Thursday, July 19, 2018

Fired

I inadvertently got someone fired today.

There is construction work taking place adjacent to my office and a lot of tradies on site. One of them was smoking in a toilet cubicle this morning and filled the entire men's room with smoke.  I mentioned this to our School manager.

My intention was that our School manager would then speak to the construction manager who would then have a word with the tradies to inform them not to smoke in the toilet.

Well, things didn't go the way I expected.

Whilst sitting in my office, I heard the construction manager walk up to two Chinese tradies working outside my office demanding to know which one of them had been smoking in the toilet.

At first, each of the tradies said it wasn't them. The manager pressed on and was using all kinds of obscenities. Eventually, one of the tradies owned up to it.

He was asked to leave.

I felt really bad.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Sunny weekend

I made the most of the fine weather this weekend.

On Saturday, I took the dog on an epic walk. We first headed towards Port Melbourne. 

On the way, I spotted this beautiful wattle already in full bloom.
 Truffles and I stopped briefly to look at the Spirit of Tasmania before heading off to the beach for a run.

We then made our way to Albert Park and walked around the lake. According to the pedometer on my phone, we had walked twelve kilometres.

Today, Nathan and I went to Chinatown for lunch. We had intended to go for yum cha but all of the better restaurants were already full so we went to Shandong Mama instead.
 Tonight I made minestrone.













Sunday, July 8, 2018

Walking the dog

Truffles and I braved the cold yesterday and went for a nice walk. She was suitably rugged up—and so was I. We did about 10km in total, including a brief stop over at the Shrine of Remembrance.

Saturday, July 7, 2018

Adut Akech

I remember a couple of years ago, David Jones put out a fashion catalogue with this incredible model on the cover. It was a bold move. And I remember being struck by the beauty of the image.
The image, sadly, sparked controversy; a consumer complained to David Jones about the cover not being representative of Australia.

Well, the model at the centre of the controversy, Adut Akech, is Australian and—judging by her very busy schedule walking for the likes of Valentino and Chanel in Paris recently—has clearly been doing very well.



Sunday, July 1, 2018

Career change

I'm happy being an academic. I love the balance of teaching and research. I love the academic freedom and the flexibility I have in terms of my work time. At the same time, I hope I'd be brave enough to be able to make the switch to something else if the job no longer excites me.

I was at a birthday dinner for a friend last night and started chatting to someone I hadn't met before. I found out that he had previously worked in a circus, been a dancer in a night club, and is now working for a bank. That's quite a diverse career path!