Work, work, work!

It's been an extremely busy and tiring week, at work and outside of work. The end of my 3-month probation period is coming up and I'm working on completing the performance goals my boss & I decided on a couple of weeks ago, which is making me feel unusually nervous.

Outside of the office, I've joined a new badminton group that plays every Wednesday night. This week there were 2 courts available but not enough people turned up to fill them both. I ended up being on court for virtually the full 2 hours, which was great, as I was in good form that day, particularly my serving which has plagued me of late, and won the majority of the games I played. However, it tired me out terribly!

On top of an extra badminton session, I had 2 voluntary proofreading assignments, both with tight deadlines and due within a few days of the other. What timing! I spent a whole afternoon editing 2 relatively short Word documents, mainly because I decided to insert my comments and explanations in Japanese. I guess I didn't have to put in as much effort as I did, but since it was for hardworking Japanese junior high school kids (yes, I'm still getting requests from my ex-supervisor in Jpn), I wanted to give them all the help I could. The second assignment was to proofread an English translation of a Chinese newsletter article. This was a first for me and though it took longer than I had expected, due to my unfamiliarity with the terminology used, it was a good exercise. It was very interesting to see the different grammatical mistakes made by Chinese and Japanese learners of English. Maybe I should've majored in linguistics rather than business...

My youngest brother is at the stage where he has to select his university course preferences. I was looking through this year's university course guide with him, and wished that I had put more thought into what degree I truly wanted to do. I had considered a wide range of options including Optometry, Nutrition, Architecture, Statistics, Astronomy, etc. (maybe too wide?) but I doubted my own strengths and opted for the broader and more practical degree of Commerce, majoring in Finance (among others).

My parents had urged me to pick Law because they thought it would be useful. I myself wasn't particularly keen on the idea, but thought I may as well give it a shot and, being the dutiful daughter that I am, applied for a combined B. Com/LLB degree. (And it didn't help that I got the marks to get into the course.) I ended up dropping the Law degree within a week. To be honest, I wasn't especially interested in Finance either and didn't want to do Accounting coz Mum's in that field, but I did like working with numbers.

Don't take me wrong. I'm not disappointed with what I chose to do. What I learned at university has come in handy at times, plus I made some great friends.^^ In retrospect, I should have used more 'heart' rather than just go with the flow.