The Last of the Browns...

Dear old Aunty Kath passed away a few days ago. She was 91. I heard from Ma, who heard from cousin Libby.

She was the last of the Browns in my dad's generation. Apparently when I was a toddler I used to call her Kakky, because I struggled to say Kath. My sister used that name for her from then onwards. I remember her as kind, funny and warm. She was very close with my dad.

In fact her first husband, who we still refer to as Uncle John, was my dad's best friend - they did everything together. Mum actually has a photo on her fridge of a young Dad and Uncle John hunting in British North Borneo of all places, which is where my lovely wife was born. Haha, yeah, Dad always used to tell stories about a place called Jesselton, which was the colonial capital there in those days. I knew my wife was born in the state capital of Sabah, a city called Kota Kinabalu. What I did not realise until quite recently was that these two places were one and the same - the name changed when Malaysia became independent. It's funny how life throws the occasional coincidence into the mix sometimes.

Anyway, Uncle John and Dad were in a terrible car accident when I was a toddler. Dad suffered a broken hip, which plagued him for the rest of his days (he did have it replaced eventually). Unfortunately, Uncle John didn't make it. Uncle John was a funny guy. 

That is me under a X'mas tree as a teeny tiny. I don't know if it was that particular year or another one, but the story still goes around that one year, at John and Kath's house, where we were all going to celebrate, there were a lot of presents under the tree. Uncle John told me they were all for me, which as you may imagine, got my toddler hopes up well and truly! Apparently I was terribly disappointed when most of my presents were given to other people on the day!

Anyway. So Aunty Kath remarried eventually, to a fellow named Jack. He was ok, my memory tells me, but the family never warmed to him the way they did with John. He and Aunty Kath grew old together, and he passed some years ago. She had been living close to Libby since then. I think the last time I saw her was when she came to visit Dad in his last years, not sure of exact date. Judging by the photo, Uncle Bob was there at the time too.

As I was looking for this photo, I found another one of my parents with Aunty Kath, back either at or before the time I was born.

They all look young, and pretty cool, and pretty happy with life. That was their hey-day. Now, none of that generation remain. It is up to the next one, me being part of it, to make the Brown name live on. Of course it is such a common surname, it won't ever die out, but for our particular family, we have six Brown males and two females, plus those who are descendants of Kath, Bob, Ted and others. I think we'll be good for a while yet!

So farewell Aunty Kath. Thanks for always being a loving and lovely person, I will always have good memories of you. May you rest in peace.

Productivity!

 

Wow! This morning I had such an epiphany! I have been such a struggle-puss with blog-writing for such a long time - I fail to do any in the evenings, I fail to do any on the weekends, and generally I don't even do any in my holidays. It has frustrated me, as I love my blog and want to really make it my memoirs so-to-speak, and something for my kids to remember me by when I am gone.

So this morning I met with one of my colleagues for a breakfast meeting. Me being me, I arrived an hour early, and planned to use this time to chill, catch up on emails, and just enjoy the ambience. My colleague being him, he was 15 minutes late, so I had a lot of time to myself. After getting set-up with my laptop and dealing with an email or two, I opened my blog, and decided to finish off a draft post. I did it easy, and then did another, and then another, and was amazed at how prolific I was being, and how well the words were coming to me.

It is not the first time that I have noticed that I can be so productive, when I eliminate other distractions. In the office my productivity is maddening. I flit from task to task, generally with half a dozen or more happening at once. I do get there, but OMG it is so disorganised and chaotic. You might think that in a café environment, distractions would be the order of the day, but I am able to put it all to the side and just focus. Possibly because I can't get up and do other things and also because there is not enough space to spread out and get other bits of work info out and into my thinking. In any event, whatever the reason, this morning I smashed out the blog posts, and I was thrilled about it!

Of course, for this experimental result to be turned into scientific dogma, the results need to be repeatable. So I am going to try this again, and soon. I don't mind Essen, but the owner does have a chip on his shoulder. That may be unfair, and it was quiet, which probably helped. So I may go back, but in my mind, there are likely better places to try. I am keen to give this experiment another go soon. Watch this space...

B and Me

Hi Daniel,

I hope you are in a better frame of mind now. If you remember, some time ago you asked me to wake you up early every morning, which I was happy to do. For a while, you seemed to enjoy being up early, and I always like it when you're in a positive frame of mind. 

But lately, it seems that you are grumpy and in a negative frame of mind when I wake you up. I don't know why that is, only you can know. All I know is that I don't enjoy it. So I wanted to let you know that I am going to give you one more chance tomorrow. If you wake up and can decide to be in a good mood, then I will happily continue to wake you. If you wake up grumpy again, tomorrow will be the last time I wake you in the morning, and you will have to wake up by yourself in future.

That is not me being mean, that is me not wanting to be part of negative behaviour. I encourage you to see this as an opportunity to choose positive over negative. I know you don't believe it, but you have the power to choose how you feel. What I don't think you understand is, whatever you choose, it impacts everyone around you. Choose positive, and we all can enjoy a happy and easy morning. Choose negative, and it is hard for those around you, because we all have to be careful what we say, and the bad mood makes it uncomfortable.

Daniel I love you very much, and I only want good things for you. But I can't choose all those good things for you. Many of them, like waking up in a positive frame of mind, you have to choose yourself. I hope you will choose well tomorrow. Have a good day and see you tonight. Love Dada.

Going C.U.

Only wifey will know what that means.

But going C.U. is exactly what I did, back in June, at the bloody board meeting to present the F24 budget no less. I had given my presentation, which was pretty well received I might add, we had had lunch, and I was on my way back to the board room. What happened was I took a step, caught my foot in the plush carpet, and went down. Unfortunately I landed with all my weight on the ball of my left palm, and that force drove up into my elbow joint, cracking it. You can see the small wedge on the upper left of the ball in the x-ray.

Far out if frigging hurt too. We were at the Moama bowls club, and it was packed. Because it was kind of formal, I wore my only proper pants, which are a bit baggy. Combine that with my slip on shoes and the plush carpet, with a healthy dose of my klutzy nature thrown in for good measure, and down I went. You'd think, in the environment of the bowlo, that it would be someone like me, helping up a poor old lady who had gone C.U. But oh no, it was two of them who ended up hauling my sorry arse back to its feet!

Anyway. I went back to the board room, and sat there in a lot of pain. After the rest re-converged, I had to excuse myself and go to the ER. In due course I got x-rayed and the break was confirmed. I had a half-cast to stabilise my arm, and spent the next month treating it very gingerly. 

It is not my first rodeo either. In the past I have been in hospital for a badly broken nose, thanks to 1) Joe De something or other being a fuckwit and 2) me being a dumb-ass and putting my head where the ball was, when said f-wit was punching it. Smashed my nose, and I needed surgery to repair it. 

Around the same time in life - Cobram High - I also knocked all my bottom teeth at 90 degrees, so pretty much broken, when I tackled some very big kid in British Bulldogs, and went down like a sack of shit with him, smashing my chin into his shoulder. The dentist simply pushed - very forcibly so - my teeth back into place. OMG it felt like my skull was going to break in half.

But wait, we're not over yet, not by a long shot! My first known break was my collarbone, back in the Singapore days at about the age of 14 or 15. I was riding my pushbike, and tried to go over a speed bump. Unfortunately, instead of sailing over it, I hit it and stopped. Well, my bike stopped, I kept going - over the handlebars and onto my shoulder, breaking the bone. Being the bone it is, no cast was possible, so I wandered around in a sling for a few weeks.

The last one may have actually happened not long before the collarbone, but for some reason I thought it was after. Again, riding a bike, I was going like a shower of shit, when my foot slipped off the pedal. What happened then was my poor toe stubbed into the bitumen at speed, and jammed. I never got it diagnosed, but it hurt for weeks after, so I am pretty sure it broke. This incident is why I am currently telling my boy Daniel not to wear thongs when riding his new bike!

Actually, I am telling this out of order in other ways too. I just reminded myself of something. When I was getting the x-ray on my arm recently, the doctor asked me about when I broke my wrist. I'm like, WTF? That never happened Doc! He showed me, and clearly it did, the evidence remains. So I am thinking that when I went over the handlebars, I must have gone down on my wrist as well as my shoulder, and broken both at the same time. The collarbone was diagnosed, but the wrist was not. Nevertheless, the sling supported both, so I healed never knowing I had broken two bones in the incident!

I think that covers it. I have been punched a couple of times in my life that I suspect broke my nose again too, but let's not worry about those too much. I may tell the stories at another time - one about my brief foray into bullying, that deserved the punch, and another about the end of my first marriage, which did not. 

The Catastrophiser

You know what? Sometimes that can be me. This week I have had a dark cloud above my head for much of it. Driven by our poor July results at work, which I own, and I do feel reflect on me somewhat. Look I know I'm not perfect. I know I fuck the dog a bit, I know I don't go hard for each and every of my 60 hours in a week. But I am constantly working, constantly thinking about work. I work to some degree, every single day. So when we were $2.4m behind budget in the first month of F24, I wore that, and I wore it hard. I had, and still have, given myself until the end of Q1 to turn this around. If not I am going to resign. 

Sometimes when things are not going well, I have what I call catastrophic thoughts. I have noticed this tends to be more of an issue when I am alone. For instance I avoided people this week, until I couldn't any longer. On Monday I had my eyes checked and bloods done, then hit the road to Leeton. We had the weekly GMT on Zoom, which I did from my unit for the sake of expediency - at least that was my message. The truth was I had no interest in going to the office. On Tuesday morning I did go into the office, and sort of perched around the place, as I don't have my own room. My team and I caught up briefly, then they had a meeting. I took that opportunity to hightail it out of there and come back to my unit in town. 

Later that week it improved, and I noticed that spending time with people helped. I have since observed similar situations crop up a few times - mostly at Milbrae, but not all. I just have this constant feeling of being overwhelmed, and not wanting to deal with some things. Last week I got an irate call from one of my reports, regarding another team member. He had some grounds for being grumpy, but could have and should have handled it a lot more professionally. Instead he vented and threatened to leave, again. I really struggled with that. I enjoy interactions with people, even on difficult topics, when we're all engaged and behaving properly. But people who don't make it bloody hard for me. It essentially ruined the rest of my week.

Of course, that is but a symptom at the moment. Normally one such event would not throw me off for days, but such is my current fragile state of mind. I am also quietly shitty that I got a poor pay rise this year, only 2.5%. Ok, so I am paid well to begin with, but it's what this represents that annoys me. As in, only rewards for the bottom line, not so much for the effort in managing a massive and difficult job.

Yesterday - and apologies, as usual this post is spanning some days - I had another revelation. I know I am prone to self-destructive behaviour from time to time, be it actual or mental, and I have sometimes wondered if the behaviour begets my state of mind, or if my state of mind begets the behaviour. In any event, after reaching rock bottom earlier this week, I have felt a little better, and am determined to do better. Not so much in terms of work performance, but in terms of looking after myself, making good decisions, and loving my family. I am utterly determined to do all those things. Whether or not that means a change of scenery and job is required remains to be seen, but I do have a sense of calm that I know how I need to manage myself for once.