Second quarter 2026 in review

The second quarter of 2026 has come to an end, and what a massive three months it has been!

Workload has been intense to (at times) borderline hellish, with three very large projects in play. I travelled twice for work, once internationally (to Auckland for a week in June). I also squeezed in a weekend away to the Mornington Peninsula with the whole extended family.

The three months was also chocked full of social and life commitments, including the festival that was my middle daughter's 21st birthday celebrations. I went to the theatre, the movies, parties, dinners. I hosted friends and family and was hosted by them. There wasn't a lot of slack in the days, the weeks or the months.

We've adjusted to our new normal as a household of three, and have settled into maintaining our relationships with my two elder daughters who now live independently. It's had moments of being bittersweet, but overall, I am very grateful that we have been able to remain close and loving in our bonds, physical distance notwithstanding.

Health-wise, it was a more challenging quarter, although no one had any severe infectious illnesses. However, my mother experienced serious spinal issues that had her hospitalised for a week and are still not resolved, while I underwent revision surgery for allergic polyp issues in / around my sinuses (which happened on Monday just gone - I am technically still in recovery!) Everything seems to be on the up now, but there are still more investigations and treatments in store for both mum and I, although (I hope and believe) no further surgeries. Given that I had my big sinus surgery in 2023 and had my gallbladder removal / hernia repair last year, my goal for the next three years is a surgery tally of ZERO if at all achievable.

It was also setting fair to be a low-reading quarter, with May and June basically logging a pitiful number of new books each, but I somewhat made up for it in July, as I put myself in a week of pre-surgery lockdown to avoid getting sick and then have been on sick leave this week recovering. I have got through 22 new books in the quarter in the end, half of which happened in July, mostly in the past two weeks :-P I've read some thinkers and some stinkers, some trivia and some gems, but if I had to pick a top favourite three from the quarter, it would be The Things We Never Say (Elizabeth Strout), London Falling (Patrick Radden Keefe) and Year of Wonders (Geraldine Brooks).

Creatively, I wrote a few poems, some of which I posted but most of which I didn't, and am also working slowly in the background on an idea for a longer poem cycle. I am not feeling creatively barren, despite not having bags of time, so that has been a real positive.

Highlights of the quarter were many, but here are just a few:

  • Theatre performances of The Glass Menagerie (with my husband) and Retrograde (with husband and friends) - both outstanding shows
  • Seeing H is for Hawk at the Sun cinema with my husband, accompanied by an online Q&A with the author (loved the book and loved the movie equally)
  • Family weekend away at my brother's friend's incredible Shoreham estate in mid-May
  • Fancy afternoon tea for my mum's birthday
  • My middle girl's 21st birthday dinner at Mamasita 
  • Trip to Auckland for a week in early June with my middle daughter (I worked four of the days, but we also had time and opportunity to do a fair bit of touristing)
  • As part of Auckland trip, a wonderful time at Weta Workshops, including a scar-making prosthetics class
  • My birthday family D&D one-shot (so much fun!!)
  • Book club most months
  • Birthday lunch with a friend at the wonderful Bathtub Gin in Williamstown
  • Birthday fish & chippies with my extended family
  • The absolutely wonderful orchestral score performance / screening of The Princess Bride (my birthday present from my husband :-)
  • Going ice skating for my little niece's first-ever time on the ice
I have added a few snaps below to give a little flavour. Onwards and upwards to quarter three we go!

Auckland Tower from our hotel room

Heading to Devonport from Auckland

Fun at Shoreham

The beautiful forest at Ashcombe Maze

Autumn!

The set for Retrograde play

As you wish :-)

Gin tasting at Bathtub Gin


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: Careless People - A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Image
I have just finished reading Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, Careless People, about her time working with the upper echelons of Facebook (2011-2017). I have more detailed thoughts (see below), but the summary version: it is a very readable and deeply troubling journey through a worsening landscape of dysfunction. I rate it 8.5/10. Caveats : First up, it's Wynn-Williams' memoir, and she paints herself in the best possible light - there isn't much taking accountability for the ways in which she also enabled, and in some cases actively engineered, some of the shadier stuff she talks about.  It's absolutely the case that she was the victim of a lot of truly execrable behaviour and decision-making, but one can be both a victim and a participant in the victimisation of others at the same time. Wynn-Williams was literally in "room where it happens", and her plaint that she thought she could do more good by staying and trying to influence people wears thin once things ...
Read more

Forgiveness (Poem)

It is strange, the day when you wake up in a pool of sunlight, your limbs loose in their post-dreaming lethargy and you realise that you can release the pain at last; that you can reach out your hand to the one who hurt you and say, we can go on, and I no longer hold that deep black well inside me dark and sad and full of knives. Perhaps, after all, forgiveness is more like love than it is like forgetting. It comes up softly and after many long nights cradling hurt places tenderly spinning gold from bitter straw. Perhaps it is the lovegift that you give your poor, sad, wounded past self to say: I see that pain, and I let it go and I do not hold the darkness anymore and I can hold out my hand again in kindness even to the one who hurt me and I can cherish the new flowers that grow on the grave of the person I was, before: the new life that comes from old things dying the things I learned from those hard dark watches the things the moon taught me, when it was just her and me sailing the ...
Read more

The perils of comparison when reading more than one book: Two book reviews

Image
 I have recently finished two books that I was reading simultaneously (actually I'm reading three, as my Agatha Christie re-read project continues, but two new-to-me books!) One of them was a book I'd not read by one of my favourite authors of all time, the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin. The other was a recently popular book that is my book club's selection for this month, so I was reading it to be able to discuss it properly at the meeting. I finished the two within a day of each other (Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven first), and I think that my judgement of Chosen Family, the other book, was undeniably harsher because of how incredibly good the Le Guin work is. This really magnified my disappointed feeling that Chosen Family was incredibly unsuccessful - as a story, as a character study, as a piece of writing. Had I not been spoiled for the mundane by Le Guin's elevated prose and complex ideas, I might have judged Chosen Family a little less stringently, although I...
Read more