The past month has been busy.
First, I headed to Dublin for a work trip. When my manager asked us in our internal chat room about going to Dublin to help another team with work related to a service we owned, I jumped at the chance. I’m usually (if not always) open to learning from new experiences, so it wasn’t a stretch for me to put my hand up.
This isn’t my first time to travel for work though. My last foray into that was a trip to Singapore more than a decade ago, helping a customer profile their system. They flew me in since I had the necessary expertise, you see, having written the critical piece, and I knew my way around their system enough to understand what needed to be done to get reasonable data.
Travelling to Singapore from Manila for several days is quite different from travelling to Dublin from Sydney, at least for me. I’d not needed a visa for that gig years ago, and I needed one now, which meant a mild case of visa anxiety.
Then there’s the whole travel time.
The only flights I could find going to Dublin from Sydney all had a stopover or two. It is, for all intents and purposes, the other side of the world after all, and the total flight time would be in the order of a whole day, so – yeah.
The trip as a whole was pretty productive, and I had a smidgen of time to do the touristy thing – I went on a literary pub crawl, which was quite an interesting way to visit some of Dublin’s pubs and learn a thing or two about the literary and historical greats who frequented them; I also paid a visit to the Book of Kells and the Long Room, which was quite marvelous.
Once I got back to this side of the world, I had to deal with getting back into the groove of things – a couple of weeks out of the rhythm and flow of my team’s sprints and whatnot put a bit of a damper on my productivity. Or maybe that was just all how jetlag manifests for me.
Yeah. Maybe blame it on the jetlag.
Thankfully, it was a blessing of sorts that I was rotating into on-call, so that gave me some breathing room to catch up with everything.
I’d also been planning to catch up with a few friends from high school in the area; we decided to try out the Night Noodle Markets over at Hyde Park. I also decided this afternoon to finally get myself a library card, after months (nay, a whole year) of procrastinating – quite apt, as visiting the library over where I currently live brought back memories of high school.
So. Again: busy, busy. I think I’m back to my regular schedule here. Hopefully.
Previously: Borrow?