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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.
Friends of ours have their own vineyard. They took it up late in their careers, and though they're not quite at the retirement stage, it's probably something they'll continue to work on once they've finished their 'normal' jobs.
To me it seems quite a commitment, because it's two or three hours up country from Dunedin, and means they have to stay away from home overnight to do any work on it - work which mostly takes place at the weekends these days. Admittedly they've got a crib (holiday home for those who don't speak the vernacular) near the vineyard (about 15 kms or so) but they're also in the process of building a house here in town, so they're obviously not planning on moving up near the vineyard in a hurry.
They've already had a harvest off the vineyard, and have sold some grapes to a company that will bottle on their behalf. Apparently we might sample some of this before Christmas. Other grapes have gone to a company that doesn't deal in private bottling, so their grapes become part of a larger production line, as far as I can make out
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I went on a ‘retreat’ for the first three days of this week, plus from tea-time on Sunday and breakfast on Thursday. A very laid back retreat, since there was no programme, no agenda, no nothing that you had to do except eat meals at the times they appeared. And the meals were great, so everybody appeared for those.
I've left my notes about the retreat at work, so I’ll talk more about the place itself at some later point, but I just want to comment on this style of retreat for the moment. For me, the prospect of three plus days of being able to do just what I want was rather scary. The days seemed to stretch out almost interminably in front of me. Sure, I had books to read (and read two and a half of them) and I could do some writing – did a mockup of the Wikipedia
entry for me as a bit of a laugh – and I could go for walks (and did) and I could spend some time thinking about God and praying. But I still felt the need of some sort of extra input. Probably if there’d been a program I would have rebelled against it. You just can’t please some people.
Anyway, it was an interesting experience, but I’m not sure that in spite of all the extra sleeping I did (popped back into bed on several occasions!) I actually came home refreshed. I got some sort of half-pie cold while away, which is still floating around. It’s making me feel tired, but hasn’t really got the feel of a full-blown cold about it somehow
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The groin pain I mentioned the other day is still niggling, though not seriously. It’s a bit of a puzzle as to what’s going on, but at present I’m just having to live with it. The worse thing about it is that it makes me feel just enough under the weather not to be able to get on with normal things. Unless I really put my mind to it! (And there’s been no news from the urology department; apparently speed in reporting back is not one of their assets.)
Anyway, it’s been a scorcher of a day here, the sort of day that makes you remember what summer is all about, but so hot that you wouldn’t really want to live with it day in and day out – at least we Dunedinites probably wouldn’t. We like our weather a little less bright and burning.
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Maybe if I lived in the States, or Australia, I'd have had health insurance. But being a New Zealander by residence, health insurance is something I don't think about. Like a good number of other people in the country.
So whatever happens with prostate thing - yes, I know it's bcome the almost total focus of this blog, and is likely to remain so for a while - I'm going to have to rely on the health system to look after me. Which it has done pretty well so far.
My latest blood test was up another point on the PSA, which isn't good. So when I went to see the doctor again this week - on a matter not related to the prostate, as far as I can tell - she said, it looks as though getting the biopsy done is the best thing. The wisest thing, in fact
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Without wishing to harp on about the prostate business I’ve been discussing over the last couple of weeks, I’m going to mention it again. This time, hopefully, from a more positive viewpoint.
Nothing has so far changed on the prostate side, except that the latest blood test, done last Wednesday, showed that the PSA level had risen yet again, to 11.something.
Anyway, some time this week I came to the conclusion that focusing on the future from a negative point of view wasn’t the way to go. Obvious, really, but sometimes it takes a bit of getting to such a point
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Just read an interesting article in the NZ Management magazine. It's written both for employers and employees and relates to the using of the Internet during working hours. Most contracts now have a clause written into them saying that reasonable use of the Internet (if it's part of a person's job) is allowable, but what is 'reasonable' may depend on viewpoint.
A bigger issue, which the article deals with, is that of abusing your boss or fellow-workers on your blog, or on a social network site such as Bebo, Facebook, or MySpace.
It's okay to hold opinions about bosses and fellow employees, but once you start publishing them online, you're putting yourself in line for dismissal, if what you say is derogatory, libellous, or inflammatory. And what a judge thinks any of those might be might depend on how serious he or she considers the effect of the writing
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I mentioned the other day that I’d felt I’d been suffering a bit from stress, probably related to the prostate business. Last Friday I made an appointment to see my doctor and today I went and saw her. I wasn’t too worried about the stress stuff; the more I thought about it the more it seemed to be a reaction to concerns I’d had after my visit to the hospital last Tuesday, and the urologist saying the word, ‘cancer’, a number of times.
Basically I just wanted today to sit down with the doctor and talk the whole thing over, get some perspective on it. I did that: asked questions, got answers – where she could give them – and was taken seriously and listened to, which is always a plus. Don’t know that I learned anything new. Had a number of things confirmed and listened again to some of the more unpleasant factors that might be involved at some point
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If you ever go to South America, it’s essential to have travel insurance.
One of my bosses, who worked in Peru and Ecuador for some 25 years as a missionary, was telling me some hair-raising stories about health care over there. The conversation had begun because a cousin of mine had told me he and his family are moving to Canada in due course, as New Zealand is becoming a ‘third world country.’ My boss scoffed at the idea – and that’s when the stories about health and hospitals and doctors in South America began.
Quite apart from the fact that paying heavily for any health care is a requirement there, and usually up front, (even if you’re dying), the lack of compassion on the part of most doctors and nurses is another fact of life. Okay, you may find the odd nurse or doctor here in NZ who doesn’t give a stuff about you, but in general they at least act as if they’re compassionate
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Having found that on Wednesday I’d kind of come to grips with the idea that I was going to have to have a biopsy on my prostate at some time in the near future, I was feeling mostly normal again. Thursday, however, I woke up with a pain in my side, sort of around the upper ribs, and my upper back seemed tight, as though it was being compressed slightly. And then my neck got in on the act and complained of being stiff and irritated.
I half-jokingly said at work that it was probably ‘third-day stress’, a reaction to the news I’d had on the Tuesday. On Friday morning it was still there and then cleared up fairly quickly. Friday evening the neck thing returned, and hasn’t really gone away entirely.
It may well be stress. Who knows. It might be a bit of a bug. Let’s hope it clears up anyway; it’s annoying
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366 Posts dating from December 2006
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