February from March

Somehow February skipped by, with all of its back-to-school-and-tap madness, without making a mark on the blog.  So before March marches out of control, here's what went on in the last month or so. 



Climber started Year 9 and Cherub started his last year of Primary School.  Talk about grown-up.



They seem to have settled into their new year at school really well, despite Cherub being separated for the first time from his lifelong best-friend. They are doing well with it though, and it's quite sweet to hear them discussing with each other what they've been doing in their different classes when his bestie comes over for a regular Thursday afternoon play.  Probably can't call it a play anymore. Sniff.



Tap started back too, and is going really well. Good class numbers, excellent retention of current students and quite a few new faces too.  The tap-kids and I are madly getting ready for another performance at the Merri Creek fete. We're all very excited!



Climber got targeted by an unknown German man via his Instagram account and received some disturbing private messages which made me feel ill when I read them.  Not that there was anything highly explicit, and my feeling now that I've calmed down is that the sender was not an experienced predator and could possibly have just been a young gay guy trying his luck, but it's so hard to know who someone is just by looking at an Instagram account.  However, it is absolutely clear that Climber is only 14 years old when you look at his profile, so there is still a high level of wrongness, and the guy has been blocked, and other preventative strategies put in place. What I took a lot of comfort from, once the shock died down, was that Climber just thought the guy was being stupid and inappropriate and either said repressive things like that's none of your business or just didn't respond.  He is an awesome kid.  I worry so much about the corrupting influence of peers and internet and high school, but time and again Climber's true character shows me I needn't.



Fixit knocked down our cubbyhouse, seeing as how the only family members who used it were Fixit (for lawnmower storage) and Basil (for mid-afternoon catnaps).  I do feel a little bit sad, but it had to be done.  We've been looking around for a new place to live, but not with any luck so far.  We did find something which I thought was perfect, but they didn't even ring up our referees so I obviously need to work on how we present on a rental application form. Possibly we need to lie?  I don't really know how these things work.



We went to the zoo in the school holidays with Jen and her girls.  We rode our bikes there which made it even more fun. There's a lovely bike path the whole way there.



I took this photo against the seal window. 



Climber has grown so much since the last seal window shots in 2013.



We went Socceroo crazy during the Asian Cup, and were rewarded when Australia was crowned champion.  The final match was an absolute killer, it looked like we were going to win and then the North Korean team equalised with 1 minute to spare, forcing the match into extra time.  Cherub wept until the moment that Australia scored their second goal.  It was his first ever experience of putting his heart totally into a team and then finding that they could let you down.



Cherub has had his last ever primary school camp.  He had an excellent time, but was so tired when he got home Wednesday night that he didn't fully recover until Saturday.


Before camp


After camp

He also had his final primary school swimming carnival. Previously he has elected to specialise in breaststroke, but I wanted him to enter the other events just to see how he performed after all these years of swimming lessons.  He decided to go against this request, and I roused on him when I turned up at the carnival and found he was still dry; so having missed the chance to see how he'd do in freestyle and backstroke, he gave butterfly a go and got 3rd place. He also received 2nd in breaststroke and 2nd in the diving.  I just wanted him to enter to see how he went, not for ribbon glory, but I suspect having seen the rest of the field in the 12-year-olds, his attitude cost him a backstroke ribbon at the very least.  Anyway, the day after camp he represented his school in the breaststroke at the Zone Carnival and finished a creditable third in his heat.



I came home from tap on February 14th to find this lovely surprise on my pillow from Mister Fixit. I had forgotten it was St. Valentine's Day so I was even more gratified. Didn't have to hint or anything.



Fixit and I attended his cousin's wedding down at a winery on the Mornington Peninsula.  It was a very pleasant day, although it did seem a shame to be the designated driver at an event where the wine was likely to be very nice indeed!



Fixit's good shoes fell apart (the soles suddenly started disintegrating everywhere) so he had to leave the wedding between ceremony and reception to find a local shoe store. I think this is indicative of how little Fixit wears good shoes, but he should be set for a while now.



I made a wearable muslin of a 1950s style tea dress with princess seams, in preparation for some dressmaking at Crarf Camp, and I'm very pleased with it. The Tiny Tappers were very impressed, and somewhat distracted, by my Winnie-the-pooh dress when I taught them this week.  I sewed an invisible zip for the first time, not wholly successfully, but good enough for a practice dress.



And although there's more to be blogged, I am off to Crarf Camp tomorrow - yay!- so I will have more to say when I return.

When Will There Be Good News?

Because people care about us and they know it's been more than 6 months since Fixit's retrenchment, I've recently been fielding questions about Fixit's job-hunting a LOT.  And whilst I absolutely appreciate that these questions come from love and concern for us, I can't give a good answer to the question, so I am starting to find dealing with it (a) depressing, and (b) slightly annoying, because it keeps bringing up how anxious and frustrated I'm feeling about it all: primarily because nothing has changed and nothing appears to be about to change and the longer this goes on the more likely it feels that nothing will ever change.

Current employment climate aside, some of the no-change-in-the-situation status is because Fixit is dragging his heels on applying for jobs, initially because he wasn't sure what he should pursue, then because he decided to do the re-training at TAFE (part 2 of which is in hiatus while the TAFE get their act together) and recently, I think, because he is intimidated by the nature of job applications; the fact that he has to sit on the computer and find sites, and register, and then tweak and submit cover letters and resumes, and worst of all promote himself, is deeply off-putting for him, and he keeps finding all these very important tasks he needs to do in the shed instead.  Well, the man is a mechanic, not a desk-jockey.  Computers are not his thing.  I have put it to him that he really needs to start casting his net wide in the current job market, and that maybe he could delay shed-gratification until after he's spent a portion of his day at the computer looking at job sites and sending emails. And in theory he agrees.  But then there'll be a snippet of paid handyman work to pursue, or an important thing needed on his or a friend's motorbike and, well....  The other reason I'm finding it too-depressing-to-think-about is my lack of faith in the hiring process, probably due to the experience we had when he applied for work at Qantas all those years ago.  There are just so many hoops to jump through these days - a veritable rigmarole of submissions and tests and phone interviews and day workshops and only then a face-to-face interview - and at the end of it I'm not sure I have any confidence in the HR people to know a good worker when they see one, specifically in something like mechanical engineering which doesn't necessarily need a sparkly go-getter person who can talk the talk in an interview. My feeling is that his best chance to find a new job will be through someone he knows, but he can't sit round indefinitely waiting for that to happen.

So yes. That's where we stand, and as I say, the longer it goes on, the more depressing and uncomfortable I find it. We're still okay money-wise, provided nothing goes pear-shaped in our lives, and the rest of our life is chugging along really well, so meantime I may have to redirect all queries to the man himself. Otherwise kind and concerned friends and family might find themselves on the receiving end of me-in-a-state saying he hasn't got a job, he doesn't seem to be looking particularly hard and I'm starting to worry he'll never get one now, which will inevitably end with people trying to offer me helpful solutions and actually, although we've all done it, that's never really as helpful as people think.

(Having said that, if you have asked me recently how it was going please don't feel like you've done wrong.  This is about how I'm feeling, and I do appreciate the concern.  But I am starting to feel like the best approach is for everyone to trust that if we get good news I will broadcast it far and wide immediately.)

To counterbalance all this stress, there have been lots of nice things happening around here.

Astrid, Jenny and I celebrated 13 years of motherhood and friendship together by taking our teenage firstborns out for a lovely meal.





Cherub's school has introduced a new music program and Cherub, having watched his big brother learn flute, was keen as mustard to join. He has now had 3 lessons on the clarinet, knows how to play 6 notes and is less squeaky every time he shows us.



He was very proud to show his notes to Grandma when she came to visit, and even set up a music stand with his music book on it, despite not yet being able to read music.



When Mum was here, we took her to see my sister's new house, which was fun.



Cherub came second in the breaststroke at his school swimming carnival, which meant he got to compete in the District Carnival where he came a very creditable 4th in his heat.

 

And we had a fun night out celebrating Jen's birthday,





Plenty of good times, then, just no news as yet.  I'll tell you when there is.

Apprenticeship Blues

About a year ago, Mister Fixit gave up his lowly-paid job as a motorbike mechanic to become an Adult Apprentice Aircraft Mechanical Engineer. You can read what we thought about it here.



Fast forward to a year later.The reality of Fixit's exciting new job has been as follows:

The Workplace.

1. No long-term planning to accommodate proper learning for the adult apprentice intake. Random quantities of proper instruction. If he is rostered with a good leading hand then things will be good. But it's not unusual for him to be given tasks with incomplete instruction and help. Many days spent either lubing or removing/replacing panels. And of course, apprentices should expect a degree of hack work but they also need to acquire a variety of skills in order to qualify. Fixit is not convinced that anyone within the management remembers this.
2. Roster system completely crap. Fixit receives his roster 2 days ahead of it commencing which makes planning ANYTHING completely impossible. Said roster could include night or weekend work which is highly problematic for us given that I work 3 nights a week and Saturday mornings. Bear in mind that there is NO financial reward for overtime, evening or weekend work. Two weeks ago Fixit submitted a letter saying that for the duration of the apprenticeship he would only be able to work day shift, as had been agreed when he signed up. The response from the people he talked to was that it would take at least a month to verify this.
3. Nine and ten hour days standard for most of the year.
4. Random stand-downs when no planes in service making Fixit anxious about fulfilling his annual quota of hours.
5. Lack of any proper chain of command making it difficult to know who to speak to when problems arise.

The TAFE (schooling)

I don't think I can dot-point the TAFE so easily. Last year they received enormous amounts of material to work through in very short periods of time. For example, an A-Z of Year 11 Physics in a bit over a week. These very concentrated bursts of learning are followed by an exam. If a student fails the exam they are expected to pay $140 to re-sit. Handbooks are not given out in advance so you can't swot up before class time, and the handouts often arrive 2 days into the learning process. They have access to some online worksheets from the aviation industry but they don't necessarily conform with the course-work and are available only for the month when the subject is being taught. The TAFE itself is badly organised and the communication lines between the industry authority and the TAFE are laughably bad.

This year, being second year, Fixit and the others were hoping that they would be studying harder stuff but not in such a rushed and pell-mell manner. The preferred method of teaching appears to be an information dump, without practical examples or thorough backup to make sure they understand. What actually happened this year was that the material was indeed harder and more complex but it was taught dumped in exactly the same way. Making it even harder to take all this knowledge in is the presence of the young apprentii who muck around, whinge, or sleep through class and then panic at the end and take up all the tutor's time. Not that that is the TAFE's fault, but it doesn't help the serious learners like Fixit.



So this has been Fixit's existence for some time now. The rostering problems really only started towards the end of last year, but the TAFE stuff has been getting progressively worse since the start. It has been a really hard year for us. We're still on a terrible wage, but Fixit's hours got longer and more unpredictable. Not surprisingly he became more and more stressed and grumpy and frustrated and dispirited. We've been unable to really plan very much involving him. He's had no physical outlet to offset the ongoing stress; finding time to fit in regular exercise what with child-minding on my work nights, early starts and random work hours has been all but impossible.



Anyway, it all came to a head last weekend. I think it is one thing to sort of know you are stressed and another thing to work out you actually ARE STRESSED and that it has started to affect the way you function. In Fixit's case he went to try and have a bit of study prior to week of schooling and found himself staring at the worksheets unable to take in a single thing and in a state of absolute panic and hopelessness. He was convinced that his brain didn't work in the right way. And sometimes it takes someone else to say to you: this is not because you are too stupid to do this, it is because you are too stressed. So I guess it was lucky that I was around, and that I'd just read an excellent article by Stephanie Dowrick on stress. Because when we checked off the physical symptoms she listed as stress-related, Fixit suffered a whole lot of them: Flu-like symptoms, digestive problems, sleeping problems, breathlessness. All on top of emotional and mental symptoms, such as feelings of hopelessness. Not fun.



The upshot is that we saw our G.P. who immediately gave him a medical certificate to absent himself from TAFE for the week and prescribed some blood tests and some walking to begin with. And then we applied for some annual leave to give him a proper break. And whilst all this is starting to make him feel better, it only took the sms from his work informing him of his roster for the following week (night shift, despite his letter) to give him the jitters again.



Then Fixit's grandfather, aged 92, without any preceding illness to speak of, died peacefully on Monday morning. So we've had the funeral to contend with too. And the guilt about not having seen enough of Pop recently to contend with too. It hasn't been the happiest of weeks.



I'm not sure which way forward. We hope that the request for Monday to Friday day shifts will be granted, and that maybe we can devise ways to help him cope with the study load (it would be naive to think the TAFE will change the way it operates). I'm considering spending some of the fiscal stimulus money on a laptop and some wireless internet so he can study in the comfort of the loungeroom while I'm at work. The more he can get ahead of the TAFE workload the better he'll be. I think some regular exercise is vital, as is as much TLC as the boys and I can throw at him. And eventually we have to decide if it is worth hanging in there. We always knew the first few years would be tough, but it's been worse than we predicted. We need to find the balance of how much short-term pain for long-term gain we can bear. It's hard to know.