This week, share an image that highlights a size relationship — make us pause and take a second look to understand the scale of the elements in your photo.
For more information on Canton Tower one of the world’s tallest building see my earlier post. It dwarfs people and is difficult to photograph due to its size.
Is there a place in the world you never want to visit? Where, and why not?
I love to travel.
If money were no object I would travel to more countries across the world. From my experience, more can be learnt about different cultures by getting off the usual tourist path—we have traveled recently to regional China and Canada in winter. Learning about a country through its history joins the dots on why things developed and are the way they are.
When my husband and I are considering traveling to a new destination, I ask myself the following questions to discover if it is a place we can visit now. Even if the answer is no, it doesn’t mean it is a place I never want to visit. Everywhere has something new to offer.
If the answer is yes, we reconsider visiting if the situation changes. In the meantime we will go somewhere else. We will never stop traveling—meeting new people and learning new things as it takes us out of our comfort zone and allows us to grow in ways we couldn’t imagine. Bring on our next adventure.
Here’s the title of your post: “An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse.”
Set a timer for ten minutes, and write it. Go!
The most important offer I couldn’t refuse was my first job. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I finished high school. I was 18. I had my life in front of me and only two prerequisites for my job—I wanted to work with people and I didn’t want to be a general nurse. Th world was my oyster but I didn’t know how to open the shell to get the pearl.
At the time my mother was working in the post office in the telegram department and noticed that the delivery boys were making a lot of deliveries to the local psychiatric hospital, literally up the hill. She inquired and discovered they had advertised for six trainee psychiatric nurses. This was a job mum thought would suit me, so she was excited.
At the time I didn’t know much if anything about psychiatry, but the more I investigated the keener I was. It was a type of nursing that dealt with people not bedpans and I was encouraged to talk to patients. Yes. This was my job and now I had to get one of the positions.
After two interviews, despite my young age I was offered a place. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. My career psychiatric nursing started 34 years ago on Australia Day—what a way to celebrate. It has been the perfect job for me. Now called mental health nursing, it has many areas of expertise. It has taught me many skills and allows me to help people get through very difficult times in their lives.
I am grateful to Matron for believing in this young woman and helping me find my pearl.
Tell us about a teacher who had a real impact on your life, either for the better or the worse. How is your life different today because of him or her?
Teachers are about education. And from my experience good and bad teachers teach you skills, even if it wasn’t what they set out to teach you. My school years were the late sixties and seventies—a different era. Most of my teachers taught me well and used skills that I consider imperative today when interacting with or teaching my patients.
In 5th class however, my teacher was the opposite. He made my life so difficult. He picked on me, made me the laughing stock of the class and criticised everything I did. This lead to poorer marks that meant my grading in high school was lower than it should have been. Despite this I worked my way back up and the gifts I gained from him are RESILIENCE and a never say never attitude. All of these skills and qualities combine to make me the person I am today. It is all part of the patchwork quilt of my life.
Tell us how your week went by putting together a playlist of five songs that represent it.
I was excited to see the topic of today’s Daily Prompt. This week for me has been varied and interesting which is unusual. My week began on Monday with Australia Day, which I celebrated with my blog post Celebrating Australia Day—an A-Z of interesting Australian information. The song I selected to represent this is “I am Australian” by The Seekers.
On Wednesday evening I participated in my Toastmaster club’s International Speech competition coming third. It as a fun night to end a particularly busy day at work. As there are no songs on speaking competitions so I choose a new song dedicated to Toastmasters International to represent this part of my week.
Friday evening saw me joining colleagues for farewell drinks with one of my staff leaving to work overseas for a few years. It is an exciting time and many memories were discussed.
On Saturday morning my husband and I attended a travel expo and began planning a trip for our 25th wedding anniversary later in the year. We haven’t made any decisions yet. However, I think a tropical holiday is in order and “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys represents that well. Unfortunately, Jamaica is a little for us to travel for a week so won’t be the destination.
Today my husband finished putting up glass shelves above my desk. They are to house my expanding Mickey Mouse collection in one place. We have planned this for about the last 5 years, so it is exciting. Now I just need to find everything and arrange them in a display.
This week also saw the completion of two other tasks we had planned since last year. On the public holiday Monday I did a Spring clean of all my kitchen pantry cupboards. I found things I didn’t know I had as well as made a lot of space by throwing out many bags of expired or no longer required food and containers.
Over the last two weeks we have had an opening and closing pergola build over our courtyard. On Friday after a week of rain the electrician was able to come and complete it. We are very happy with the result and look forward to using it now as an outdoor indoor living space.
In Australia we are now into February. I can’t believe how quickly this year is moving. January was a very unusual month. It was filled with many different things and many goals were completed—the question is will it continue from this week and month into this year. I hope so.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/playlist-of-the-week/