Been a busy time. A major project has gone live and my desire to read has returned. When I commenced at the State Library at the start of August last year, I inherited the Chair of a project group that got underway in late 2010 to revamp the databases pages on the SLNSW website. Interesting. After a couple of years working alone, from home, all of a sudden I was chairing a group that covered several teams and had face to face meetings…in local business hours no less! A novelty after several years of late night teleconferences. A whole bunch of new challenges.

It’s taken some rather unexpected turns since then, I rarely seem to end up in regular projects. Flexible deadlines became tight deadlines, and thankfully I had a boss who pushed me in the right sorts of ways. It’s been a good project to work out how things work at SLNSW, and provided ample opportunity to meet a lot of new people. Very much a learning experience for me. I learnt some new things about me and how I work, some good some bad, and acknowledge that there’s still more to learn. One curious side effect is that for the last 6 weeks or so, I’ve been living from week to week, expecting to go live any day. I would make last minute decisions, only to discover that they weren’t last minute anymore. Some decisions were good, some resulted in additional work.

There are things I’m naturally good at eg I can look at a random piece of code and make some sense of it. There are some things that don’t come naturally, like project management, so I have to focus harder on those. This project took my entire focus. Now that it’s over and the stress has lifted, my desire to read has returned; my morningpersonitis has returned – I’d hit a point in recent weeks where I couldn’t seem to wake up properly and caffeine had no effect. I haven’t been able to read in a couple of months.

At the start of the week, before the project had finished, I downloaded Dessaix’s new book of essays, and forced myself to read one. He has a certain style of writing, or rather of digressing, that I s’pose seeps into my subconscious. He plays with writing and puts me at ease. On the bus home this evening, I picked up my reader and got stuck into the second essay…not had the mood in a while, much easier now.

The project finished, stress lifted, and my centre has returned.