So its raining outside

My bag is pretty much packed for a trip down to Christchurch with Tash and I'm sitting semi watching Antiques Roadshow on the Living Channel. It's already 11 oclock and I should be finishing off a proposal which might contribute to my moving back into the world of gainful employment. Today was a bit of a late start as I didn't get back from the gym (that's four days this week!) until just after nine.

It's great having my laptop back! Not the least because it lets me capture random thoughts. Yesterday at the gym I was listening to a audio book version of Stephen Covey's The Eighth Habit. He was talking about the change between the industrial age and the knowledge age and how many businesses still operate under the industrial age principle where machinary and plant (capital) has value and people are replacable. Whereas in a knowledge economy the value of a business is in the knowledge of the people who are working there. He also talked about co-dependency of dysfunctional thinking that reflects that and how most people when hearing him talk about it tend to think how someone else should really be listening to this.

So to resist being co-dependent (as I was contemplating previous places of work as I listened) I thought about what that might mean if I applied it to me. It's quite difficult to put into words but it seems to translate that people aren't easily replaceable and in fact that I am uniquely knowledgable and valuable - there isn't anyone who can do what I do, the way I do it, because it depends on my brain and how I synthesise and organise information and ideas. This has all kinds of consequences as how we value ourselves and our skills - but given the pervasive dysfunction the cynic in me wonders if it matters that much.

Total distraction - there is this elderly lady on AR with two "odds and ends" from her mother's sewing cupboard. One is an engraved silver bodkin which she uses and the valuer has just said that it was made in 1649! And he can't identify the maker from the hallmark because the records were destroyed in the great fire of London! The other was a little tool for skeining thread which was dated at about 1720. (and the combined value was 700-800 pounds!)