This happened last time. In December Ada had most of her teeth out, returning home high as a kite. Right now she has not a care in the world and is wriggling and pouncing like a kitten, nosing into nooks she has ignored for years.
You can see the spike marks where her (now removed) lower teeth pierced her top lip.
Ten days of breaking cooked chicken carefully into thumbnail pieces so she can hoover it up. Too small and mushy and it gets caught in the gums, causing pain. Too large and, without ability to chew it, she will be in trouble. Five days of 6pm drugs…
Two guests were academics. They both work most weekends. And into the late night many nights a month. They have little actual time to prepare material for teaching, and even less time allocated for this task by their workplace. They are tired. Rail against meaningless hoops and procedures they jump through, and even more against fake deadlines that turn out not to be deadlines at all, but nevertheless cut into their limited time to do other tasks.
This lifestyle was a major reason I wanted out of academia. Another topic of conversation tonight, the pressures at every turn to try to anticipate the impact of your actions on student mental health, is another compelling reason I walked.
If this is you, or someone you love, you may want to consider contributing to the ANU research project lead by Inger Mewburn (aka The Thesis Whisperer) into what “being productive” means in academic work. You can find out more here: Our new survey is live – your help please?
In the park. After dark. Riding home from work, so very well rugged up. She tore along the ground, matching my speed. I stopped. She stopped. She looked about, did cute possum-y things. A dogwalker sent her scurrying up a tree, sitting in the lowest fork. She waited for danger to pass (which, it seems, was not me), then ran down again and into the night.
It’s late. I was going to muse on the recent graduations I have had, sparked by Con’s post on the weekend, and Snail’s crossroads (or decision to stay back from them) today and Andrew’s post from last month about career twists and turns.
Still time before the end of Blogjune. I *even* could post afterward. I guess.
The pic above is the basket I left in the garden near the benches at the bottom of the staircase of an apartment building in the urban eco-village. The circular courtyard between building and garden is known as the “breast circle” because it has a large sculptural urn in the centre with thyme winding out the top. Viewed from the vege garden on top of the apartments it looks like… well..
My box of organic fruit and veg this week had too many apples, onions and garlic, so I loaded up my basket, popped on a note asking people to help themselves and went off for the arvo. The same spot has baskets often filled with produce from the main big vegie patch at ground level – strawberries, Italian parsley, broad beans… or produce from the fruit trees – enourmous quinces, mandarines, mulberries, feijoas…
The other main produce, honey from the hives on the roof, is divvied up after harvest between residents in the shared kitchen – bring a jar and spoon your share from the big pot on kitchen table. The same shared kitchen is site of a monthly potluck dinner, which is sometimes themed (like bring your holiday snaps and tell everyone about your recent travels). Keeping the shared laundry clean, and the drain pipes clear, and stairwells swept and pruning and the bike shed repaired and… many more maintenance tasks, all take place on the Saturday morning busy bee the fortnight before the community meal.
I was elbow deep in cleaning the loo this morning when a friend, who lives in the eco-village apartment I used to rent, rang me to say she had baked a cake and invited her current, and my former, neighbours for a cuppa. Did I want to join them? I grabbed my cane basket of extra veg in one hand, and my compost bucket in the other, and walked the two minutes to the community. I still drop my compost into the community bins, something that works well for me and the garden. We sat, happily knitting and chatting for a couple of hours.
Returning home, I just had time to make a late lunch when I set out again with requisite cushion, rug, water bottle and yoga mat to meet yet another resident of the eco-village at the front gates. We walked the five minutes to the local community centre to spend two and a half hours at a mindfulness mini-retreat. Lots of breath work and snuggling under rugs and rest.
Neighbourhood gathering in the Square. Nature Play with cubby making. Welcome to Country. Live acoustic music. Basketball. Firepit. Marshmallows. Free hot chocolate. Chatting with friends and neighbours.
ONE THING I DID TODAY
Accepted my limits. Back to doing Foundational Yoga via my regular livestream, having not even tried the 108 Sun Salutations last night.
I had a major spill on my new e-bike on Good Friday. I was riding into the sunset on my way to the beach, going at top speed, around 25 km/h. My front wheel slipped on some roots on the bike way, sending me sliding down the road and into the bushes on my left side. My knee, elbow and arm were badly scraped, and I hit my head on the pavement. I was helped up by a good samaritan family and prepared to ride off again, when I realised that my knee bleeding through my ripped trousers could not bend.
Luckily I was mainly scraped up, rather than anything broken. It took me weeks to recover, waiting for the skin to heal over on my knee before I could bend it again. Getting anywhere, sitting and even finding a comfy way to sleep was challenging. My left arm could not really extend or hold anything well. Even with the skin healed over I have been padding my knee with a cushion whenever I do yoga.
It’s frustrating when you have worked to get good at something, and have been very mobile, to start again from a much lower level. Especially when your major transport is walking and cycling. I have a small feline cheerleader who climbs over me if I stay too still in a pose during a yoga session, and lurks about waiting for me to go into shavasana at the very end, so she can snuggle into the blanket on top of me. I’ll soon be back to where I was…
The vet left them when the other teeth were removed due to disease in December, hoping the top lip would settle over them and Ada would develop small calluses where the teeth rubbed a bit. Instead they have scarified her top lip, and are due to be removed next week.
The older cats get, the more their teeth fuse to the jaw, so even though they are healthy, it is best to remove them now.
Expect dispatches from a sofa, under a healing cat, next week.
University of Melbourne from 10th floor of Law School Building, Pelham Street.
Today was a success too.
This has been the most incident-free event I have been associated in this job so far. The Skills Summit last month had one speaker fall off a ladder and another withdraw on the day before – and the event photographer had an awful leg injury the same day. Transmission was sometimes patchy when people were beamed in via Zoom. We learned much.
So much so, that when one of the research infrastructure partners announced that Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council) had offered for one of their Canberra staff to remotely talk about their contribution in the last session of the day, instead of being thrown into a tailspin I could say – “yes, we can absolutely do that”.
Today was the first day of a two-day public symposium I am organising to show people the research infrastructure we are building. The first day of the symposium explains how we got here and outlines projects completed. Tomorrow looks to the future and explains where we are going. You can watch it remotely by clicking the first link.
With catering, stationery, run sheets, assigning jobs, contacting speakers all out the way last week; today was all about time keeping, chasing up slides presenters had not yet provided, running about with a mic, pushing out links on Zoom, briefing MC, meeting traditional custodian who was doing welcome to country and answering all those micro-questions with micro-decisions.
Today we have around 70 people on Zoom and 60 people in person. Nobody is remotely presenting. We are not recording remote presenters, although we are recording the whole thing. That’s a doddle.
But… about three weeks ago, at the same venue in Melbourne I was part of a team organising a Skills Summit, with far more moving parts. On the third day, a Carpentries Connect event, we had in-person satellite events in Perth and New Zealand. People presented from Melbourne, Perth and Wellington to all other locations via Zoom, at the same time as this was beamed into the physical locations. All needing careful coordination, which we did with a local AV company. People contributed via Zoom chat and we had simultaneous workshops on the same topics happening at all venues. Plus recordings. Which needed downloading and editing afterward.
You can see the recording of the session I co-presented about What we learned about skills needs in our co-design process (in the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons). In it I describe what researchers said about how they like skills delivered, who should do it and what conditions should support this. This was from a couple of thousand data points shared in 10 different workshops with around 600 registrants. Not all of it was about skills, but there were gems there.
[End of a worky worky work post].
My accommodation – it has a bath! Home does not. I nipped out at lunchtime and bought bath salts. Evening sorted.
(Someone in the lobby of the law school building at the University of Melbourne is playing beautiful piano music while I have an hour’s down time and un-peopling before going out to dinner with 40 or so people)
ONE THING I DID TODAY
An icebreaker.
For 40 researchers. All at the start of a new round of research infrastructure projects, some continuing projects and some brand new.
At a day where these project leads all meet and get to know about each others’ projects, learn what works and what doesn’t from each other. They think about their communications plan, Indigenous Data Governance and how they will demonstrate successful usage and uptake of what they build.
This was the first 25 minutes of the day and I wanted participants to talk to people outside of their projects. I wanted them to start thinking about how they would describe their projects in preparation for the comms workshop, think about what success looks like and possibly cross-fertilise to make new research projects.
A Problem of 10 words
I started by expressing the problem I hope to solve in my work, in 10 words:
Focus areas need support so researchers learn to use infrastructure
Part of the first five minutes involved participants coming up with the problem their research infrastructure will solve. In 10 words. Written on the back of a paper napkin – signalling that this is very much first draft and speculative.
2. Title of a research article
Next, I instructed participants to imagine that three years have passed, and their research infrastructure project is a success. They were asked to write on a post it note the title of a research article someone could write using that infrastructure. That was the other part of their five minutes.
Then I divided participants into four groups (first – people born in June or before on one side of the room, those after to the other. Then- each of those two groups divided by people born before the 16th or after the 16th). I told them to find two people from other projects in their quartile.
In these groups of three, participants shared their 10 word problems. Then they were asked to come up with the title of one or more research articles using at least two pieces of successful infrastructure.
The rest of the day they worked surrounded by their potential successes on the walls.
![A small grey hairless x]cat sits on a brown-striped knitted beanie on a blue sheepskin.](https://librariansmatter.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/IMG_4614-scaled.jpeg)
