubbish, books put together for the sake of another book to add to the management shelf. Some of them are very good, the work of people who’ve really done some research and investigation into what makes good management, and good companies.
And then there are books like Richard Farson’s Management of the Absurd.
Now, I’ll tell you front up: I haven’t read this. And most of the reviews I’ve seen of it are positive. The Melbourne Age’s Management blog calls it an absolute must-read. And so who am I to criticise
[ Click here to read more ]
Well, we have the first lot of carpet down in the downstairs part of the house, as of today, and have started to move some furniture back into place. Meanwhile, my dear wife encouraged her four-year-old grandson, who’s now living with us (with his mother) to start pulling the wallpaper off our middle bedroom. It wasn’t necessary, but she had to do it all the same. (Think she would have redecorated the entire house, given the chance.) He’s been happy to help and was even in there by himself tonight before tea, having a go at another strip. Fortunately it’s coming off very easily, which makes it rather enjoyable for him.
The other enjoyable thing is that the computer desk is no longer parked virtually in the doorway to our bedroom. Having to creep around it to get into bed has been a bit of a trial, let alone having to type at a peculiar angle, which is all that the space would allow. Now it’s back in the ‘office’ as it ought to be, and apart from refusing to connect to the Internet until it had had five attempts, it’s going fine. I don’t think it likes to be shifted around in its old age. I know the feeling of inconvenience.
So the work is nearly done. Only one more week and then we can start getting everything back into place. The two carpet-layers who were here today found that the job was going to take a lot longer than they had allowed for (or their boss had allowed for). They’re coming back tomorrow to carpet the stairs, which have only been underlaid at the moment. Once the stairs have their raiment on, we’ll be able to climb up and down them without catching our feet on the little nails that are set in place waiting for the carpet. They’re not painful, just annoying
[ Click here to read more ]
To those who’ve picked up on my post about the renovations we’ve been doing, which has caused me to be a bit less visible on this blog than usual, I’m happy to announce that all carpet in the house that needs to be uplifted has been uplifted. Only one room still has some goo on the floor that we need to clean up. Otherwise everything is ready for the new carpet to go down.
What a relief. Even though two rooms are completely empty at the moment and all their furniture and fittings are scattered around other rooms and in places where they wouldn’t normally be, it feels as though we might make it through to the finishing post.
I had my doubts a week or so ago, when I was just about ready to give up on it all. Of course, you can’t actually do that. Once you’ve committed yourself to having carpet laid, you’ve got to get on and do all the preparatory work. Nevertheless, even in spite of that it felt as though we wouldn’t get it all sorted – or perhaps more importantly, we wouldn’t have the energy to finish the task
[ Click here to read more ]
I’ve been negligent of my ongoing word game over the last fortnight. Hopefully those who’ve been keeping up with it will forgive me. (All two of them.)
Just to clarify: this is a post in which a word appears that's not entirely unusual, but perhaps not used in everyday speech. Sometimes the word is more obscure than not, sometimes it’s a fairly regular word – at least by my standards.
Your task, as the reader, is to be the first to tell me in a comment what you think today’s especial word is
[ Click here to read more ]
One of my jobs at work is researching social issues, from suicide to child abuse and everything in between. This side of things hasn’t got off the ground too much as far as I’m concerned, and I’m still working off data written up by the previous occupant of my chair.
Suicide seems to be one of the bigger issues we’re looking at, as well as the reasons why people commit suicide. These are many and varied, as you might imagine, and don’t make for positive reading. One of the reasons I don’t find listed very often in regard to the suicides of young men is that of being ‘dumped’ by their girlfriend. Yet, I know of three young men who committed suicide because of this. It seems illogical when you look at it from the outside because older people tend to think that there are plenty of fish in the sea, and being dumped by one person only means you’re likely to find someone else who suits you better. But the young man mind doesn’t seem to work like this.
Curiously it isn’t teenagers who use this as a reason for suicide but slightly older men in their early twenties. Maybe it’s just too much for their egos at that point. Again, looking at it objectively, it doesn’t seem likely, yet it happens
[ Click here to read more ]
Meant to say that it hasn’t been all work and no play. Between states of exhaustion I’ve managed to copy out two piano pieces that I came across during all our shifting. These were both written back in the mid-fifties, which makes them some fifty years old. They were given to me to play sometime in the early sixties, I guess, when I got to know the composer, a violinist. At that time he and I used to play quite a lot of violin/piano music.
The two pieces have been languishing in my house somewhere all this time, forgotten by me, and probably by the composer himself, who’s now in his 80s.
I put them onto Sibelius and gave him the original music and the printed out copies a couple of days ago. He was quite amazed, I think, to come across them again
[ Click here to read more ]
I’ve been out of circulation on the blog scene for a week or two because of major upheavals at our house. We’re carpeting the place and it’s taking us all our time trying to get the old carpet up and all the staples and nails and stuff out of the floor. Night after night and all weekend for several weeks in a row. On Waitangi Day, the national holiday, we spent all day working, and both of us were shot the next day.
On top of this, my daughter and her young son moved in upstairs (where we’d already got the carpeting and renovation done) and that meant moving stuff upstairs and getting it in the right places and so on.
Meanwhile downstairs is chaos, the sort of chaos that nearly drives you batty. Both of us have had our moments in regard to it. At the moment I’m sitting in my ‘office’ and it’s almost empty. Most of the stuff that normally resides in here is shifted into space where carpetting isn’t going to go – and there’s not much of that
[ Click here to read more ]
My wife used to work in a nursing home as a caregiver, and later on one of my daughters carried on the work. It’s tough and back-breaking (sometimes literally) and though both my wife and my daughter are good with people, they both found it demanding and tiring.
I had an aunt in England who went into a nursing home (one of the BUPA homes, in fact, a name that still strikes me as rather odd and uninviting), and because we were in New Zealand and she was in the UK, it was hard to gauge how she fared there. I remember ringing up more than once to see how she was going and having trouble trying to get anyone to understand me let alone find her. In fact, even when they did understand me they sometimes seemed to think I’d got the wrong place.
Nursing homes obviously vary a lot, and they’re not a place I’d like to wind up in. My mother occasionally said she’d go and live in one in her old age, but we wouldn’t have let her, (unless she became completely beyond our care). I’ve seen perfectly intelligent old people go into nursing homes and wind up going crazy with the lack of stimulation. Seeing a bunch of old people sitting around a large lounge doing nothing, the tv blaring away (or muted so that no one can hear it), and none of them able to move, doesn’t strike me as an ideal way to end your days
[ Click here to read more ]
More Posts
245 Posts dating from December 2006
Email Subscription
Receive e-mail notifications of new posts on this blog:
|
|
|
Read More
Add Comments
Comments (2)
