Dustin LindenSmith

...and even then, it wasn't a very good one. I haven't paid much attention to this scene or my blog for a hell of a long time. Probably since last summer sometime, I guess.

So how is everyone? I'd love to hear a hello or ten...

I feel like I have fallen into a black hole of work. Some kind of vacuum out of which I fear I'll never emerge. This gig started with a good-paying contract position where I worked from home, and then, I now realize, I succumbed to an ego play to accept a promotion and a raise to a Management Position, which came with more responsibility than I care to consider and more hours than I care to work.

So here I am, with a few spare minutes before B comes homes from a late-night study session, and a long list of personal things to do that I don't feel like looking at because I'd rather just take a break for awhile...

So, what news? B and I are training for a half-marathon (13 mi/21 km) at the end of May, and it's going well. Every week now, I'm surpassing my previous longest distance ever run, and I still can't believe how amazing it feels to run for that long. I never thought I'd be one of those people who said that the run starts to feel best AFTER the first 5 miles. Amazing! Have also lost 15 lbs since Jan 1, so that's a good thing too.

B's studying like hell for her medical licensing exam she writes in late May, and once that's over, she's sailing smooth until her residency officially ends in June. Looking forward to that, when she'll start drawing a nice salary and the heat will be off of me to put in these kind of hours at work. My plan, which I've shared with few except B and the guru, is to resign my management position at this company and become a 3/4-time programmer instead. 6 hours a day man, nothing more, and occasionally less if they like. I'm currently managing the department, so would hope that they'd consider me qualified. The question is whether or not they'd accept my offer.

Z is 22 months old now (wanna see more?), and I can't say enough about her. She's one of the biggest reasons I want to stop working so damned hard. By the time we get home from work after picking her up from daycare, we're both knackered and only have a couple hours of quality time with the girl before she hits the sack. It's too sad, really, because she's so fun to play with and hang with, it'd be way hipper to be able to spend more time with her in the mornings and afternoons. Hence the 3/4-time job I mentioned earlier.

B will probably have 2-3 years of hard work ahead of her while cutting her doc chops in earnest, but she has chosen a subspecialty which should yield high dividends without super long hours and bad on-call duties, which should allow her to scale back her own schedule within a short enough period of time. Quality of life is what we're looking for, not big dough. If we can be comfortable working 3/4-time each, then we're doin' that.

I'm just so burnt from working for the Man, you know? Yeah, y'all know.

(This is a fun site to play around on. So is this.)

The days pass so quickly now, what with this full-time, demanding management job. I think the work is akin to a martial art, in which I deflect, catch, grab or redirect the myriad requests, questions and tasks that come to me throughout each day. I have a staff of three which are all excellent, and in the three weeks since I've begun working with them, we've all learned how to dance together fairly well.

On stress: Yesterday, at the height of our workday (2-5 PM each afternoon gets quite busy), my right hand girl said in frustration, "I can't handle this! It's too much! It's crazy how much they're asking of us! There's no way we can finish this in time!"

I turned around in surprise. Had we reached that point? I hadn't noticed. Was I deflecting so much to them that I wasn't feeling the stress for myself? I looked down at my to-do list: 9 items left, all due that day, and not nearly enough time left in the day to get them all done. A supposedly stressful situation, no? But I didn't feel it. Couldn't feel it. Had to rely on the others to indicate that it was actually a bad, stressful day.

Oh well. If they say so, I guess.