advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
How To Shop Emerald Gemstone: A Buying Guide
Gemstones are valued for their preciousness and natural flavors. Since most of the gemstones are extracted from deep inside the earth’s crust, they are already subjected to harsh temperatures which in a few cases, give the stones their much sought-after vibrant colors while in other cases, may cause them to develop inclusions in the form of cracks which may reduce their value.
By Vishal Batwara4 months ago in Journal
Sixteen Girls, One Cooler Box, and a Weekend in Mbombela I Did Not Ask For. AI-Generated.
How a man with no hockey knowledge ends up holding a whistle I am fifty two years old. I played rugby at a school in Boksburg in the eighties, and I played it badly, mostly on the wing where I could stand in the sun and look interested. I have never held a hockey stick with confidence in my life. I could not tell you, honestly, what a long corner is without checking on my phone first, and I have checked on my phone many times, and it has not stuck.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Bay We Stopped Parking Anything In. AI-Generated.
The room nobody wanted We consolidated in the spring of 2023. The borough shifted our second engine over to the station on the other side of the creek, which made sense on paper and still makes sense now, and it left us with a bay that had nothing in it but air. Sixty two feet long. Two overheads that we kept cycling once a month just so the chains would not seize up. A concrete floor with a trench drain running down the middle of it and forty years of oil laid into the slab in shapes you could almost read, like a map of somewhere.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Frame In The Corner Belonged To A Man Who Died. AI-Generated.
What the workshop smells like There are two smells in my life and I have never wanted a third. The first is frame paint. Not the stuff in a rattle can from the hardware shop on Sarnia Road, the real thing, sprayed thin and warm in a booth I built myself out of chipboard and an extractor fan I rewired twice. It gets into your sinuses and stays there for a day. My wife says she can tell what colour I have been spraying by how I sleep.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
Six Years of a Deduction I Never Read. AI-Generated.
The line I never looked at For six years I got a payslip from Charmaine every month, printed off her home computer in a font that was too big, and every month there was a line on it that said UIF and a small number next to it. I never looked at that line. I looked at the number at the bottom. That was the only number that mattered to me, because that was the number that had to cover rent in Boksburg and my share of the car and the food and whatever my mother needed that month.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
At Sixty-Three I Went Back to School Because My Granddaughter Would Not Stop Doing Sums. AI-Generated.
The child in the back room Lerato came to live with me in the March. She was fourteen then, and she brought two bags and a school shoe box full of pens, and she did not cry at the house. She cried at the church, once, briefly, and then she stopped, and I have not seen it since.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Whistle Only the Waveform Could Hear. AI-Generated.
The cupboard I work inside a cupboard. That is not a metaphor about the industry, although it could be. It is a genuine built-in cupboard in the spare room of my flat in Melville, doors off, shelves out, and the whole inside lined with foam I bought in Booysens and glued up myself on a Sunday in 2019. There is a duvet nailed to the back wall, a second duvet folded over the rail above my head, and a third one I throw over the doorway when the neighbour's gardener starts the blower. The duvets are the actual acoustics. The foam is decoration. Any voice-over artist who tells you otherwise has never had to explain to a client why their forty-second radio spot for a bakkie promotion has a faint hadeda in the background.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
Bar Forty Is Where I Keep Losing The Second Violins. AI-Generated.
The three weeks that were supposed to be three weeks I came off my bike on a gravel shoulder out past the reservoir on a Saturday in April. Nothing dramatic. A truck came wide around the bend, I moved right, the shoulder was loose, and the front wheel went out from under me. I remember the sound of the gravel more than the fall. Like someone pouring dry rice into a bowl. My helmet cracked in one spot near the back and I sat in the weeds for a while feeling like the world had been turned down a notch.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
Five Months of Beer That Tasted Like a Doctor's Waiting Room. AI-Generated.
The garage years I am thirty six years old and for two of those years I made genuinely good beer in a garage in Gqeberha. I want to say that plainly at the start, because everything that comes after is going to make me sound like an idiot, and I would like the record to show that I was not always an idiot.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
Twenty-Six Years of Bunks, and Then a Room With Nothing In It. AI-Generated.
My sister started it Ilse phoned me on the Tuesday I paid off the last of my tax and said, in the flat way she has said things to me since we were children in Goodwood, that I could not keep sleeping in her spare room like a parcel nobody had collected.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
I Kept the Knives and Let Go of Everything Else. AI-Generated.
The fan The last thing you switch off in a restaurant kitchen is the extractor fan. Everything else has its own small ceremony. The gas gets closed at the wall. The fridges get propped open with a wooden spoon so they don't go sour. The pass gets wiped down with the same blue cloth you've been wringing out since 2015. But the fan runs the whole time, so loud you stop hearing it, a sound that lives in the bones of your skull for nine years and then one night is simply not there.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Statements I Kept In My Handbag. AI-Generated.
The morning I stopped opening the post There was a specific day it started, and I only worked that out much later, sitting on the edge of the bath with the taps running so nobody could hear me. It was an ordinary Tuesday. The postman had pushed a handful of envelopes through the burglar bars onto the mat, and I picked them up on my way to the car, and instead of putting them on the kitchen counter like a normal person, I folded them in half and pushed them into the side pocket of my handbag. I told myself I would deal with them at work. I did not deal with them at work. By the end of that month there were eleven of them in there, soft at the edges from being carried around, and I had learned to hear the plastic crinkle of them every time I reached for my car keys.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
