Posts Tagged ‘time off’

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Gigantic Update

Saturday, October 2nd, 2010

Well…. hello everyone. Been a while eh? You may have heard through Twitter or Facebook that I’ve got a new job. It’s great! Nothing like my last lot. I think I’m going to be staying with them for a while. The perks:

  • They’re in Albion Park Rail! This means I can drive there in 25 minutes. BIG DEAL, since my last job had me catching a train for 90-100 minutes, then hiking to Glebe from Central station.
  • They sell tangible products! Not NLP which I find highly dubious.
  • I get to be part of a team, instead of having everything IT resting on my shoulders so I feel like I’m constantly under massive amounts of pressure.
  • I’m treated with respect. That’s a key thing that seemed to be lacking before.
  • I’m making about the same as before, only I don’t have to spend $57 a week on a train ticket. It’s closer to $25 a week in petrol. Oh and I get more perks because I’m an employee instead of a contractor… and they’re already deducting tax, so I won’t have a nasty surprise at the end of this financial year!

OK, so what else do I have to report? Well, what don’t I?

God knows how many goals I’ve achieved. I’ll have to do a full rundown in another post as this one will get too long.

I’ve done tons of drawing with my Wacom Cintiq (have I blogged about that yet??). It’s made it SO EASY to make cool looking drawings. I love it to bits. Look in the sidebar on the right to see a few links to images I’ve created with it.

A couple of days ago I registered the domain www.atherandearth.com. This is where my comic will live. I am still working on it, but I’m confident I’ll be able to start getting things done with it once NaNoWriMo this year is over.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I will be participating again in one month’s time. It will be AWESOME. I already have a fully developed plot!

Site Flight Web Design is over. I just never could get the hang of running a business. Don’t worry though, I’m not sad about it. It’s just me, I’m not cut out to be self-employed. Not enough motivation for things like that. It’s a problem I’ve had since I was about 10. Started out as a distaste for homework. Now it’s a distaste for doing things for other people while I’m at home. It feels like my personal space is being crushed, I guess. I’m happy to work while at a workplace, but I just can’t take that work home with me. Hence why I couldn’t handle working from home.

So it’s been a funny old ride, this year. It started out with me as enormously cashed up, buying cameras and expensive graphics tablets, leaving my Woolworths job, moving house, working in Sydney, ending each day feeling more drained of my sanity than the day before… then, I was unemployed, enjoying all the sudden free time but feeling lazy and sluggish and kind of doing that thing that George Costanza in Seinfeld did during the “Summer of George” – spending all my time “decompressing” by sitting idly. It got to the point where my sister tried making me do things by giving me lists because she was so upset that I seemed to be doing nothing. But I found my way.

I applied for a fateful job in late August, I got an interview, and the following Wednesday I was offered the job. I was nervous on my first day, and a bit spooked by the whole ordeal in the first few hours, where I had a whole lot of tasks bounced off me, and I was left worried about what I’d got myself into. But now that I’ve settled in, I’ve learnt that these things are doable and it seems like I’m appreciated in that workplace.

Because of my unemployment coinciding with my car needing a bunch done to it, I’m still in a bit of debt, but my job will take care of that within this month, and that’ll be a big weight off my shoulders.

Thanks to working close by, I will be able to not only join the gym next to my workplace and work out every day, but also work on my comic AND do NaNoWriMo without any problems.

This is it! This is the point in my life where everything works for me!

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Posted in 1001 days, 101 things, Personal News, Projects, Web Design and Development | No Comments »

Freeing Myself

Friday, June 25th, 2010

It’s been ages, hasn’t it? Work really got in the way of many aspects of my life since the office shifted to Sydney city. I barely got any time for anything, and that time was spent being tired and listless.

That is one of the many reasons I decided to leave that job. My last day is Wednesday, and BOY am I excited. This company really is crumbling, and even though I quit 7 weeks ago, after only a few other people quit, now I’m one of the only ones left after everyone else quit in the meantime. I wish I hadn’t agreed to stick around this long (the boss realised how badly she needed me and asked me to stay). Every day it gets harder and harder to get out of bed and face this place. Back on the day I quit, Boss Lady decided I was to blame for all her problems. I’d had a really terrible and stressful two weeks before that, having a lot of pressure put on me while the other web designer was away, so I just snapped when she began to tear into me. Normally at times like that I would retreat, but by then I was just fed up. I stuck up for myself, and showed a side of myself I haven’t let out in a long time. I don’t regret it, but I wouldn’t be hasty in doing it again.

So I have a holiday coming up in July. Much needed. But also needed is a source of income, so it’s straight to Centrelink for me. That’s okay.

So anyway, many things have happened these past months, the most obvious of which for those that see me would be my tragically rapid weight gain. Good god, I need to get this sorted. Office work is really taking its toll. Not to mention the weekly pizza they feed us here, and the many places to buy junk food on the way to the train station. This job is poison in my life. I thought it would be great. There aren’t any food places really close to here except for a liquor shop, I was going to walk to and from Central every day, which is a 25-30 minute walk each way. I was going to be active on the weekend. I was going to keep my life in order with a set routine that included Wii Fit and the Biggest Loser Wii game.

What happened to all that?

Let’s analyse.

  • The liquor shop nearby has soft drinks, and it has chocolate bars. When I’m really hungry, they seem like a great idea.
  • The weather got colder, it started to rain more, so I started catching trams and buses from Central. Especially since the MyMulti travel passes came in, I’ve been getting buses.
  • I’ve been so tired constantly of late that the thought of playing a physically active video game is one of the least appealing things when I’m at home.
  • I’m a comfort eater, and work in general (the volume of work combined with having to travel 5 hours a day) has been stressful. Stressful to the point where I have had a recurring apthous ulcer in my mouth since April. I have never had an apthous ulcer (aka canker sore) before.
  • Since I get home so late, I either buy my dinner or just eat the most convenient thing at home, which is often something bad for me.

So, as you can see, I don’t have a lot going my way in terms of weight loss. So I hope to turn things around when my holiday starts, at least in terms of activity and physical exertion.

So, hopefully I will get the chance to update you on the goals I’ve achieved since my last post, but I can’t right now, so see you later.

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Posted in Personal News | No Comments »

Back to Work

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Ah yes, it felt like I’d never left. Unfortunately.

That’s right, today I went back to work for the first time since I broke my foot, back on the last Friday of November. I was given the all clear for my foot on the fifth. It, however, has s ome discomfort now that I have been on it for work. It’s a slight worry, but the doc said it would heal itself. It’s been near on six weeks now, which is how long it was supposed to take, but clearly it hasn’t healed entirely yet. It’s not really posing a problem, though.

I guess this kind of hails the end of my good times. Well, I don’t want to think of it that way. I should think of it more as “back to the routine”. The past week or two has been pretty lazy for me. I have spent a lot of time playing Sonic games. An unhealthy amount of time, even. I have also been spending a lot of time browsing the forums of Sonic Retro, as I came across their Sonic 2 HD project, which looks utterly tasty. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the first game I ever loved. It started while watching my eldest sister Kelly’s boyfriend (and now husband) Glen playing it on his Sega Mega Drive. The Sonic 2 HD project will be the same wonderful game, just with updated, beautiful graphics which are based faithfully on the original sprites, just High Definition. Example:

Sonic and Tails

Forgive my geekitude, but I just CAN’T WAIT for them to make this game. Despite my current projects, I’m toying with the idea of contributing, if I can get their “uber” art style down.

Anyway, that’s it from the world of Natalie today.

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Posted in Medical, Personal News, Projects | No Comments »

Christmas and Whatnot

Friday, December 26th, 2008

So Chrissy is over now, thank goodness. Yesterday I ate so much I hung around the bathroom late last night in case I had to vomit. Luckily, the nausea passed by midnight and I had a pretty nice 9 hours of sleep. My eldest sister, Kelly, was not so fortunate and was very sick last night and today. Not sure what it was. She ate and drank quite a bit so it could have been due to that, or food poisoning, though she didn’t eat anything that nobody else did.

So, we brought our nephews back home with us, and they’ve been fairly good. They both have Nintendo DSes now, so they’re unusually quiet. I’m liking it! Anyway, I’m under the weather today. I might do a little bit of writing, but I just need to sleep off the overindulgence, I think. I’m going to really get stuck into my projects starting tomorrow. The kids will be going to our caravan in Gerroa (near Gerringong) so I will have some good quiet time, I think. I’ll be going to the van sometimes over the next couple of weeks, but we only live half an hour away, so it’s easy to come home to sleep, instead of being packed in the sardine can that is the caravan.

I didn’t get many interesting presents this year, sadly, nobody really did. See, every year for the past 3 or 4 years now we’ve been doing a “$5 Christmas”. The family agreed to spend exactly $5 on each person, no more and no less. It is getting harder each year to do, due to inflation. And it has seemed to eliminate giving and getting… well, good presents. The only people to get decent presents are the kids, because they do not have the $5 limit.

So, I don’t know, it’s left Christmas feeling kind of anticlimactic for the adults. In my opinion, anyway.

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Posted in Personal News | 2 Comments »

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

Well, the summer solstice has just been, and you know what that means… Christmas… i.e. the holiday based on the winter solstice.

So I’m going to be going up to Sydney today and staying Xmas Eve at my eldest sister Kelly’s place, with my two nephews Jake and Luke, and new niece Meah. Since my nephews demand a lot of time, and I will probably spend a lot of time playing their Wii. I probably won’t get time to do much, if any, writing. Not that I did any yesterday. Holy crap.

So like, don’t expect an update on here for the next couple of days. If I do get a post in, it’ll be a miracle.

I certainly hope to finish the first draft of my novel in the next few days, if I can work on it.

So, I’ll see you round. I don’t expect many people to actually be reading this, though. I only am aware of three people that even are aware of this blog’s existence. If you are not one of those people, leave me a comment (though it may not get approved until after I’m back). Heh. Anyway, bye.

Natalie out.

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Posted in Personal News | 7 Comments »

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