A roller coaster ride

Plenty of ups and downs at the moment as I get used to my new role and we both deal with the cultural differences and the general way of life round here! John has endless issues to deal with and this week was no exception - guess it's just the complexity of his role and the amazing things they are all doing, but there always seems to be something. However, he always seems to manage to calmly sort things out and yesterday's life or death crisis gets managed for a new calm tomorrow!
I think most of my crises are ones of confidence and purely of my own making. I am so keen to prove myself, get things done and feel like I have a list of achievements chalked up, that it frustrates me so if I don't think I'm making enough progress. I also find it hard to strike a balance between being proactive and creating my own plan and doing things which people ask me to do which don't really seem to fit with any plan at all! I had a suggestion this week that we should be sponsoring trips to the zoo for bright school children - now where did that come from?! I was dying to quote Albert and the Lion or the TV programme 'Our Day Out' where the children all bring the animals home on the coach but thought it might be taken the wrong way! I spent hours writing the Employee Handbook to make it more engaging and user friendly only to be told that they preferred the blank, bullet point style and I dread to think how they'll react to my restructuring and rewriting of the HR newsletter!
One of the most difficult situations is the confusion around who is the marketing manager, the current lady is an absolute sweetheart and we are working together really well despite the company's best efforts for us to compete, but neither of us was expecting the other, so we've ended up with two people trying in theory doing the same job. We complement each other really well, since my experience is more around strategy and comms and her's is around design, corporate ID and events but without some clarification for us both it can be confusing. Whilst the two of us get along just fine and work well together, it would be nice if things were a bit clearer.
I've been meeting up with event organisers in order to create an overview of the profile raising which we could do via sponsorship and events which has been fascinating. The latest one this week was Adrenaline Sports Live which sounds like fun and a mysterious systems security conference, which sounds right up our street!
I met the CEO and Chairman very briefly when we arranged a photoshoot to get some decent pictures of him. Everyone talks about him in honeyed tones and he is certainly a very impressive guy. I am hoping to get a slightly longer audience (I think 10 minutes is about the maximum) sometime soon to hear more about his vision and to get a better feel for what external messages he would like to communicate.
Both John and I comment on how tired we are, despite getting lots of early nights. When I'm driving round I listen to the radio, airtime crammed with ads for after work activities and places to socialise and I wonder who has the time and energy for such things? Everyone I know is constantly exhausted by the pressure of working and living in a strange place - we're probably just too old and the younger generation manage to combine work and life just fine!
I used to get up regularly at 5.30am to go to Boots for meetings but round here if I have to get up anytime before 6.30 it feels almost impossible. It has to be possible to do more without getting so tired, we probably need to take more exercise, but with a working day which actually starts at 8am, that's difficult. We're both really looking forward to our trip to the UK in March for John's birthday. Especially now that my boss has signed it off - though can you believe it, they count the weekend if you take holiday which goes across one, so what I thought was going to be 8 days leave is actually 12! That is so mean. Fortunately I also have an unpaid leave entitlement to it looks like I'll be dipping into that. Right now time off seems more attractive than money!
Anyway the week ended on a high with an email from Mum to say that her friend Jo has managed to find a dog sitter so they are able to come and visit us in April. We are so excited about this - we've been on the hunt for a new bed for the empty fourth bedroom so she doesn't have to sleep on the sofa bed and I've bought more towels - you can never really have enough towels I find - even in a country where you can get a whole load dry in less than 2 hours!