Spring has sprung
When I arrived here for my second coming in February, it was stinking hot with dry, moisture sapping winds bowling in from the western plains each day, and the occasional freak storm of a night. I settled just in time to catch another colourful autumn (the autumn here is incredible), but had a few distractions along the way, like a burglary and a forced relocation. Winter was a polar opposite to when I arrived—freezing cold, snow and frosts like hell has frozen over.
Now, the place is slowly rousing from that sleep. In recent weeks, numerous deciduous trees have slowly begun to sprout green shoots, but in the past week, the city has erupted into colour as the streets become a patchwork of pink and white blossoms, and a thickening canopy of green.
Warning signs have gone up in all the magpie territorial zones to alert pedestrians to possible swoopings, and the sharp edge has come off the air. I'm returning home with usable daylight at the end of each day, and on the rare mornings when I'm up by 6am, there is light in sky—at least until daylight savings kicks in.
I'm hoping the combinations of extra daylight and warmer temperatures will be sufficient to motivate me to get back to the gym on a regular basis as, quite frankly, my body shape is starting to look like a play-dough creation from my nieces: the basic form is there but it's all bulging out of proportion, and I think my arse is now wide enough to have its own radar profile.
I guess I'm also getting ready for a new start myself. After coming back to Canberra to replenish the finances, I've achieved that goal sufficiently to examine some of the other important aspects of work—job satisfaction being one of those. The people in my immediate team are great to work with, but we're hamstrung by a departmental structure that is geared towards tying people up in red tape, and as such we are not having the kind of impact I would prefer to see from my efforts.
Combine that with some internal and external political agendas, and there's not a lot of time or energy left for doing quality work, rather than simply “covering our arses”, which given what I said before, requires more and more work for me when taken literally.
In past roles I've been able to not only help identify problems, but develop and implement solutions. Big government projects are a double-edged sword in that there are few opportunities to work on projects of such scale outside that sector, but at the same time, the organisations are nowhere near as nimble as the private sector teams. Adding to the woes are the carpetbaggers who sell “solutions” to the government sector without identifying the problems to begin with. All in all, these big government projects are exercises in frustration—for me at least.
So as my contract draws to a close, I am finding myself contemplating not just my future on this project, but also my future in Canberra. I arrived here on the leading edge of a season of change, and it may just be that I leave on another.