Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The past few weeks

Well, if I thought my week up at the Gold Coast was busy I was wrong! Things certainly haven't calmed down since I've returned, either at work or at home! Here's the recap of the key events since the beginning of April....

1. We farewelled Steven as he returned from his trip to NZ for a night and took him to one of our favourite pizza places (Bar Reggio) in Darlinghurst. Our quiet Monday night dinner took 2 hours to eventuate - I've never seen that restaurant so busy in my life! We had a great time though and devoured some excellent pizza's.


2. The Easter long weekend was then quickly upon us and we were on cat/house sitting duties. We looked after Tiffany and Mia (Lisa & Christian's cat who has gone away to christan their beautiful twin girls with their family), we made sure that April and May (Carl & Martinette's cats who had gone up to Mooloolaba for the Easter break) were ok and of course our own little ratbags. We ended up spending most of our time our in Manly praticsing our non-existent surfing skills but we sure did have fun. We checked out a new bar - "Henry Afrika's" before enjoying dinner at the Manly Ocean Beach House.

The Manly Ocean Beach House Restaurant, at Manly obviously :)

3. On a sadder note, we helped our friend Jenny pack up her house as she was moving to Melbourne on the 12th. Jenny lost her husband Steve in December to a brain tumour and I have to stay it was a very strange experience packing clothes into a box of a man who I had never met and would never get to meet.

If I ever need anything to put things into perspective, I will certainly recall this experience and I have such utter respect for Jenny and how she is handling the horrible situation she now finds herself in.

4. We've had Jo's cousin Karen, partner Paul and 3 boys stay since Sunday so we've been busy little bees and our apartment feels much smaller with 4 adults, 3 young lads and 2 cats in it!

5. The pace doesn't seem to be letting up anytime soon as coming up in the next few weeks are:
- A weekend in Newcastle this weekend
- Jo's Mum's birthday on 3rd May
- Missy Higgins concert at the Enmore on 4th May with Bo and Claire
- Pink concert on 12th May

and don't get me started on what's been happening at work!!

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Busy week

I left for the Gold Coast (again) on the 23rd March for my week long conference. Nicci and I decided to fly up on the Friday so we could make a weekend of it.

Friday night we stayed with Nicci's friend Luke near Brisbane and enjoyed a great dinner and a few nice wines and dinner in the garden with his family.

Luke kindly gave us a lift the next day to Wet n' Wild where Nicci and spent most of the day at Calypso Beach floating around on a rubber ring!

We arrived at our conference venue on the Sunday at about 11:00am - Nicci had to be there early as she was facilitating and had to attend a session. I spent the afternoon in the huge lagoon swimming! What was to be the only relaxing time of the following week.


The Hyatt at Sanctuary Cove

Up early Monday morning for a run and gym session before breakfast and then to our conference room for Day 1 activities. I had met some of my team the previous night at the welcome dinner but today was designed to make sure we worked as a team. Our task was a 'virtual safari' run by Peak Teams.

The next day the real work started. The whole point of the conference is to teach a strategic planning and thinking model and apply this to real business issues, skillfully facilitated by Michael Wilkinson from Leadership Strategies based in Atlanta, Georgia. Believe the hype, Michael is the most incredible facilitator I have ever witnessed and I was super proud to be voted by my team as the person who had contributed the most to our case study challenge and receive a copy of Michael's book.

We all were taken through the process using a common case study and by Thursday we were back in our teams to work on other case studies submitted as part of the application process. Luckily I knew quite a lot about my case study because I wrote it :) We started at 8am in the morning and finally finshed up at 9:30pm (this could have been worse had it not been a master-stoke to pause for dinner and drink wine!).

The Hyatt's fantastic fake beach and lagoon

The other focus of the week really is the networking, getting to know other people in our vast organisation and also presenting to a board of senior leaders on the Friday with the aim of getting some support for your case study.

All in all, it was a fantastic week which saw me go ten-pin bowling, surfing at Surfer's Paradise, stroke a real life white tiger, have dinner on a fake beach, sing karioke twice and present to over 70 people with a hangover! Great stuff.