Disorientated with Distractions

Regrettably I haven’t kept up to my commitment for a post every weekend, and its time to put that right. I’ve had rather a lot going on over the past few weeks, and have had even more on my mind. Two key events have taken place this month, the first being the Socialist Party’s Congress. It was the biggest event that I have been involved in with the party, much bigger than the regional conference that I attended previously. I’ve been so busy recently, mostly regarding this months second key event, of moving house, that as yet I haven’t put together an article on my experience and how my local branch participated, so I’ll have to just briefly summarise the experience for you; it was invigorating, inspiring and eye-opening.

In many ways, moving house has been an even bigger event, being perpetual broke, it was stressful to have to rely on others, both for their time, and their facilities for the actual logistics of the move, and it was even more stressful due to the fact that I have been forced to downgrade from renting a house, to effectively living out of a single room… which as had an even bigger effect on me than I could have imagined, and although I’ve been at my new place for nearly a week now, I’m still only getting used to it.

I’m still seeking employment, my CV seems to be doing what it needs to, only now it seems to be my interview skills that are letting me down… something I will have to develop. I know I have a lot to offer any employer, but I’m used to under selling my abilities and breaking that habit is hard enough, coupled with a very unconventional work history, and it ensures that gaining employment is the hardest thing on my to do list.

Now that I’m living closer to Leeds, I’m able to commute on foot, so I can commit to more interviews and development opportunities, which is a huge positive that I intend to make the most of whilst I’m living here.

Lots of Stuff, Right Direction?

I’ve got loads of stuff going on at the moment, or at least what feels like loads; Job searching, house hunting, enrolling for potentially 3 college courses next month and at the same time I’ve trying to develop this site, a branch website for the Socialist Party, and have now started a basic online course on HTML and CSS. Not happy with that, as of this evening I’ve also started work on a new e-commerce website, which I’ll be developing offline via XAMPP.

Trouble is, as much as I’m trying to stay busy and improve myself by way of developing skills and experiences, the longer I stay out of the work place the more I feel like I’m heading in the wrong direction. Instead of boosting my confidence and keeping me focussed on job applications, my focus is growing increasingly towards developing new skills, that perhaps won’t be at the top of of the requirements list of any prospective employers, for example I’ve spent far more time on improving my knowledge of WordPress and web development than I have on bringing myself up to date with Excel, which is likely more appropriate for the types of roles I am applying for. I’d no doubt feel better if I was drawing a living from being at home like in my online poker days, but even then it’s not what I’m after, having spent so much time being self employed or self unemployed, having a routine of going to work and keeping home life separate, at least to an extent is very much welcome. I can’t let myself become too pre-occupied with distractions that take the focus away from getting a job, however much those distractions may benefit me down the road.

Blog Update, Poor Title

I pondered the title of this post for a good 5 minutes… okay so that’s not that long, but still. Given that this site will be made up of a collection of different topics, with probably varying degrees of focus, and the fact I’ll repeatedly want to chat about whatever takes my fancy, I really need to develop a system of naming the posts I categorise as “casual chat”, both for aesthetic and SEO reasons… I’ll give it some thought.

Earlier in the week, as I mentioned I had an appointment to picked up some contacts to follow-up regarding some courses I need to take. I ended up being distracted by other things Friday, so I’ll be following up those leads on Monday. Another in road into improving my career prospects is to get my CV up on here, which is now listed under my new page, Hire Erika! The new page will only feature on the menu when I’m seeking work, so I’ll probably link to my downloadable CV via my about page too. In fact I’ll get that done after I publish this post. The new page is very short at the moment, effectively just acting as a place holder for my CV. I was planning to publish my CV on the page itself as well as making it available for download, but at the time I was too tired to lay it out nicely so I’ve left that for the time being. If I do publish it up, I think it makes sense to expand it and elaborate on my experiences, as the version I host here doesn’t have to be limited to the standard two or three page limit, that you’d aim for if you were mailing it to a prospective employer. There are probably some sophisticated techniques for displaying online CV’s in an interesting and creative manner, which I will have to investigate. Even if they don’t work on my current WordPress.com hosted domain, becoming familiar with the methods will help me should I move to another host.

Always trying to improve the site, and in doing so learn new, and refresh old techniques for working with websites and WordPress in particular I’ve made a few small changes to the sites navigation. I’ve created a new drop down menu entry for the site’s blog categories, and also removed the category widget which was displayed at the top of the sidebar. I did investigate placing other widgets up on the side bar, having created a little more room, but the ones I’m interested in are not suitable for my hosted domain.

Yesterday was a really good day, I did a proper good shop at the supermarket. Having ran low on so many things over the past few weeks it was really good to stock up again. I could still do to pick up more groceries, as a 1/3 of my shopping seemed to be taken up by toiletries and household items. Before hitting the supermarket I visited a local farm shop and picked up a bag full of vegetables and free range eggs. I hope to make use of much of the veg by making some vegetable pies, something I’ve only done a couple of times before, the first time making a bulk supply. There always a great thing to have in your freezer, easy to cook, surprisingly filling and packet full of veg I’d imagine fairly healthy despite the pastry, especially as I only use pastry on the top of mine.

WordPress support got back to me today regarding a problem I’ve had on the Socialist Party’s branch website I’ve been developing, so I hope to complete a couple of pages on their a bit later on. So far this morning, I’ve already finished the hoovering, had breakfast, done the dishes, emptied the washer and topped up my internet dongle, so its set to be a productive day.

About Emotivated Erika!

My About Page has undergone a rather massive transformation today, which was a rather satisfying task to get done. Within the updated page you’ll find a more detailed description of this site, what I plan to write about and show support for, as well as a section on myself, outlining a bit of history, listing a few hobbies and interests that I expect to write about. Tooked in down at the bottom is a link to my new Press Page, which currently holds a few quotes of mine regarding Occupy Leeds from regional media.

I’ve probably spent too much time on website and blog related work today actually, as I’ve still got a mountain of household chores that need completing, but it has been enjoyable and hopefully rewarding. Even more importantly I have got more work to do on career planning. Yesterday I did some research on various job profiles that I had short listed from the Next Step website, and later on I’ll continue with that, perhaps reducing my short list of careers I am interested in pursuing a little further. My main objective for tonight however is to get started on some star stories. Star stories are short “stories” you create to highlight or document your skills and experiences. There a useful aid memoir for filling out job application forms, updating your CV and can assist with preparing for an interview.

Before I get busy on tonight’s agenda, I’ll be rustling up something quick and simple to eat. I expect I’ll go with some stir fried vegetables, as I still have plenty of spinach, mushrooms and courgettes in the fridge. To ensure I’m not back in the kitchen looking for something else to eat within thirty minutes, I’ll prepare a jacket potato to go with the stir-fry.

Looking ahead to next week, there is a mountaineering club meet and Socialist Party branch meeting in the pipeline.

As predicted tonight’s evening meal / supper was a jacket potato with some fried vegetables.

Being Productive

Its been a long time coming, but finally after too many days out of the house and too many “comfort days” I have finally gotten in a productive day at home, and it an’t even finished yet! Sure things started off slow, waking up about 11am… and my guess is probably on the generous side I turned the heating on, made it just in time to catch my courier before she had to consider what to do with my mail and then went back to bed, and besides the odd dash to my desk to check Facebook or change the video I was playing, mostly for background comfort, there I remained… until a time, which would be unfashionable to disclose.

Well, eventually I dragged myself off my bed and turned off whatever video I was half ignoring, having seen it too many times, and from there I kicked my day up a notch, well several notches. The first order of business was to sort out the laundry that was drying on the clothes airers over night. The usual drill of neatly folding (read as dumping on temporarily on the sofa) anything that was dry, and replacing it with the surplus washed items awaiting its turn on the airers from my basket. Another load of washing in the machine, and the laundry component of my day was done, at least until the final load got finished in the machine.

The dishes were next. There are always more than they should be, I blame late night snacking, and the bad habit of being too hungry to sleep, but too sleepy to bother washing up before morning. Sharing my house for a few day’s and then spending an equal number of days crazily busy away from home, didn’t help matters, but eventually my worktop was visible once more. Think I took a quick dash to the local shop about this time, the lady, I suspect to be the owner, commented about me being in the paper, I failed to resist buying a pack of biscuits and soon after I was sat once more at my desk, munching biscuits and sipping tea.

The biscuits, as nice as they were didn’t hold my hunger back for long, so the next job was to get to work on lunch. Today’s menu, called for a bastardised version of Jamie Oliver’s vegetable lasagna, taken from his 30 minute meals series. .. I’ll skip the finer points, but dinner was ate and more chores got done

By now, my mom had returned so I could make the short trip to borrow her stock pot. Having defrosted three chicken carcasses the night before, a key task for today was to get to work on creating a new batch of chicken stock. Just in time too, as I used the last of my stock pile in the lasagna. A bunch of hours and a little boredom later and I’ve now got the first batch strained and in the fridge. It needs to cool enough so that I can drain off the surface fat, and whilst I’m waiting for that, the second batch is on the heat and will be ready in approximately 1.5 hours time… judging by the “quality” of the stock, I believe I can get another 2 loads out of it before it goes “too weak”, which I’m guessing will be a total of about 12 litres.

Wrapping up today’s productivity, I finally got around to narrowing my stupidly long short list of job profiles, I took from the Next Step careers website. I must have had at least 20, maybe even up to 30 job profiles, covering a reasonably wide range of industry’s, as my first step was to simply create a list of any jobs that appealed to me, mostly on title alone. After some advise yesterday, I am now tasked with reducing this “short list” to a much more manageable 3 or 4. My plan is to approach this task in stages, and tonight’s portion of that effort, which I started on just before I began writing this post, is to read the entire profile for each job profile and then categorise it into one of 4 categories. The categories I have chosen to use are; Available to me now, requires some training / experience, requires extensive training / experience and requires a degree. inevitably whilst categorizing each job profile I’ll realise I’m unlikely to pursue some of them, or after reading further decide they are not for me, so those will be left out. After an hour or so I hope to have reduce my current list down to perhaps half and be in a much better position to explore my next steps.

Only other news that I can think of is that I plan to commit more to this site, apparently posting regularly is key, so I’ll endeavour to try to have at least one post published every weekend. I may skip if I published something on the Friday and nothing worthwhile took my interest since, but generally I will try to get a new post up either on the Saturday or Sunday of each week, in addition to whatever ad-hoc posts get published also.

Switching Focus, again

Lots of stuff has happened as you’d perhaps expect from my last blog post. A surprise for myself, but perhaps not for some of my readers was that I got back involved with Occupy Leeds, and to a smaller degree the wider Occupy Movement. I remained on the fence as to whether I was “official back”, at some point I probably would have blogged about it, but as was usually the case with the Occupy Leeds Occupation, when there you get busy, and when living there, you get very busy and all sense of normal routines just flutter away. A quick stop by turned into a night stay, which turned into 2 day’s, there was a new “crew” on site, one or two I’d seen before under less pleasant circumstances, but the feeling was different, there was hope, and it was intoxicating. Soon I was on my way home, once more, only this time to pick up supplies, and from then I was once more a fixture of the camp… until near the end, when we parted ways for good… only to be reunited as part of the deconstruction process.

I probably should go into depth about those final few weeks I spent with the Occupation, but that’s for another post.

Since then I’ve been easing once more back into what one could say was to be my usual routine, spending way too long at my desk being less than productive, and then opposing that side of myself with bursts of frantic productivity, rather desperately seeking my next objective, but at the same time, enjoying the moments of calm before the storm. I’ve got a couple of new “ventures” in the pipeline at the moment, all of which seem to be being held up by one thing or another too, which is a shame… I’ve had an opportunity to further develop my web skills a notch however.

The focus now, needs to be on career development, or more accurately career choosing as I still haven’t rooted myself on to any sort of career path, but I’m hopeful my recent experiences will prove useful.

An emotional journey

Its been a hectic and emotional three weeks. An invitation to an event got me started on a roller-coaster of Occupation, which at least for the time being as now slowed to a halt. After seeing an event listing for an Occupy Leeds event, I happily signed up, after developing an increasing awareness of Occupy themes via Facebook and Twitter over the previous week. My reactions peaked when I realised this was an event without a group, I recall it being odd, and was excited about being involved in a movement from the group up, so I quickly setup a Facebook group, it was the 30th of October 2011. Soon after I was alerted to the fact that a Facebook Page had already been setup called Occupy Leeds, funnily enough both the Facebook Page, the group I created and the event had all been setup independently of one another. The same individual was then pivotal in linking us all up together, so even though each effort began as an individual effort, soon all 3 Facebook initiates began to converge into one unified presence, albeit with still a lot of independence.

A wonderful member of Occupy Britain was soon involved and hooked us up with the domain name and hosting for www.occupyleeds.co.uk and from that moment on I took on the role of webmaster, and loved it. I’ve used WordPress a lot previously, but this felt new and refreshing, it was a great pleasure in developing a new site that seemed to look more and more polished with each passing day and having our kind “sponsor” on call to help me tackle any difficulties made it a really enjoyable experience. For the next few days, things developed at a rapid rate, I setup a Skype account, however it got seldom used, I setup a Twitter account, the credentials of which have been used by the initial “founders” of Occupy Leeds and eventually other members who took on either a “web-role” or an “admin-role”. A forum soon appeared and I believe within a week, with help of our “sponsor” we had also setup an e-mail forwarding system given us the use of official looking e-mails, such as info@occupyleeds.co.uk and we even had a public phone number, working via a call forwarding system. These steps where crucial during the pre-occupation phase in my opinion and quickly became swamped after “occupation day”, which facilitated the need for a mobile phone for camp use to remain on site.

The occupation began rather haphazardly on the 11th of November 2011, I personally felt annoyed by the lack of organisation of the group as a whole, despite doing my very best. Perhaps I should have expected, to my knowledge only the 3 “co-founders” had met each other before occupation day, and everyone inevitably add their own priorities and biases towards what needed to be done, and how it should be achieved. After lots of discussions throughout the night regarding the setup of the camp, laid out in my absence whilst I was purchasing supplies elsewhere, the next morning, those of us who capped the night before got busy and remodeled the camp in time for the 2nd general assembly (GA).

My priorities at this time, was in setting up a well organised, functioning camp, so I recall being even a little annoyed that work had to stop to facilitate a GA, which felt a little pointless as tents still had to be fastened in place, etc… but it happened, and during this GA, the working groups were created, those already existing from the night before were either confirmed or modified. After getting other my frustrations with the actual camp, things got on nicely for a few days. There was a very small number of us who remained close to 24/7 and we all seemed to get on well. Up to a week in, a rift could have developed between those who remained at camp, and a larger majority of people who seemed to only appear for the GA’s then disappear, and to an extent I believe it did, though it didn’t halt progress.

Towards the end of the first week and into the second week, morale was low. After several nights myself and others ushered thoughts to the effect of another night with just 4 of us all day and all night and we may as well pack up. Bringing these concerns to GA, alleviated some pressure and we had a small bump in over night attendance for the next couple of nights. After two weeks I had, had enough and had to get away for a night at home, but you couldn’t really forget about the camp. I kept seeing things or being made aware of things that needed to be done, but camp life was so busy you can’t manage everything, and wish such low numbers around camp for the majority of time, especially in those early day’s, it was very hard achieving anything outside of keeping the camp running… and at least in my own opinion that problem has persisted to this day.

Up to 20 days in to occupation, more working groups have been setup, and they appear to be getting more organised, unfortunately that was tainted by a storm decimating the camp, and despite a call and tweet for an emergency meeting for the next morning, at most 3 people turned up until well into the evening, leaving us very under-manned to rebuild the camp. In the end we did a very through job of rebuilding the main tent and stabilizing the smaller sleeping tents, but the camp was a mess, and remained so for several days afterwards.

At 3 weeks in, the camp and its surrounding movement has enjoyed some real success, we had an awesome day when Billy Bragg graced us with his presence and sang a few songs, and a large presence of support from the N30 strikers also raised morale. However, the camp is still plagued with fundamental problems that have been present from day one, despite my best efforts these have developed to an extent, where I feel my presence on camp was a waste of energy, so I pulled back, hoping and expecting others to step up and take more of an active role, and to an extent that did happen. The camp so an influx, albeit small of new people, who were keen to keep the camp running, fetching water, charging the battery system and keeping watch on a night, etc. Sadly the day shift, has ever has been increasingly forgotten about, less and less people turn up during the day, and any active engaging with the public on a day-to-day basis has effectively ceased all together in my opinion. I tried to re-kindle things, but in part due to my lack of familiarity with “Occupy procedures” and my overt frustration over what to me is clear inactivity and inefficiency of everything from inter-group communication to even handing out information to the public, a key objective of the camp, those efforts have not amounted to enough positive change that I feel I can remain as part of the current movement within Occupy Leeds, without driving myself mad with frustration or driving others away.

It’s definitly a sad day, but also a relief to be away from what seems to me like increasing reactionary red-tape and hypocrisy. As of today I class myself no longer a part of Occupy Leeds, and wish everyone still involved a safe journey and good luck.

Job Seeking

I’m job seeking at the moment. A fair part of my day is taken up by checking e-mails, sending out speculative e-mails, searching for jobs online, and after all that I like to spend a bit of time reading articles on improving my employment or career prospects. I’ve found a few useful articles available via the Monster Jobs site recently which are worth mentioning.

Monster.com Last-Minute Interview Preparation