What is that yellow thing in the sky?

It was a very wet July in New Zealand. It was cold in June. It is shaping up to be quite a winter. I wonder what August has in store for us? I’m a little over it, although it’s encouraging to see the days getting longer, a little bit each day. Soon the stretching out of the days will be really noticeable, and we will be on our way to spring, even if the weather conditions don’t improve much. The daylight will help. I sit in office cubicles pretty much all day right now, apart from when I move to go to meetings, even within the cubicle farm that is the Ministry of Health, or to another venue. Cubicles do tend to be the default habitat for the non-executive public servant in Wellington. I gaze across a sea of heads each day. Well, actually, only about 15% of their heads as the cubicle partitions cuts off their faces. Its a little spooky actually if I think about it too much.

I think I’m missing my clinical work but its too difficult to keep chopping and changing out of it, so I’m resigned to not really getting to do any more for the rest of this year at least. Next year, perhaps. Its all pretty busy in terms of Wellington work in central government. Most are picking the general election to be at the latest possible date that Labour can call it – that will be November 15th. Electioneering has certainly stepped up, with Labour phasing in tax cuts from the beginning of October, and the right-of-centre National Party slowly revealing their policies, sometimes not as they perhaps would have planned to. It is certainly true that all this election activity is having an impact on the sort of work we do. There is no end to number of requests for information we are getting either through Ministerial requests or through the Official Information Act (1982). The workload pressure is certainly ramping up. Roll on summer and the election.