reinvention

Got my redundancy notice today. The company — ICA Solution — is downsizing and may lie low for a while from June 2005 as we didn’t get the contract to provide Internet access to the Northern Territory Government. While the redundancy payment/package is okay, I’d prefer to keep working for the company. There are a few more weeks till we shut down so we may still find a way to keep the company viable. Not much work out there for ageing ex-artsworker/geek types like me. But you never know.

It has been ten weeks (well, ten weeks and a day) since I stopped smoking. Its been that long too since my operation to clean me up when my appendix ruptured. I had the operation on 11 December 2004 and haven’t smoked since then. My wound is supposed to be completely well now but I still get pain sometimes. I’m also getting fatter; maybe its stopping smoking — its said that when you stop smoking, you get fatter. While I’m not too keen on getting fatter, I’m still glad I’ve managed to stay away from the smokes this long. Not that the urges to smoke have gone away. I’m drinking lots of tea , as I’ve gone on tea as a tobacco substitute.

blogpix/img_0051 blogpix/dcp00024

Last Friday, 11 February 2005, the Northern Territory Government (NTG)announced that Telstra instead of Optus will provide phone and Internet services to the NTG for the next five years. I work for a company that’s part of the Optus-led consortium that used to provide these services; by June 2005, our contract with NTG will be done. Our company’s not sure if we can continue to be viable after June. I’d like to continue working for the company, or in the same field. But I may need to prepare for another change as there are not many jobs in this field at the moment, and not many companies as flexible and as dynamic as the one I work for now.

More photos of Bugoy, taken by Bing in December 2004.

blogpix/IMG_1154 blogpix/IMG_1155
blogpix/IMG_1160 blogpix/IMG_1156

Here are some photos from Bugoy’s Casuarina Childcare Centre Christmas Party, 13 December 2004. This post is also a test of the WP-Gallery plugin, which creates thumbnails and links to images in the Gallery application where the original images live.

blogpix/IMG_1118 blogpix/IMG_1119
blogpix/IMG_1120 blogpix/IMG_1121

Have finally consolidated entries from two other blogs into this one. My first blog was with blogger.com and was called reinvention. I set that up mainly to try out blogging and have not been using that much over the years. I had intended to use it as a personal blog but seldom used it. The other blog was bramilo.weblogs.com and was a blog for my Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship in 2000-2002. The entries there were mainly Fellowship-related. So this current blog, also named reinvention, contains a mish-mash of blogs from the past; I think I will continue with the mish-mashing of interests.

It has been nineteen years since I migrated to Australia from the Philippines. I arrived in Sydney early morning, on 8 February 1986. The thing I remember most was the immigration officer on duty joking about me not voting in the Philippine Presidential elections the day before. He was probably wondering why I wasn’t too amused; I had just escaped from Marcos’s Philippines that previous day and was jumpy at any mention of Marcos or the elections. Nineteen years have passed by too quickly, I feel sometimes.

from blogger:reinvention

Again, after so long, another post. Since the last post, I have been working as a geek (mainly as system administrator) and have not had much “creative” or “artistic” stuff to write about. I have also been very busy with two new young children — Andres and Alejandrina — which has not left me much time to do anything else outside of work and parenting.

I could have written about geek things, or about parentig things, but as I said in my last post, blogging is a bit hard for me.