Thank you

Hi readers and visitors! Given people are still checking out this blog from Facebook (thank you!), I thought it was well beyond time to update this blog and explain myself.

This blog was a wonderful pastime and creative outlet for me, and gave me membership to a wonderful community of fellow bloggers and readers.

My main theme in this blog was the combination of full-time work and motherhood.

I wrote a lot about full-time work, parenting and twins. I also wrote about books, modern life, some popular science and general thoughts and opinions. Some of my posts were cringe-worthy, some were not bad, and a few were pretty good! No doubt ALL have dated badly.

So what happened?

In 2015 I switched careers to working in IT project and program management, and though I had been  a project manager for some years, working for a technology start-up and later for a small-to-medium company as it matured and developed its own technology capabilities was fascinating and FULL-ON.

I have spent the last few years fully immersed in product development, "agile" development, lean technical projects and the many and various philosophies and community conversations around those. I have been LIVING on Twitter.

Combined with this, my children were growing up and my day to day challenges and interests were different.  Plus, they won't let me post stuff about them anymore - a challenge that hits most blogger parents around the same time :)

So to my poor, neglected personal parenting blog: I unintentionally ghosted it, and the wonderful community who I connected with through here.



via GIPHY

I am sorry to my fellow bloggers whom I stopped visiting, stopped reading, and for whom I left no explanation on this blog! I am sure they are used to it - bloggers come and go, and most blogs end without fanfare or a proper good bye.  I hope everyone is doing well, and I will try and visit your blogs from time to time, as I loved reading them and I miss those perspectives sometimes.

Where am I now?

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to check out my current, more professional blog, it lives here:

https://nonprojectproject.com/

My latest post may be something relatable to some of you :) -
An Introvert's Defence of the Open Plan Office


And I make NO commitment to weekly or monthly updates!

Stay well everyone.
Thanks for visiting, and thanks for reading my stuff.

Keep in touch via Twitter!


Jackie

IT NEVER ENDS

My house is a mess

It causes me stress

But not quite enough

To clean up, I confess.

I try, I do -

I know you do too -

But all I can manage

Is limit the zoo

Work vs Self-Promotion

Here we go: yet another article with "advice" on how to find success - this time at Forbes.com with a terrific example of the genre entitled 'Want to be successful? Quit working so hard'.

There is a solid kernel of truth in this advice, at least in the title. Being known as a 'hard worker', and slaving away at a desk job (or any job) for 12 hours a day will not generally be rewarded with 'success' in terms of money and renown.  Most of us already know this, even if some of us (ahem) only figured it out after years of doing the same.

We Interrupt this Dystopian Nightmare for a Visit to Rippon Lea

It's time for some #AlternativeFacts. Trump is not President, Obama is allowed to have a third term, and that Simpsons episode from 20 years ago remains a funny satirical portrait of an alternative future America.

And in this lovely, lovely world, we can safely ignore politics and take our children to visit one of Melbourne's historic houses.

Our original intention was to visit Como House, and then take the little punt across to Herring Island. And after I talked up both to the kids and got them all excited* about going, I did the very basic internet research I should have done first and found that Como House wasn't open.  (It seems to be open on weekends again now, so we will go another time).

So, on this particular day (last Saturday), we visited Rippon Lea instead. (Read on to see some pretty pictures and experience the charm of Rippon Lea).

Tech Life: Build, Test, Release Adventures

For the past year and a half I've been working for a small and smart financial software vendor, which I love. I'd been inching my way from financial services to "the other side" of the software fence for a few months before I made the change, and I thought at the time I had developed a solid understanding of technology vendor-ship and what that work would be like.

But of course, you only know so much until you get there.

Living in a Modernist House

I recently caught up with a great two-episode series on the ABC called Streets of Your Town, about suburban architecture in Australia. It's worth a look - you can catch it here until 30 November.

Watching this, I suddenly recognised the first home I remember living in. It was a brick box with sloping roof, exposed beams and bricks, floor to ceiling windows, a split level ground floor and an open staircase, all nestled in a native garden and surrounded with a ti-tree fence. Tick tick tick - all of these are features beloved of the modernist architects of the time.

We have always remembered this house as an oddity - weirdly designed, a menace to small children, plagued with hunstman spiders thanks to being nestled in that native garden. But now I realise it was actually a modernist masterpiece!

Illustrations of (My) Life

Hello, and welcome to another instalment in an ongoing occasional series I call Lazy Blog Posts.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are some photos which I thought were a pretty good short-cut to saying something about life.  Or in some cases just my life.

So without further ado: photos!

5 Favourite Posts

How fortuitous that just when I dusted off my blog this week, along came a new Listography! Whether this marks a return of Listography or just a one-off thing, I'm happy to see it and immediately want to participate.  I loved Kate Takes 5's Listography when it was a regular thing - always so easy and fun to make a five-point list of anything.

So this Listography is Five Favourite Posts.

Halloween Party 2016

I don't blog much these days. But you didn't think I could ignore Halloween did you? A quick search on the word 'Halloween' on my blog turns up 22 posts (?!), including this one (2015), my first one (2012) and my Halloween poem - so it's no secret I love Halloween.

The Olympics

The Olympics are on! So I decided to write something about the Olympics.

I've written before how much I love the Olympics. I always have, ever since childhood, when during school any teacher who could commandeer a TV would set it up in a corner of the classroom for as long as they could get away with it.