October 7 2020

G'day folks.

Lab day today at the water treatment plant.

On a Tuesday this week, instead of Monday like usual, due to the public holiday

Kept me quite busy, but I didn't tally a lot of activity really. Was at around 2000 by day's end. Calibrating bench meters and collecting and samples doesn't take you far really.

So I went for a walk when I got home.

It was kind of chilly, but the sky was clear.

Down into the Sturt Reserve I went. It's quite the gully.

Saw a few ducks, some hares and a fox, and just tried to relax and enjoy the surroundings as much as I could.

There's a lot of water around the place due to all the rain we've been getting the last few weeks.

Work has been stressing me out a bit lately.

Being short-staffed is the main factor, to be sure. But also, dealing with other people's short fuses and impatience is what gets to me.

I'm a pretty strong believer in treating others as you wish to be treated.

They're all fellow staff members too though, and are generally good people as far as I know. So I don't hold it against them. We're all in the same boat.

Throw in a bit of sleep-deprivation from being on-call, and covering absentee staff-member's on-call too and you have all the ingredients for a nice Occupational Burn Out^TM soup.

Mmmmm, get that on your spoon and slurp, slurp, slurp it down your gullet, fella!

(what am I even talking about...?)

I also just realised that I messed up yesterday's post. It was for the 5th of October, not the 6th. And today's is actually for the 6th, but now needs to be (I guess) for the 7th because the more accurate title is in use by yesterday's post and... o-bla-dee, o-bla-dah, life goes on, brah!

What do you think of power poles?

Like in today's photo. Which is from my walk through a small part of the Sturt Reserve.

Perhaps you have no strong opinion about them one way or the other, which is what I imagine many people might feel if someone asked for their general opinion on the topic.

Not especially interesting. Not enough to warrant the formation of a distinctly expressible point of view. Perhaps? A part of life on the periphery of perceptual experience. Literally just infrastructure.

I think some of them are aesthetically interesting. More for their stark, purely functional form rather than any beauty.

They tower above human eye-level imposingly. Simultaneously familiar and mysterious.
Like, why are the pieces that connect the wires to the poles shaped as they are?
The one in the photo is pretty dull though, as far as they go.

There are so many different designs around the world too! Of which I must have only seen a fraction from internet searches and my limited domestic travels.

Well that about does it for me this evening. A post about my daily exercise morphing into an extended soliloquy on electrical poles is a pretty clear sign that I need to sleep.

So good night, sweet dreams, sayonara.

Until tomorrow!