An afternoon and a day in the Dandenongs at a corporate retreat. Didn’t even blink as I typed that. Academic, university staff member and employee, primarily conceive of myself as a researcher educator, but this was a corporate retreat. No other name to describe it. All about redesigning all the undergraduate programs in the school to shift to a larger, studio or lab based model for 50% of delivery. On the surface it is a tsunami of change, underneath, for some not so much – there are many ways of dragging your feet, doing ‘no’ while saying ‘yes’ and creatively shoehorning what you have always done into a new model so that you can keep on doing what you’ve always done. The positive, in 12 months the entire academic middle management of the school has moved from scepticism and cynicism to engagement and action. It’s a big achievement.

Still, being cooped up for nearly two days gets claustrophobic. It isn’t like a conference where everyone there has some sort of academic interest in common, here where all just middle managers with some senior management shifting from ideas to implementation under the enormous cumbersome umbrella of three federal compliance regimes and the university’s own systems to boot. Best not to dwell there. At least for me. If you really like that sort of work you should be looking for work in a university as if you like that sort of work there’s a rich career waiting for you – seriously – because those who are good at it are in very thin supply (our last two school managers we have hired internationally, the first lasted 18 months before being poached by higher up). This is sort of ironic, we’ve apparently been unable to employ a Dean, internationally, on several occasions, yet can find and deliver school managers from the other side of the planet. I digress.

Home quite the worn out one. And tomorrow I do a similar repeat of being locked up all day but this time it is the now traditional Honours Research Day out at Ceres. We book a room, head off campus, and every honours student makes a five minute very highly structured presentation about where they’re up to. There is feedback from everybody else, they provide the lunch, and it’s a great way to cap the end of semester one, set sail for semester two (and the finish), and to see just how far everyone has come. While I am tired, and now horribly behind on two book chapters and a presentation I didn’t realise I had consented to next Monday in Sydney I’m really looking forward to the day. They are in this together, the strict formula we use ‘flattens’ things to iron out peaks and valleys, and they are all wrestling with the same issues and concerns as new researchers. So they have a great sense of themselves as a cohort and how they regard, address, and help each other. It really makes for a good time of it. Unfortunately, two of the honours teaching staff can’t make it, which is going to complicate the day in terms of feedback and intensity, but I’m thinking of some other things there that should help too. And by then it will be Thursday, the end of the week well and truly in sight and barely a smick done on the list of what I sort of need to try to progress along. It does feel a bit intense, but everything is moving along, in its own way, which isn’t so very bad. Just need to finish some things so that you have the experience of things going out, and not just coming in – or toward you.

A day where I am working from home. Girded the desk, visions of immense productivity, agency, and action. And perhaps a bike ride to punctuate the day (no idea about the legal implications of working from home, then going for a ride that isn’t a commute, and if I have an accident, what sort of legal tangle that might produce?). Walked smallest child to school (all a flutter as today there’s a bustripexcursiontoellendalefarm), then home. Even smaller child who Ms A looks after on a Wednesday has arrived. Then there’s the dog wanting attention. Then the email. Then I’d better just catch up some news just to ease into the rhythm of the day. Oh, that’s right, I have to answer that stuff today don’t I. And the even smaller child wants to serve me play dough biscuits she’s been making. Even smaller child and Ms A depart, for music? And silence descends. Well, except for the burble of the aquarium with Blackie and Whitie in the study which is Small Child’s but she didn’t want all that noise in her room did she? Right, I have stuff that needs writing. So a really decent intense one pomodoro of writing. Then another near hour of email and filling in forms. And now I realise I don’t really have the time to go for that ride (and gee, look how windy it’s got). So perhaps it is back to trying to catch up (and doing some of those things I really don’t want to do but they’ve been on the to do list for, let’s face it, over three weeks now, so surely with no interruptions I really better get on and do them, even though they simply feel utterly unproductive). On the other hand there were a couple of passages in there this morning where I ticked a few boxes and moved a few things along. You need to be able to see that, because let’s face it, it is and will always be just swamp.

Flickr, a terabyte for all, free. Fuck me. I assume this is the price to leverage a strong platform back into a signature position in the now Facebook come Instragram dominated photo field?

My MacBook Pro has been intermittently having a screen freeze. Well, not quite, it freezes and then splits the screen as if it has two displays. The cursor still moves in time with my cursing, but nothing is clickable and a hard reboot follows. Things have been corrupted. So I log the job. The problem gets worse so that every time I launch Keynote it happens (ah I think, maybe it is something about sending some signal out?). No IT person arrives after three days so I ring to ‘escalate’ the job. Prompt service. Cannot, no matter what I do, make it happen. He believes me (a ha), but since I can’t replicate it can’t do anything. So now, I’m back here trying to work, with this horrible anxiety that as I open a key file the beastie will do its freezing dance and I’ll lose something that actually matters.

So, am making sure things well backed up, keeping duplicates on the local drive as well of the important stuff, and getting used to anxiety as a simple condition. If it happens again, I’ll just genius bar the thing, which is a nice option given we have three year AppleCare with these things.

Advantages of moving to leafy outer north eastern suburb.

• quiet
• native birds
• trees
• gum trees
• an experience of a different space
• paddocks
• kangaroos
• lizards
• a really good ride to work on my bike
• nearness of real bush

Disadvantages

• distance to the city
• distance to some of my children
• time spent in car ferrying said children to sport/friends/events
• cost of the train
• a really hard ride to work on my bike
• how far away you feel when something goes wrong
• distance to capital A art

Finally, it’s been the weekend where the list of very important tasks that were to be done Friday got shifted to the weekend when Friday ran out of time, yet have not been done because the family matters. On the other hand I’m now uploading 670MB of iBook for a project that I can thankfully say is now completed. Well, once the 4 hour upload is done…