That’s the question that my husband asked me last night. We were watching the news which had a story about how the Melbourne City Council is trying to entice workers back into the city. Our city is still feeling the effects of the long lockdown of 2020 where it felt we were all in our […]
A Nothing Day
Today was a weird blah day. I guess we all have days like this. It’s Tuesday. This means it’s my day of French class which I eagerly look forward to but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house. I was feeling under the weather. My stomach was sore (it didn’t help […]
A Little Bit of Japan 🇯🇵
I count myself lucky to be living in a multicultural city that is well known for its foodie and cultural scenes. Today I decided to drive ten minutes down the road to the suburb of Clayton. Clayton Road is full of Asian restaurants and cafes. Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, it’s all here. I’ve never tasted […]
Embarrassing Job
Now that I don’t work, I come across people who are still working and hear some horror stories of what is happening in their place of work. A few have mentioned to me that they’re simply “going through the motions”. There has also been a couple who (once they found out what I used to […]
Pharoah Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria
Last Friday a friend and I headed to the National Gallery of Victoria to see the Pharoah Exhibition which is on until October this year. After having an initial heart attack at the entry price of the ticket $34, we headed in and were in awe of what we saw. The exhibit was in two […]
Indoor Skydiving
This morning we headed off to Essendon Fields, an area near the airport that has airfield and various hangars that are now a bustling retail precinct. I had bought a voucher for Andrew to experience indoor skydiving but as he had a frozen shoulder for most of the year, he couldn’t use it. Now that […]
What are My Next Steps?
I’ve been considering what to do with this Activate Learning blog. Should I close it down? Should I rename and redesign it? Should I start a new one as Life Lessons from Books? However, the more I think about it, the more I realise that “activate learning” is a useful generic “catch-all” phrase that could […]
At the Crossroads of a Decision
Cafe Rando
Once a month on a Sunday, our French School has Café Rando, an informal and leisurely beach walk at the Rickett’s Point Marine Sanctuary followed by a coffee at the beachside cafe there. It’s an opportunity to meet other students and Francophiles and bavarder en français. 🤣 What a stunning day! We have been lucky […]
Mensis Horribilis (Horrible Month)
I would say that this month has been one of my worst months in a long while. It included everything from illness, emergency, doctors, ambulance, even a funeral. However in hindsight, after all that, it’s also a month that has shown me what I will face more often in the near future with ageing parents […]
Conversations with People Who Are Still Working and Those Who Aren’t
I’m at this weird age where some friends, family members and acquaintances are still working, close to retirement or just decided to retire early (like myself) brought on earlier than planned due to various factors in their lives such as “post pandemic life rethink”, ageing parents or career transition. I’ve got various groups of friends […]
What Day is It?
I’ve reached that stage where weekdays and weekends run into each other. “What day is it?” I ask my husband. “Unfortunately not the weekend,” he groans getting out of bed to get ready for work (He’s on the countdown towards retirement and cannot wait for that day he stops work). Guess I shouldn’t be complaining […]
Lazy Days
Now that I have so much time on my hands, one of the things I love to do on sunny days is sit out in our back garden for the entire day. After a morning walk, I come home to breakfast and take it outside. I move everything out there, my yarns, my craft projects, […]
Reflections Of The Year Post-Work: What I’d Like to Do Next
It’s been a little over a year now of not working. At the time of resigning from my previous employer, Rapid Circle, I had been planning to take the year off and then decide what it is I wanted to do. However, truth be told, the plan was never to return to the kind of […]
A Year Since I Last Worked
I can’t believe that a year has already passed since I resigned from my last role as a community manager in a tech company. Around the same time, I also gave up and deleted all my social media accounts and felt that I had walked away from another part of my life to start afresh […]
Decluttering My Book Shelves
I guess there’s a point in everyone’s life when they do a major decluttering of the things in their life to mark transition points. I realised that my home office study will need an overhaul with all the text books and reference books that I have collected over the years. As I try and figure […]
A New About Me Page
Today I did a few things to update my old “brand” (is that the dreaded word we use now?). Now that I’m not working and unlikely to ever go back into the corporate world doing what I did before, I realise that I have no formal “occupation” as such. I have described myself as “semi […]
Returning to the Ukulele
About 8 years ago, I started playing the ukulele and even took lessons from a teacher. I practised every day and got myself to the point where he asked me to consider learning the guitar next however, I wasn’t interested in that back then. After all, I had to fit it all in with life […]
Is Your Life Today What You Pictured a Year Ago?
I use the Jetpack app for all my blogging on my mobile to tap out a post and it has some daily prompts to help people to start blogging. Every day I look at the questions but just write my own thing. Today was different. Let’s give this a go. So here’s the question on […]
The Tower of Babel
It’s hard to believe that I’ve spent a majority of my working life trying to help organisations and people see the value of peer learning and community building and at times, I feel I’m constantly banging on the same old drum without having achieved anything. To be fair, that’s only the way I think. If […]