Monthly Archives: March 2020

Working from home – finally

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Well I am now officially working from home- I pretty much told my boss that I was no longer coming in, its far too dangerous and I could either work from home or go on leave.

My immediate boss is very supportive and bang – it was arranged just like that. The relief was enormous.

DD found out last night that she will also be working from home now. She needs to go in to the office on Monday morning to get some supplies and then the three of us are staying put in this house.

We have plenty of food in the stockpile and once we make it past the 21 days we’ll know that we don’t have this virus.

DS is still working which worries me. He’s in an office and they are taking all precautions but I am hoping they will close this week. 
The numbers in our town have gone up including some medical staff from the hospital. It still all feels a bit surreal. I’m glad most people seem to be just self isolating despite the slowness of our governments response and increasingly confusing directions. 
So this weekend I need to create two more workspaces at home and I have some cooking to do. I am looking forward to having some time to get in and do some jobs around the house and garden and possibly use up more of my fabric and yarn stash in the coming months.

Shut the schools!

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Our state STILL has schools open!  I am pretty angry about it, we have been told to prepare to work at home but it seems like no-one has the balls to actually call it.

So far this week I’ve spent my work days dealing with very distressed students and mental health crisis – all by phone. And packing up my workplace, sorting paper files, delivering training in preparation for working from home. I hope to God they tell us today or I am just going to take leave.

In Australia we’ve had thousands of people put out of work, we’ve seen lines around the block at Centrelink offices, and their website keeps crashing as people are trying to register for welfare. Quite a few of my clients or their partners have lost jobs in the last week. I expect that DS will be laid off soon as well. DD is just waiting to be told to work from home, hopefully today.

Right now I’m grateful that we are so far ahead on our home loan and that we don’t have debt. DH & I’s jobs are pretty secure and we both have long service leave and plenty of sick leave (months) to fall back on. We had a courtesy call from our bank yesterday which was nice. Home loan payments can be put on hold and to contact them if we need to re-arrange finances in the future.

So at times like this its normal and natural for us all to be anxious and feeling stressed. I’ve cut my TV viewing way back, news just half hour morning and night – I only need to know whats happening locally. I’ve cut back social media – and  I’ve started exercising in the morning to help manage my stress.

I also wanted to mention a wonderful, frugal forum that I have been a member of for many years. Simple Savings  is very low cost, it even has a ‘leg-up’ program for people struggling financially and its filled with so much wisdom, frugal tips and community. My day would not be the same without it. They also have a Facebook group but I found it was very, very different to the forum, just not the same sense of friendship as the forum. So if you are looking for frugal help hints and frugal friends I can truly recommend Vault membership @ $21. Fiona is also updating her book ‘$21 challenge’ to release it as an e-book soon.

Ok, thats enough for today, just quickly sharing my thoughts before I head off to work. Take care, take a moment to slow down and breathe, we will get through this xx

Busy, busy, busy!

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Its 2 am here and I’m just sitting watching CNN, eating a roast beef sandwich, decompressing from a very busy day!

Australia has now closed its borders.I was surprised our government actually did this but I think its a good move. We now have a confirmed case in our town.

They are still insisting schools stay open though. The Catholic education system had made the decision to close schools but then the prime minister intervened to prevent that unfortunately.

There were meeting yesterday, and there is another one today to discuss staff working from home. I spent yesterday contacting my clients and setting up phone/video appointments, copying files that I will need and sorting paper files that I’ll need to take home, attending meetings (all online) and doing some training.

After work I did my second job via Zoom, instead of face to face as that organisation has already shut down and is working from home now. The person I was working with yesterday hasn’t done any tele-health work so we spent most of our time planning for that. I had discussed me leaving but as they are now also working from home we’ve decided I will keep working.

By the end of the day I was really tired, but I actually had a good day as I was busy and productive, I feel good when I can help people and at the moment my experience with tele-health & teaching is useful for many people who don’t use technology everyday in their workplace.

So I’ve had a few hours sleep and today I have more training, phone/video consults. I’m really hoping we get the ‘work from home’ go ahead for next week.

In other news we had busloads of people come into our town and raid the three supermarkets – then they moved on to two other towns nearby and raided them. They hired a bus, drove 3-4 hours to panic buy out our town and its infuriating to see people so greedy! I had read about this happening in another state but never expected it would happen here. Its interesting how differently people can respond to a crisis, some with kindness and others with selfishness. I do believe that kindness wins out in the end.