The tide is going out

I haven't posted here for a little while. My parents were up here over the long weekend (these cheap flights mean I'll see a lot more of them now!) It was good having them up here, though the Antarctic blast that swept its way up the country did make my flat unbearably cold at times. We ate out twice, spent the best part of a day at the Auckland museum (which was very good I thought), went to Takapuna market, played Scrabble (more on that in a later post) and looked at a house I was interested in (it received their approval and has an auction on Saturday).

Then Mum and Dad flew back, and it was back to work for me. Tuesday was one of my better work days; I get on pretty well with my two younger colleagues but they'd both caught a bout of (swine?) flu over the weekend which meant I picked up their quoting work. That was great, because I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it. I felt better about myself because I knew I was helping people. I used to do quotes all the time, and would have been quite happy to have carried on doing them, but alas I was in a career, rather than just a job, so that was never an option. It was back to normal yesterday, which means feeling hopelessly inadequate. Today was even worse and I just wanted to go home. I've got to do a bloody presentation on Tuesday and I'm still nowhere near even getting the data I need for it. I don't even know what the presentation is for. The tide is rapidly going out on my job, so doing something about that has suddenly become Priority A.

On Tuesday I saw the psychologist who basically said I need to find ways to make my remaining months (weeks?) at my current workplace as tolerable as possible; one of those tactics was to ask more questions. That evening I went to the men's group; Andy, talented bloke that he is, wasn't there because he was playing live music on the radio. I met up with Andy during my lunch hour today though.

I hope to be starting Italian classes some time in July. I did study the language a bit in '01 and '02, just using books and tapes, but I'll start at the lowest rung of the ladder and hopefully I'll work my way up.