Work is fun

Sometimes two & a half days at work is just not enough. And sometimes two & a half days at home with the kids (not counting weekends) is not enough. I think I've made this comment before - as have many. It's a difficult juggle, and sometimes it feels like everything loses.

But overall I do think it's pretty great. And I feel lucky, although we did plan it this way. Chris and I joined the public service mostly because we knew kids were on the horizon and we wanted jobs with more security, more money, and especially the option to work part-time. Also, for my part, I just wanted to try to figure out what it was they were doing inside all those huge public service occupied buildings here in Canberra. I'd lived here most of my life and still didn't know how they worked or what they could possibly find to do.*

At the moment I'm working in a job where I sometimes feel in over my head and sometimes feel pretty competent. It's not much writing or editing, so that's different for me, but it's a lot of web stuff, so that's familiar - except it's more technical than most of the work I've done before.** In fact, most of my real experience for this job is from my play time, rather than my work time.

So it's challenging, and at the same time I feel like I am formalising and filling out some skills that I've been working on for a while, so that's really nice. And just lately there's even been discussion of Web 2.0 technologies (yo, blogging!), which of course is a particular area of interest for me, even if here (as almost everywhere) my ability to keep up with has been seriously crimped since the birth of Liam.

This week I was flat out at work. Today I arrived at 7:30, left at 5:00 and worked right through lunch. I wouldn't want every week to be like this, but sometimes - well, this may sound odd, but it's invigorating. Of course, the caffeinated coffee and chocolate I finally had at afternoon tea time might have helped with that too...
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*The answer, by the way, is plenty - and then some. But I'm still not clear on what a lot of it is.

**Which isn't to imply that it's terribly technical or anything. Not by the standards of the rest of my team anyway.