I had lunch out today, complete with wine, and expensive food. And, completely solo. Not planned that way though: defiance prevailed.
A colleague(friend?), who’d booked the catch-up afternoon, had cancelled.

I’d eagerly anticipated the great banter, laughs, and lighthearted arguments about semi-non-important things. I’ve always really enjoyed conversations with this colleague/(friend?).

But: they’ve cancelled 5+ times on me over the past two years, I’ve lost track. I keep anticipating fun catch ups…and keep being stood up.

It does nothing to get mad at them, I know how life gets in the way.

I do wonder though, who’s the fool here?

I spend a lot of time in my head. And I like it there. It took a while to learn to like it, but now I do. Although, while I like being in my thinking, it’s actions that people see.

So, I spend time thinking about things like backyard ultras, being Gen-X in the resources industry, how to demonstrate competence, credibility beyond credentials, and ethics and self-governance, and, and, and… but thinking about these important topics isn’t enough: it’s just as important to share them.
What I can’t figure out is where.
LinkedIn? Substack? A newsletter? All of the above?

Long ago, I was introduced to the Day-Timer brand of time management.
Now, I have 25 years of Day-Timer planner pages in boxes. The past 5 years I’ve been less loyal to Day-Timer; I now use a bespoke design via Agendio.

In 1995, I started out tentatively, only writing down a few things, a few names. Then, I became a prolific recorder of tasks, events, meetings, to-do’s, names, contact details, and notes of all sorts related to work.

Once, I tried not using a written work diary, tried to do it all online, and that lasted, oh, about a day.

I’ve recently started a ‘career review’, looking through my 30 years of work, to get a handle on who I am and what I do. It’s time to re-live some of the memories, time to re-connect with some of the people, and to remember the learnings, challenges, mistakes, successes and, the mundane day-to-day tasks and topics that have influenced me and my development.
A summary is how LinkedIn (and AI) sees me: job titles and company logos. But the magic is in the stories, experiences, and interactions I've had with people and problem-solving. There’s so much of that to share.

I’ve experienced the shift from sympathy to empathy. We experience sympathy when we imagine the feelings and experience of someone else. There is an arm’s length with this, because, by its nature, when we’re sympathising, we haven’t been through it ourselves.

I’ve grown in the last few weeks, and my heart has now expanded to have deep empathy for those experiencing dementia in the family. And also, on discovering how much one in the partnership covers for the other, how bad it was/is. My aunt, I now know, had a tough life in the last few years; RIP Patricia B.

We all inhabit a place in the world. Currently, I’m in Mandurah, south of Perth. It’s not my permanent place, but it’s important I’m here. The person I’m helping is experiencing his place being in upheaval. He is confused and distressed, because his place has changed. He wants to stay in the same place, but he can’t.

My place in the world, for almost 30 years, has been Brisbane. But more than that, I’m learning that our place in the world must include people.
I’m learning through this experience that cultivating place with people is more important than physical place.

There are lots of problems, in the world, in our lives, all around us.
Art Smalley, known for his work in lean manufacturing, described these four types of problems:
1.           Troubleshooting, needing a rapid fix,
2.           Gap from standard, the fix which prevents recurrence,
3.           Target condition, the fix which improves output, and
4.           Open-ended, needing creativity and innovation to solve.

At the moment, I’ve got a few close to me, involving death and dementia, and distance. Life turns at every waking, right? Perhaps these don’t apply to personal problems, but if they did, I’ve got all of the types.

The phrase, “I can’t see anything”, for me, is a code-phrase to identify when communication has failed. I love telling my parent’s story about it, often as a safety share.
My parents shared the safe-driving responsibility at intersections, with the passenger helping by advising the driver if the lane was clear of traffic.

One time, the passenger said, “I can’t see anything”, so the driver went into the intersection, nearly causing an accident.

The passenger meant, their view was blocked, not that the lane was clear.

This is a real-world example of poorly chosen communication. The whole family learned quick!

In the 1900s, “work” evolved from a majority working in the fields, to a majority working in the office. In the 1980s, I, like many GenXers, started “going to the gym” and ‘having gym memberships’. This was an attempt to stimulate the muscles that were no longer stimulated ‘at work’.
The same thing will happen with our brains. It’s been a slow march to lazy brains, but with calculators, GPS, and now, AI, we have less reason to use our brains. Just like we had less reason to use our muscles.
The next evolution will be gyms for our brains.

I’ve recently been thinking through my 30+ year career in the gas pipeline industry. It’s been a fun trip down memory lane!
I’ve listed out all the engineering projects I could remember; then tried to figure out what made it memorable. And I made notes about those experiences. And also, the people! Oh, the people of this industry (you know who you are), you’re what made those experiences (mostly) so enjoyable.

Meanwhile, we’re evolving into not needing to do calculations anymore, AI will do that. Identifying ‘competency’ will be about application of knowledge (experience!).
So, get out and do stuff.

In the main, engineers serve the public. It’s our duty, our responsibility, our ethical obligation, to serve the public interest, particularly in the view of public safety.
Bridges, roads, pipelines, buildings, process plants, airplanes: engineers involved in design, building or operating these assets in the public realm are, simply, in service to the public. Sometimes, serving the public, in the name of safety, overrides (or should override!) the wishes of our clients.
With the degree, and this positioning as one who primarily serves the public, if this makes you proud and confident, you're an engineer. If not, maybe you’re not.

I like to think of Backyard Ultras as “odd but fabulous events that slow runners could win”. The concept is: run 6.7km in under 60mins, every hour on the hour, for as long as you can.

I’ve done three in the last two years: 6, 7 and 10 laps (40.2, 46.9 and 67km).
I like that my goal is more efficient running, not faster running.

At these events, it’s not about speed. The question isn’t, “what was your time?/how fast”? The question is, "how far did you go?"

I love that I don’t need to run fast to go far.

I have a civil engineering degree, and I’m damn proud of that.

Through my career, though, I haven’t often called myself “an engineer”.

My image of engineers continues to be the stereotypical one of those doing the design, building or operating.
And I don’t design, build or operate.

But importantly, I definitely identify as someone with an engineering degree. Similarly, lawyers and accountant would as well.

Now: with AI able to do tasks that engineers/lawyers/accountants learn at university, and which used to take weeks to do, it feels even more important to understand what having engineering/accounting/law degrees will actually mean.

I have a Canadian bloodline family, mostly residing quite a distance from Brisbane, and, I have a nearby step-in-law family through my Australian husband. My Canadian bloodline family is far-flung, residing in many worldwide locations, and also, admittedly, not all that communicative. This is a striking contrast to my local, close-knit, and noisy/chatty step-in-laws.

The unexpected tension of simultaneously being needed by both: the proximate yet ‘step-in-law’ family, and bloodline family at a distance, is testing me.

I’m glad I have skills to help deal with this: compartmentalising emotions, time management, and, probably most importantly: recovery quiet time for myself.

I saw this group of pelicans and thought, gee those are big bodies. Then (oddly), I thought, why haven’t I ever seen a dead pelican?
I’m a city girl. I’ve never seen a dead animal larger than a possum. Not a dead dog, horse, cow. Roadkill kangaroos from within speeding vehicles doesn’t count.
My life is so sanitised. No dead bodies, no bad smells. A clean little bubble. I wonder about these clean urban lives, no mess.
Real life includes dead animals. Made me wonder if I’m missing out on experiencing real life.
Maybe this is just a weird 100words.

In my haste to post 100-words on time yesterday, instead of posting my own photo, I used a random photo of wooden bowls from the internet...which I now can't find again... which brings up attribution issues (ethics, anyone?)

LinkedIn won't let me replace yesterday's photo unless I delete the whole post and re-post ... so instead, here is a photo of actual husband-created bowls :)

(pretty similar... these are better of course.)

Apologies to the creator of yesterday’s photo of bowls, for my not attributing it. In my past 100-word campaigns, I always attributed the images.
So, oops, mea culpa.

I admire hobbies that result in physical, tangible objects, like woodworking, painting/sculptures, even knitting or needlepoint. These hobbies focus the brain and hands very differently than most engineering/knowledge work does (answering emails and attending meetings, anyone?)
I’m considering that I probably need to develop some ‘better’ hobbies, looking into the future. Currently, maybe unfortunately, my hobbies don’t produce anything (i.e.: reading, running). A few years ago, my husband retired without any hobbies in place. It was a difficult time, because we observed his internal ‘worth’ go from high to zero. Now that he’s a full-on woodworker, we’re all better off.

Sometimes we have “things” (dramas/challenges) going on in our lives, sometimes more than one. Right now, I have at least four going on (related to my family, my in-laws, a work commitment, and a (self-imposed) commitment to developing a new skill). Each deserve 100% of my attention. Each of them, on its own, would be quite bearable, and even enjoyable even if challenging. Overlapping like this, it’s stretching my capacity.
I’ve caught myself in many “should’ve” loops (I should’ve “done something different”). Alas, that thinking doesn’t help. During stressful times, simply aim to be kind: to yourself, and to others.

In 2019, I started writing #100wordsaday here on LinkedIn (wasn’t really every day). I kept it up for almost 6 years, and even put 100 of them into a book.
I’m now tagging it #100wordsofmine. That’s so I can continuously claim ‘no AI has been involved’. These are my words, even while Copilot is always encouraging me to ask it for help. The only technology in use here is Word’s word count.
Why is this important? I’ve decided that in this emerging new way of work/being, original thought will become scarce. So, I will contribute mine.
Here’s to 100 words!

I’ve not really missed Calgary winters, which I left behind me 27 years ago by moving to Brisbane. I’ve been back in winter only three or four times over that quarter century. Maybe that says something.
This one coming up soon is a family holiday. We’ve put our order in for cold snowy days. Ten Australians are joining me on this trip, including four under fifteen. It will be so fun to experience snowy cold through people who have not grown up with it.
For me, it’s kind of ‘meh’.
For them, it’s all they’ve been talking about for months.