A Week at the Creek

Well, back in Cairns after 10 days in SE QLD. After Easter, I jumped straight down to Bris for three days working out of the Brisbane office, then out for a week's training session at Murphy's Creek.


The firm has bought a 40 acre property down by the creek, and has set it up as an offsite "school" with twin-share accommodation. So myself and 11 other staff converged on the place for a week to live out there and learn. It was actually a really good week, based on Stephen Covey's book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". The first two days were spent with a facilitator from Franklin-Covey taking us through the proper 7 Habits training, and the last three focussed on where and how we apply these habits in our work as a legal practice. I quite enjoy personal development activities, so I had a great week.


Long days, however, with things kicking off at 7am and having planned activities through till 7-8 at night every night, with the vast majority of the days spent on dodgy plastic chairs in front of a projector and whiteboard. Needless to say, I was very glad to come home. I was lucky to go on the same course as two other people from our office here that I get on really well with, which made things a lot easier. The groups are drawn randomly from all staff Australia-wide, to allow people to mix and get to know one another. I've got some photos of the property, but have been too busy to upload them yet - will get them up ASAP - it's a lovely spot!


Being down in Bris for the few days before gave me a chance to catch up with everyone again, which was great. I stayed with Jamie, as usual, and really appreciate having somewhere to stay that's handy to transport, yet more friendly than sitting in a hotel room by myself. Hope I haven't outstayed my welcome with the amount of time I've spent there lately! On the Friday night Jamie and I headed over to Paul and Nehara's place for a BBQ dinner, and to talk about their upcoming wedding. We have heaps of stuff to organise, which reminds me that I need to ring Derrick back at some stage! I stayed at their place Friday night so that we could head down Saturday morning and get measured and fitted for our suits for their big day - another checkbox ticked off!


Sunday Jamie and I made our (belated, after Matt spent all morning reading a book) way to Toowoomba, and spent the afternoon with Mum & Dad, Grant & Sam, and the kids. Always fun, even if it is mayhem. Grant and Sam are planning a trip up here soon, so will be great to see them here, especially since Jess has missed out on these last few trips down, and misses the kids terribly.


After the week at the creek had finished, Dad came down and picked me up, and Mum, Dad and I drove down to Jamie's - saving me from the pre-organised shuttle bus ride. Main Roads had decided, in their infinite wisdom, to close the highway at Blacksoil at 5pm on a Friday afternoon to re-surface the road. Everyone was being directed off an exit, around a roundabout, then back down onto the highway past the roadworks. A stretch of road that normally takes 5 mins caught us for over half an hour as we crawled along. Still, it could have been worse, and since my flight was the following day, I wasn't stressed by the delay. After a quick trip to the airport on Saturday, and I was buzzing back home.

All in all, a good 10 days away, but I think I'll try in future to so shorter trips - the 10 days just left me drained and spent by the time I made it back, which probably goes a long way to explain why I've had the flu for the past few days. Everyone's telling me it's swine flu, so hopefully they'll quarantine me from work. that'd be nice!

Photos are now online!

2009-04-18, Mum, Dad, Grant & Sam & Kids

2009-04-20, Tiddalac

Busy Busy!

I know - I'm slack - no updates this month yet. Have we been sitting around slacking off then? Not likely!

Truth is, we've been flat out, both at work, and at home. Some of the things we've done:

An impromptu week in Bris for Matt. The call came late one Friday afternoon, so I booked my tickets and jumped on the plane on Monday morning. Was a good week, both work and personally. The main reason the whole team was assembled was a day offsite to speak with the CEO about the current issues he sees in the firm, and how he wants IT to come up with some ideas. I really enjoy these days, as it gives you a window into the high-level operations of the firm, and the various challenges that the board and management team are facing. I'm confident that we can come up with a plan to address the concerns that were raised on the day, and as an upside, it will have very significant benefits in pretty much every other area of the firm as well, not just the main legal practice.

Personally, it was great to catch up with the family, with Dad and Mum coming down from Toowoomba one evening with Sam & the kids, and Grant coming up from his block TAFE at Logan. We had a great time playing with the kids - little Fraser is 7 months old now, and sitting up and laughing and just being very interactive. He's almost crawling - in fact I'd be surprised if he's not already by the time I write this. Lilly came down to the train station to meet Jamie and I on our way home from work, and skipped all the way home. Jesse was quite taken with his San Francisco cable car toy we bought back, even to the extent of foregoing a trip in the Uncle Jamie's car with Granddad so he could stay and play. I've got the photos at home, just haven't had a chance to upload them.

Thanks go to Jamie for letting me crash at his place with no notice, and for posting me my camera and other stuff that I forgot and left behind (which is the other reason for a lack of photos lately!). Also was great to catch up with Paul and Scotty and have a few pints of rum at O'Malleys, as is our custom.

Home - New Toilet. Yup - sounds pretty boring, but in reality, is very, very exciting. Our old toilet:

• Would not flush properly. 9 times out of 10, you'd need to hold the flush button down for 30 seconds to get all the water out of it. If you just pressed it in, it would stop flushing as soon as you took your finger off it.

• Would not half-flush at all. See above.

• Would run constantly. No matter what we did, we couldn't get it to seal shut properly. So all day and night it would run, and every 5 mins would make a SHHHHHH noise as it refilled the cistern. Some times it was worse than others, depending on how the last flush went - sometimes it would flush constantly until you thumped it to stop it.

• Was very, very loud. The above wouldn't have been a problem if it was quiet. But it was loud enough to startle you awake if you were sleeping in our bedroom, at the other end of the house. No joke on this one!

• Would leak. Nothing nasty - just the water feed into the cistern would drip if the tap wasn't in EXACTLY the right position.

Our new cistern is just a relatively cheap one, but it's a good brand, and should last us a while. I had my eye on a nice vitreous china cistern, but it was twice the price, and after all, it's not exactly something that you have on display, is it?

The good news is that it's quiet, it's quick to refill, and both the half and full flush buttons actually work! And it's not constantly wasting water on us. Amazing how something so little can just make your life so much less stressful!

And anyway, isn't it pretty!

(Answer - no - it's not pretty, it's just a toilet)

Family - Brendan's Wedding. Jess' brother is getting married in 5 days on Easter Sunday. So there's been a bit of arranging around that. We haven't had much to do at all, really, but since the Impretzel is going to be one of their wedding cars I needed to give it a good detail on the weekend. Also, I'll be videoing everything, so have had to ensure that my tripod has been dug out, and that I'm a bit more familiar with the new digital camcorder.

Home - Trees. - Photos coming soon to a blog near you!

Home - Sinkhole. - As above!

Bris again in a week's time. - A couple of days after Easter, I'm heading back down to Bris for a few days working in the Bris office, then a week of offsite training at Murphy's Creek, near Toowoomba. Have planned to dedicate some time during the half-week I'm in Bris to get together with Paul and go over some planning for his wedding to Nehara in August. Should be a great day, but since I've been appointed Second Best Man ('cause let's face it, if I was the Best man, surely the girl would be marrying me?), we have more pressing things to arrange, like the Bucks party and other such alcohol-fuelled adventures. On my way to Murphy's creek, I hope to be able to call in on Grant and Sam and spend the morning with the kids again. Should be a blast!

General Work Work. Even since we returned from our holiday (8 weeks ago now), I've worked every weekend. Mostly just either a single day, or two half-days, but it really gets you down not having any time to "switch off" and get away from a computer. The week after I returned, we had our email system completely destroy itself one weekend, which necessitated a couple of big, BIG days to get it back up and running. On top of all this, we've had a lot of small after-hours maintenance stuff that's been needed to be done at night through the week, which usually counts for a couple of hours each week night. So all strung together, it's left me feeling very run down and just generally sick of work. But hey - what's new there? And it's probably a better situation than what a lot of other people are facing, with not enough work to go around.

House - Pool and shed quotes. I'll just leave that one there.

Stay tuned - more to come soon! Including the photos from the West Coast portion of our holiday!