Well hello blog, remember me

Dear Blog

I'm sorry I have neglected you for months but I have been really busy.  Work continues to be a source of problems.  The site I work on is closing and the staff are leaving, well all be over by the end of August. 

In true Project Manager style I analysed the risks and decided that the major risk would be that the global Project Manager vision wouldn't work and our group would be next out of the door.  I did a quick gap analysis (get me with the worky buzz words) and realised my CV was missing an actual Project Management qualification.  Everything has been on the job training from one company.  So I decided that the way to go was to get an official qualification and show I know how the job should be done not just how the company I work for does it.

So I put myself in for an exam without doing the course, bought the books and spent the last few months revising in preparation.  I sat the exam recently and frightened myself because I found some of the questions very easy making me think I may have missed something.  One of the 10 questions I totally messed up but overall I think I will pass.  Fingers and toes crossed, results should arrive in the next few months.

My next step was to polish my very, very out of date CV.  When I say polish I mean start from scratch as it is 10 years since I updated it.  Finally completed a basic CV that can be easily customised for different jobs and all ready to start applying.

JUST IN TIME:

Last Wednesday we got the notification that plans have changed and our jobs are now at risk!  Spent the remainder of the week listening to the rest of the group saying they saw this coming and that now they need to start updating CVs etc.  Confused, if you saw it coming why have you done nothing?

Have 5 job opportunities to apply for, all of them have things that sound interesting and I know I can do them although all but one would be somewhat different from my current job.  CVs will be winging there way through electronic mail early next week.  Wish them luck if you have a spare moment!

On top of all my planning for this I have had to deal with work itself.  It has been horrible.  Without moaning too much I just need to say that the company has decided on really unrealistic timelines for closure and transfer.  So many things haven't been considered and it has been a nightmare recently.  As none of you know who they are I think it is reasonable for me to say that I am disgusted by their lack of customer focus and consideration.  They haven't treated staff well but we are costs so that's business but customers are your profits and future income, you'd think they would be trying to protect relationships.  Bitch over, not really my problem but when you have worked with clients for years it is hard not to care about them.

Away from work all is good, Mr Midnite has been very supportive and continues to infuse me with his positivity.  The furry girls are as usual wonderful and always ready with hugs and doggy licks when the day has been stressful!

Mental health wise the stress of work hasn't been a great help.  The situation is pushing my pharmaceutical support system to it's limits but I refuse to let it break me.  The doctor has let me have a few sleep tablets and the difference the occasional good nights sleep makes is unbelievable.  I have heard before that there is nothing you can't handle if you get a good nights sleep but now understand this. 

Knowing that I have been doing positive things to improve the situation as helped massively and I'm confident I'll find  nice new job soon.

Hoping my blog will forgive me for my extended absence and that I can get back to writing soon, I do miss it.

Lots of love
Mrs M

Pearls

I have been thinking about things, not always the best idea but apparently the off button on my brain is missing.  Anyway one of the things that I was thinking about was how things haven't been going very well for me recently.  If you read my blog you will know I've had neighbour trouble, car trouble, redundancies at work and my gran is ill.  These thoughts could easily have become a self pitying path to depression but they weren't.

Instead I was thinking about how well I have been handling these things.  I have been stressed, upset and angry but not to the extreme.  I have been able to carry on with my life, going out, working and seeing friends while these unpleasant things were going on.  Not so very long ago I wouldn't have coped with these things, it could have gone two ways.  I would either have stressed myself into a manic mess where I would likely have gone a bit crazy with excessive going out and shopping, remember the handbags?  Or, I would have plummeted into a major depression and stayed in bed.

Mr Midnite would tell me that the bad things have been sent to show me I can cope.  It is easier to be positive when everything is good, the challenge is to stay positive when things aren't.  I used to get depressed sometimes for no reason so if something did happen I had no chance.  Now I have difficult things in my life and I still feel OK.

Not sure if I'm explaining this very well?

Anyway to reach the pearls from today's title.  I have a charm bracelet and I buy myself the occasional charm that means something.  I have a little heart to remind me to love myself and a little dog to remind me to be happy.  I went into the shop today to try and find something to signify turning negatives to positives.  I had no idea when I went in what that would be I just knew something would be there that would represent what I wanted.  I browsed the shop for a while and then spotted just the thing. 

When I saw it I immediately thought of how pearls are formed by the shelled creatures.  A little piece of dirt gets stuck inside and causes irritation so the creature forms a pearl to protect itself.  From an irritation it produces a thing of beauty.  A positive from a negative. Perfect!

Dear Santa

Dear Santa

I have tried hard to be good all year so I thought I'd write and ask you for a present.  For Christmas please could you make my Gran better. 

Thank you

Dear blogger friends
I'm sorry I can't write much today.  I am trying hard to be positive and not let things get me down but my Gran is very ill.  She is in hospital with a perforated bowel.  They are trying something first but if that doesn't work she will need major surgery.  I am really worried about her, she is in her 80s and has a bad heart.  I'm too far away to visit easily.  I want to go and see my family but with the current situation at work I don't think I'll be able to.  It is one of the rare times when I wish I wasn't so far from my family.
Please send positive thoughts (or pawsitivity).
Thank you

Faith

Recently I lost a little soul who was very close to me and it brought me to the obvious question - what next?

I don’t have the type of faith that leads me to believe that there is a better place waiting for us after death. I would like to have that deep seated belief that nothing can shake but the truth is I don’t and never have.

I love the idea that after death we all move onto a place where we will get to see the people we have lost. I want this to happen, I want to be re-united with my Gran and to get a chance to know my Grandfathers, one that I never met and one who I remember only as a big man. I guess as my life goes on there will be more and more people to add to this list and more reasons to hope that I will see them again.

At the moment I am most missing my little dog, my near constant companion for the last eleven years. I watched her go to sleep in my arms and I did it for all the right reasons but I'm still not sure if it was really right. Who gave me the power to decide if she should live or die? I want to believe that sometime I will see her again and that she will understand what I did. If there is a heaven, a better place then she deserves to be there, probably most dogs do.

Deep down I’m a scientist, I can’t just accept this idea without a hypothesis to prove or disprove. When I speak to people who have faith they know they are right so they don’t need proof. I want to believe but I can’t without knowing. I can’t know so I can’t believe.

I do believe in God but I don’t do religion. I think that the universe contains more than we could ever know or understand. I think that there may be higher powers (a God or gods) that have at some stage influenced us, but if this is the case much of it has been twisted by people hungry for power and control over others. I think it is human arrogance that leads us to believe we could understand the will of a God or gods. I think people take what is there and use it for their own purposes, adding strength by saying it is "the will of God".

At the base of all religions are some lovely stories trying to teach us how we should live. As far as this goes it is great, we all need guidance on what is right and wrong, how to respect each other and how to cope with difficult times. How do we know the stories came from beings that were more advanced than us, they could just be stories written by clever and insightful men and women. Maybe heaven was invented so that people would accept poverty and hardship here because of the promise of something better later. Nothing in the religious texts proves they came from God, not to me anyway.

I have read accounts of life after death experiences, people who died for a short time and had “out of body experiences”. The often repeated images of hovering over your body, seeing a light and even seeing family members on the other side. It sounds good, and maybe I should accept this as proof but the mind is a wonderful and complex thing. At the point of death the brain is firing rapidly and could easily be producing images, hallucinations. If you have heard these stories, seen them in movies or have some knowledge of religion these images could be recreated in your own conscious at the point of death. I hope this is not the case, I hope that it is really the light from a better, cleaner, purer place and that your friends and family are there to welcome you.

Something I am fascinated with is psychics, people with the ability to speak to the dead. I don’t understand this and it seems that there should be an explanation. I have watched the TV shows where a guy stands up and gives people messages. Some are vague and the things said could apply to a lot of people but others are so specific and seem to really know things they shouldn’t. John Edward I find particularly interesting, he has often told people things they didn’t know and he is so insistent. The audience member then goes home and speaks to other members of the family and it turns out he was right. That rules out one of my theories that he was somehow reading their minds (hey I’m talking about speaking to the dead here, why is mind reading less believable). So that leaves me with the idea that they have really good researchers. Maybe if I had the experience myself and was left thinking there is no way he could know that I would believe it was a message from “the other side”. See I want to believe this to!

So can I take the evidence here and use it to give me faith that there is something after death. If I had faith I wouldn’t need this evidence to prove anything because I would just know. The fact that I need the evidence means I don’t have faith.

I can’t know so I can’t believe but what I can do is hope.