About flat personal battery, project silver lining, departures and arrivals and XMAS plans

And another big delay. It seems Christmas season is busy this side of the globe also, have had about minus 40 hours of time for myself which has resulted in zero blog posts and flat personal battery. I realized this the hard way on Saturday; I was so tired I was hardly able to eat, all pale face and quiet and had no interest to do anything but to sit in quiet and cry. I think I reached the thing called Transfer-burnout that Marijke mentioned when a while ago I asked her if she ever run tired of all the fast forward life and new faces and I recall the answer was yes. You do run tired if you don’t realize to stop every now and then and take enough time for yourself. *Breathe* So on Saturday night at Punjabi Palace forcing my self to eat and thinking back the past months it wasn’t a surprise I felt exhausted as I hadn’t had a quiet night in 2 months or so and I am very much a person who cannot live by calendar and have every minute booked. I said out loud I needed more me-time, silent time, do what ever you like time, go for a long walk time, have overdose of coffee at balcony whilst reading Hesarin Kuukausiliite time, wearing pyjamas all day if feeling like it time, time stopping time, reflecting time, blog writing time, reading a book  in the middle of the day time, yoga time, selfish time only for myself I mean. Another Big Ahaa for the power of lost appetite and saying things out loud. So all determined the next morning I didn’t have alarm on, went for a long morning walk as I felt too tired to run and gave myself a permission to take it easy if my body says so, listened Jenni Vartiainen Seili and smiled and cried in turns, had a looooong brekkie at my balcony with good coffee and rye bread and saw the world already with brighter eyes. I like me. I like me time. Like like. But still at times it amazes me how darn difficult it is to recognise the early signs of running tired and act on it. How easily I am thinking that tiredness is caused by something like flu, antibiotics or one night bad sleep and not admitting it’s me I need to blame. How difficult it is to wind down and listen to yourself and respect what you hear. Respect the fact that building a life here and lack of comfort zone sucks the energy and needing a friend to spell it out to me and convince that I am not crazy or sick but burned out instead. How easily I forget the basic lesson of *Breathe* although I have it hanging in my necklace almost every day. How stupid it is to go as far as loosing my appetite which is a definite sign of things being not ok (excluding the feeling of being madly, crazy in love and willing to jump to a dwell for the sake of that some one…not good either in that crazy sense I have learned). Bang bang bang and the head is against the wall again and not meaning the bed board here. Phuuuh. Anyways I think the 6 month milestone I am about to reach soon is a proper point to stop running and start walking. Only kids around 3-6 years are capable of having ‘run’ as their default setting and still keep their energy up. Walking is not for old or weak people but perfectly fine method to go forward in life. I am not old or weak but 31 years old and tired. Flat battery cuts you out.  So to Santa’s wish list I could add a rainy weekend when you cannot go out but must spend the day in bed instead. But only one or two rainy weekends as the Queenslanders for sure remind you about the consequences of excessive rain. No floods thank you either.

You got my point, past few weeks have been fairly busy. Thinking back a LOT has happened: celebrating Marijke’s Bday at Ortiga (a beautiful modern fine-dining tapas restaurant with excellent service and cute waiter whose number M got with the bill, hih), Moms last weekend here with dinners, west end market and enjoying the city, sending mom back home, workshopping at Wollongong, Independence day (not anything specific happening here but I was of course thinking a lot about people and life back home) dad and Tarja arriving, eating out and showing them places, getting sick and spending early morning hours at hospital emergency (nothing serious but still something I wouldn’t like to experience again), antibiotics that kill anything smaller than a squirrel,  week of workshopping at Emerald and Dysart with 400 km of driving each day on top of full on work day and lots of little insects in my room and ugly frogs outside my room door resulting in poor sleep, Jazz concert at Kangaroo Point, project Christmas party, Accenture Christmas BBQ, friends BBQ, skyping with little people, catching up with friends and the list goes on and on and on. And I still wonder why I am a bit low on energy? *Superwoman* *Catwoman* *Princess Leia* *Ms HB* *and other female super heroes*

On the silver lining although I mostly dislike being on the road I’ve also enjoyed the part of bonding with my project team members and finding “my people” who are on the same page, fun and easy to get along with. The bonding happens easily in the middle of nowhere, you share flights, cars, dinners and breakfasts and therefore have heaps of time to catch up also on the personal note. I have missed it since I left my last project in Finland, the feeling of being at home at work, having people to talk to and mixing the line between work and personal life, which I tend to do where ever I am. I cannot live long in a small talk environment but need those trusted people who are interested about the real stuff…to whom I can say “this smile is fake, I’ve had a really fucked up morning and would need a large long black in good company” and they say ok let’s go. At the moment my key driver to stay with this project are the people…don’t care that much about massive world scale roll-outs but more so about the variety of talented people who I can look up to both professionally and personally. And I am especially liking the soft side of my colleagues as they are people who have the patience to explain complicated stuff that I don’t get, people who are positive no matter what happens, people who act as my living dictionary and make me laugh, people who wink an eye for me at a workshop to reassure I’ve done well and ticked the box, people who are so excited about mining and this project that I almost feel guilty for not doing so, people who cover all the corners before a workshop to make sure it runs like water downhill, people who can be relaxed even if half of the attendees of a workshop cancel on a last minute, people who seriously try to focus on work during project flow time (4 hours period twice a week dedicated to work on your deliverables and any calls, meetings or even replying to emails is forbidden) although everyone else around is just joking. So no matter how much I dislike in-the-middle-of-nowhere these people make it worthwhile, the project is getting under my skin  :)  Yet to be seen if it is enough to carry me in one piece to November 2012, seems like a commitment for life at the moment. How about wrapping up 2011 first?

Ok, back to the happenings of the past two weeks.  So I sent Mom home December 5^th after a great and eventful month. She had a beautiful and relaxing holiday, got up to speed with long walks (will be a challenge in Finnish sucky weather at the moment), healthy food and taking more time for herself, not to mention vitamin D from sun to last through the dark winter season. We got a good dose of quality mom-daughter time to make up for the past 5 months and upcoming few months too and she got to see with her own eyes that I am all good here and meet my people. I felt confident sending her back home, I could look her in the eye and say I will be ok and see you soon (which I really couldn’t say when leaving .fi as I wasn’t sure if I will get alive to Australia or be at all ok) Goodbyes at the airport weren’t all sad: I was happy to stay here, continue my life and get back on track with routines, I didn’t want to follow her or anyone else back to Finland. I wanted to stay because for now my place is here. So with my teary eyes I was glad to realize I wasn’t left with void, I had plenty of things to go back to from the airport. Things and people I enjoy and are important to me. The stuff called My Life (I tend to forget it at times, that no matter where I am, my life is happening there and I am responsible of living it and making the most out of it).

From the airport I just changed terminal and headed to do some more workshopping at Wollongong.  The Gong trip was rainy and short and I came back on December 6^th (Independence Day!) only few hours before Dad and Tarja arriving from Singapore. So basically in 48 hours I had said bye to mom, gone to Sydney, arrived back to Brissie and was at the International Arrivals waving the Finnish flag again (1.15am). The reunion was sweet as expected: hugs from Dad feel equally good as hugs from Mom. He didn’t look a day older, but fresh and tanned instead with a big smile to see each other again. Familiar. Great to see you both, Welcome to Australia and Brisbane. Dad had rented a place from Kangaroo point to make sure “you are not hosting old people two months in a row” (although I said it is perfectly fine for them to stay at my place and I certainly won’t mind) so they stayed only the first night at West End and moved on Wednesday to Kangaroo point. The apartment is super nice, clean, with a view and dining table so decided already back then that Christmas Eve will be spent at their place as I still don’t have a dining table. In three days I had showed them three of my favourite restaurants in West End: Punjabi Palace (Welcome to India), Hong Depot (Welcome to Korea, South Korea) and Little Greek (Welcome to Greece) and besides the tasty and reasonably priced food also the Bring Your Own concept has been highly appreciated by these two wine lovers. It is easy to eat well and drink well here. For the tourist office side we have been at Mt Coot-Tha lookout, Mt Glorious and Power House, West End markets and James Street and hopefully I can courage them to take a day off from golf and drive to Burleigh Heads or Surfers Paradise one day to have the first dose of beach life and Pacific Ocean. Both of them are fanatic golf players which in my opinion takes the focus away from travelling this far and believe after they leave I have an excessive list of golf courses in Brissie with ratings and stuff. Anyways in between Christmas and New years we will go for a road trip to Hunter Valley (a big wine region in New South Wales about 1000 km away) to enjoy a bit more wines and cheese in beautiful scenery and to broaden my knowledge of Australia outside Queensland.

Then the Christmas is approaching. We have had bunch of different Christmas parties or Functions as they are called here with BBQ food, bit of drinks and chitchatting with colleagues. Nothing special to report, very lame and tame parties in my opinion. Anyways only few days to go and my plans are almost locked down: go to the West End market to do our grocery shopping, dad will cook, I will bring wines, everyone will eat and drink, call back home to wish merry Christmas, open presents if Santa and Rudolf travel this far, stay up and talk up and just enjoy the night. I have also gained a bit of an urge to make rice porridge for brekkie – just because in our family I’ve usually been in charge of the rice porridge, love the taste and the excitement of catching the almond or not. So might be I’ll bring that tradition to Australia also. Otherwise our menu will be totally different from the Finnish cuisine: Thai prawns, mushrooms and salads, maybe a bit of starter soup and cheese platter for dessert. At the moment it is approx 35 degrees too warm to find a proper Christmas mood so better mix it all up and make it stand out of all traditions I’ve ever had.

I believe I am not posting again before Christmas so better wish you all well now: Merry Christmas dear Friends! Take care and enjoy winter, candle light, your special traditions and most importantly nearest and dearest around you!

Love you all,

//Ansku

Ps: Today my dear brother Antti is celebrating his 35^th Birthday. So after I get this one posted  I will raise a glass to the best big brother in the world – Love you and miss you bro <3

About End of Year Party, mine tour and good times with Mom

Aaargh, another delayed blog post due to work and spending quality time with Mom. I just haven’t had the time to sit down for an hour or two and focus on getting this done…seriously, we have had something to do every evening not to mention busy and out of routines days at work! Anyways, now I have the time, I made the time and have loads of things to report again. Rock and roll.

Starting from ACN end of year party that I was heading to just after publishing the previous post. The party was fun! I do remember and it was lot of fun. The venue was La Ruche, one of my (many) favorite drink bars in Brissie and the concept was “Soul” with free drinks and food until midnight (I think the theme was lame, how do you dress up as “soul”...It can be anything and everything...so I went for the short dress, high heels and big big ear rings). Everyone was allowed to bring a quest, so basically the place was mostly packed with strangers as I don’t know that many people from our office outside my project, and as my project has plenty of recent new joiners from around the world we all experienced the same feeling and hooked together. I was so busy talking to people and drinking that I totally forgot to eat, it rarely happens that I forget to eat. Around midnight I tried to migrate to the desk serving BBQ hamburgers but ended up to the dance floor instead. It happens. And to report the most interesting thing, Brissie office has the Tiger attitude too…I did witness some fooling around of people who really shouldn’t be fooling around and pretty blunt attempts from people who kind of forgot they are married.  I behaved, of course. So mostly the evening was all about drinking, not eating, catching up with colleagues and dancing our assess off. I think it was around midnight we decided to make a move to a big gay bar across the road  (gay bar because we wanted to dance, and gay people know how to dance) but couldn’t last long as the high heels kind of got to me and hit the pillow at 2am. My hair was pretty sore on Sunday but luckily Kaija had organized a Finnish lunch at their place so I needed to get up, dress up and got a lot of good food and apple crumble for dessert.  It was my first official party with our Brisbane office, I see a lot of potential (meaning parties, not opposite sex).

Work wise past few weeks have been amazingly busy with workshopping from Monday to Friday with a double booking last Tue and Wed and same continuing this week. I haven’t had time to do any work basically, or even to check my emails as here down under the wireless connections are most often worth nothing. Work still doesn’t make me scream out of excitement and the highlight was a biz trip to Emerald with 4 of my colleagues and straight to Peak Downs mine to get a mine tour explaining the end-to-end process of mining “production”. I rented a car from Emerald Airport (a bigger airport, not just a tent) and got a brand new big 4WD with only 32km in the meter. I was asked to drive it carefully and I promised to do so and told I have also attended a defensive driving course but think the guy at the counter wasn’t convinced. I also told him I promise to be gentle on the gear and he said “it’s automatic”. That’s nice. The drive went well and safe and we hit Peak Downs a bit after lunch, got our safety gear (including a pink hard hat) and headed to the “pit 42” to be picked up by our tour guide. This time our escort wasn’t a macho miner but a very very big guy John who can die any day for being so fat I think. Still he managed to give us very educating tour across Peak Downs and organized us to get a ride with the biggest Dragline on site. When approaching the dragline I asked my colleague Kurt would it be totally inappropriate to start singing Lady Gaga’s “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen” and he said yes, it would be totally inappropriate. I thought it would’ve been funny. Anyways Draglines are these huge monster earth removing machines that cost around 280M AUD each, are about 5 floors high and big as unit blocs and can move massive amount of dirt per time (still dirt, not exciting or sexy). Peak Downs has also one out of three biggest Draglines in the world but it wasn’t currently functioning. We still got pictures of us standing in the bucket and heard that with the floods one of competitors Draglines got severe damage as it is able to move 2m per step and can take only 72 steps before getting overheated and they didn’t have enough time to move it and it went swimming. He told that the mine site needs to inform the nearest power station when they are starting the dragline as it consumes so much power that they need to reserve one generator solely for the draglines use (I wonder if half of central Queensland loses electricity if they forget to inform them?) I also learned that Sweden is buying quite a lot of coal from Peak Downs (around 160 000 tons per year) and they “are a bit fussy” with their quality requirements. I asked for other big clients and they were “Korea and Europe”. Jep, Europe as in Europe without further detail (except the story about Sweden as the guy thought I am a blond from Sweden). I was happy to get a tour around the site and hear detail of the processes but still do not find mining as such very interesting. And I still struggle with the environmental impacts. And in simplistic terms I believe it takes a lot to screw up a business like Coal Mining as Australia has huge reserves of coal and they only need to dig it up, process a little, transport to ports and ship it to China and make ridiculous amount of profit. Well, I am maybe cutting a bit of corners but still ;) After our tour we headed back to Dysart to check-in to MAC mine camp we were supposed to stay overnight. I got a 2m x 3m size room, with no lights and damp toilet. I said *shitshitfuckfuck* out loud, multiple times. Good thing with no lights was that I didn’t see properly how terrible the room was…not really something I would call a silver lining. After dinner I forced myself to sleep, woke up at 4am to the noise from the car park right next to my pillow and counted minutes to 6am to get up and get out of there. The workshop went surprisingly well despite the lack of sleep, drove back to Emerald to find out our flight was late due to big thunder storm and got home 11.15pm so tired I only could cry. It was a blessing my mom was there waiting for me. It felt so good to get a hug from her, sit next to her on the sofa and just cry. I felt homesick. I wanted to go home. I missed the little people. I missed my friends and family. I missed sleeping in my own bed. I hated mine camps. I hated damp toilets. I hated sandwiches for lunch. I hated instant coffee. I hated the jargon I didn’t get. I hated in the middle of nowhere airports without lights because of thunder storm. I hated thunder storms. Hate is a strong word and I hated a lot of things and most of them related to mining and work. But I did get a hug from mom. I got some food although it was fairly late. I got sweet dreams in my own bed. I woke up feeling like a different person. These ups and downs come and go…so far I have managed to get through alive. But tough week with big emotions. Felt fragile.

Weekend was full of action again as it was the second last weekend here for my mom. On Friday we went to have dinner to a new Korean BBQ restaurant one block from my place and ended up having a long night as if everyone brings one bottle of wine (many restaurants in Brissie have the Bring Your Own BYO concept were customers can bring their own wine and they are only charging 3AUD per head for the glasses) with simple math everyone ends up drinking one bottle of wine or even more if you continue the evening to my balcony with some excellent Moscato. Hupsista. No "if"s, it just happened. I do love my balcony with capital L, it truly is my living room now and love spending time there. Mom got the furniture for me as a Christmas present as she wanted to give me something I can enjoy every day and I surely do. I told her she doesn’t need to do that and the best present I can ever imagine is my family flying over and visiting me here and getting a hug from a loved one…she said she knows it but wants to give it to me. So most of the evenings we sit at the balcony in candle light talking or reading magazines accompanied by two little geckos named Kekkonen and Kepponen, tiny little creatures who keep to mosquitoes and cockroaches away. On Saturday I also managed to buy a bookshelf (and thongs and a hat) despite the most terrible hangover in my Aussie life history. I did need a bit of push from Mom and big fat brekkie at Campos, but still I made another big decision again to increase the quality of my life. Finally I get the books out of the boxes (bought few favorite ones, and also the ones I got for a farewell present) and pictures of loved ones too. I have a place to put my life into :) Who would’ve thought life is in a bookshelf, well mine is.

We also visited Stradbroke on Sunday and managed to keep in shade and not to burn. It was my very first proper beach day, went swimming, and had a big burger and Corona for lunch and ice cream for dessert! And the beauty of it all is the fact that I can do it every weekend if I want to :) I also got more visitors on Monday as my friends Tomi and Jenny are travelling in Australia and New Zealand for 6 weeks and their first stop was at Brissie. They have heaps of plans and will most likely see more in 6 weeks than I’ll do in a year which makes me think people who transfer should have double amount of holidays: 30 days for visiting back home and 30 days exploring the new home country with an extra allowance to afford expensive flights to other side of the world and the less expensive here inside Australia. Why not?

Anyways now it is Thursday evening and soon the last weekend with my Mom as she’s leaving back home on Monday. I find it stressful, knowing the moment of “It was great to have you here, see you later, love you, and take care” will be emotional and hard. I find goodbyes difficult although these are not goodbyes but see-you-later instead.  I am slightly traumatized by the farewells in Helsinki, I definitely don’t want to go through the same again as it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I do think my mom needs a strategy to learn to deal with the missing and bye byes. It cannot be the case that the tears of missing start to hit a week before departure as it is just too much energy spend on negative thoughts rather than enjoying the time we have together. I need a strategy too, a strategy for not to be afraid of the bye bye’s as the sweetness of the reunions totally out rules the salty tears I cry at the time of separation. This is the first time that someone very close comes to visit my life here and then goes back there where I left…I don’t know yet how it feels, suppose it will leave a void. I need to be able to fill in that void quickly.  Still, I have another upside around the corner as my dad is arriving to Brissie late on Tuesday night. Can’t wait to see them, wave the Finnish flag, wish welcome and get a big warm hug.

Big warm hug,

//Ansku

PS: December 1st and little bunny behind the first window (have two calendars, picture and chocolate version). Thanks Inna for the great Christmas surprise...love it!