Howdy, y’all. I mean Mom, the only person reading this. And I guess whatever bots and crawlers are scouring every nook and cranny of the interwebs.
I had good intentions in Belgium, and then the days started getting long. My ability to function with little sleep is drastically reduced (or my need for sleep is substantially increased), so waking up at 5 and doing stuff while KrisDi or whoever I’m with is still sleeping just doesn’t work any more.
After getting back from Belgium, I had a grueling series of workweeks, and as of right now I’m kind of caught up. It’s a holiday, and my primary plan for today is to process photos and get a post or two done.
My boss continues to approach retirement, and is very much in a backseat situation now. At this point, I’m reasonably convinced I can do this job and keep my sanity (although that self-deprecation is a habit that I’m having to re-examine). If I actually look at things rationally (which is surprisingly hard when evaluating myself), I’m doing many things really, really well.
We had our board of directors meeting immediately after Belgium, for which I was unprepared, which is bad because I was coordinating 11 presentations or demos, most of which were given by others. It ended up a pretty serious success.
That leapt right into a bunch of other work things that would be routine if I wasn’t learning how to do my boss’s part of the same things — project reviews (now I’m the reviewer), salary changes (now I’m balancing the whole group instead of just proposing for my direct reports), managing (now I’m mostly managing managers), teaching other people to recognize and raise issues to me and learning how to deal with these random challenges directly.
Anyway, I’m going to process another day of photos and then go back and work on my open draft of one of the days in Belgium. Some really good stories from that trip, it was awesome.
Not sure I want bots crawling around, but you can’t stop ’em.
You are exceptionally capable, though I continue to be amazed at your organizational skills. Your entire brain must have been taken over by the right half. You are not the little boy who sat in the middle of his room in tears because he didn’t know how to decide where and what to start cleaning up. Bravo, my sweet—but don’t forget to take fun time. Lie on the grass in the sun, watch clouds go overhead, play games with the family, walk in the woods. Just don’t lose the spontaneous, ebullient little guy inside, trying to get out now and then!