what I did on my winter vacation

I survived.

Not without many tears and complaints launched Upward, naturally.  But I get that He gets it.

Soon after my Mo’s passing in late October, something came along to consume 150% of my time and  focus  — my job, and specifically an impossible 12/31/12 deadline for a huge project delivery.  A death march, as we call it in my line of work.

I survived that too … met the deadline, passed the subsequent audit, tossed it all into the company Bonus pool, and even had a few Bonus drops splash back on me …

… but not without developing extreme crankiness about all things Work and even more extreme disdain for my management.  A few weeks after the beginning of the year, at peak of crank, having worked eight days in row, 12-14 hours days, on the stupidest shit my “Can we chat?”-at-any-late-hour-they-felt-like-it-management could dream up,  my phone rang at a late-hour, flashing Caller ID Guess Who.  Ignoring the air raid siren screaming in my head, I answered.  The bomb exploded a short fuse later.   I hung up on Guess Who and fired off my  resignation.  Oops.  Maybe I should have lined up another job first.

Utter peace and contentment and the joy of having something real to worry about (money) reigned on my planet for a few unemployed weeks, then another organization in the same company hired me back.  The Grace of finding a job quickly came along with a decent sign-on bonus, no loss of tenure, a line of work I love, much less management ineptitude, much less actual work, a bit less salary, and a solid and pleasantly nutty team to play at work with.

The bad news is that anxiety and panic are still my near-constant companions.  Worse since I lost Mo, yes, but I understand why.  The toolbox gets a lot of examination, restocking, reorganizing.  Drugs are necessary.  The good news about this bad news is that I am now in therapy with a psychologist and some of her insight I find completely fascinating.  I am not buying all of it quite yet, but some of our talks are very enlightening.  She is part Native American and she brings some of her understanding of spirituality into her therapy, and my spirit connects with that.  My spirit also connects with her taste in jewelry — turquoise and silver.  There will be many posts about what I am learning from her.

To conclude this catching up episode, there is a new horse.  Actually he is an old horse, borrowed from a local trainer who loves him to pieces but doesn’t have time for him.  His name is Legend and he is sweet, sound, unflappable, work-loving, people-loving.   Hanoverian, 17-2 hands (extra-large),  patient, quiet, affectionate and willing to partner with me to work on low level dressage while I wait for my next jumping horse and the $ to pay for him/her to fall from the sky.  In the meantime, I am enjoying building a partnership with the Big Boy and learning new stuff about horses.  Legend is a completely different being than Mo, but he is turning out to be a patient and agreeable teacher like Mo was.

the Big Boy … up three steps, then tippy toe, then jump into the stirrup.

Legend’s first dressage show. He was a good boy. The rider (me) sucked. But we made it through our test without any unscheduled dismounts.

Life has been much worse.

Hell Hath Another No Fury* …

… like a claustro-socio-group hug-execuspeak-“now pick a person seated at your table as your partner for the next activity”-phobe trapped in a gigantic Hyatt Regency ballroom with no windows, seated smack dab in the middle of 600 other Company Conference lemmings all shouting at the same time at the tops of their lungs because they can’t be heard over recorded Adele belting out “Rolling in the Deep”  at concert-mega-decibel-belt, this choice of music I have no doubt chosen to elevate the Hip factor of the event, the chooser oblivious to the fact that Hip Company Conference has been, by the laws of physics or something, long ago rendered inexorably an Oxymoron of the Highest Order.

there are no words

Don’t get me wrong.  Adele is one of very few contemporary artists that I enjoy listening to. In fact, next to Bonnie Raitt she is my favorite female singer.  Not just because she can sing.  But also because she pulls off gorgeous-with-pudge so very beautifully.

TURN IT UP.

awesome performance.

How.  Ever. I know what you are up to, Company.   Don’t treat me like a moron and try to snake-charm me with Adele.   The message of this two day Leadership Conference is what the message always is:   Do More With Less.  You can call it New Company Culture, Agile and Nimble, Trusted and Trusting, WTFed and WTFing, whatever the F  you want to call it.  You didn’t need two days of me held captive in a hotel next to a freeway with sirens and too many people and too much noise and too much talking and not enough air and not getting my real work done and counting and recounting and splitting and resplitting my few remaining Xanax doses¹, that Safeway won’t auto-refill, because my nurse practitioner, who put zero refills on the Rx even though she wrote the Rx as “1/2 to 1 pill twice daily as needed”  and who “wants to see me” before she oks what she already f-ing prescribed, and who is getting fired btw, for that.

All you need to do, Company,  is say “Carol, Do More With Less.”   And I will try, since you are the Company and you hired me to work for you.

But working for you does not include attending conferences at which I cannot actually do my real work.  Particularly since I stepped down to 10 mg Paxil, where the roller tends to be on the downhill side of the coaster when I am not getting the peace and comfort I get from being stressed out by my real work.

The nutshell, which I know normal people usually do first:  I rendered myself inexorably AWOL for all but 90-stuck-in-ballroom-basket-case-minutes of the two-day conference.  I worked in my hotel room.  Or parked myself and my laptop inconspicuously in an out of the way sports bar with windows one floor above the gigantic ballroom and therefore out of clear view of the Conference Attendees Police, and worked there.  Also successfully AWOLed myself from the Dinner and Party-to-Follow segments of the Agenda, via Room Service.   Which was pretty good.

I thought I had Gotten Away With It too.  Until they unloaded us from the Company-provided bus after the ride home.  My luggage was not on the bus.  Because I didn’t put it on the bus.  I assumed that since there were courteous and friendly Luggage Dudes who took my luggage from me, carefully tagged it and carefully stored it in the Awaiting Bus Departure luggage area, there was an implied commitment on the part of the Luggage Dudes  that they would also carefully stow it on the bus for the trip home.  But, because I was AWOL, I missed an announcement during the Closing Ceremonies or whatever that had something to do with attendees putting their own luggage on the bus.

Thankfully, the bell captain found my forlorn forgotten bag in the Awaiting Bus Departure area and the concierge is shipping it to me.  At my expense.

The moral of this story:  If you go AWOL, you will have to do without your favorite moisturizer for a few days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* previous Fury

¹  ala  Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marian Ravenwood (trapped with Indiana Jones in the Well of Souls, surrounded by thousands of poisonous snakes kept at bay only by a single torch on its last remaining sputters):  “Indy …  the fire is going …. OUT …”

Paxil 20 – Patience 0

So far, I have weaned myself down by half — from 40 mg to 20 mg.

I am definitely feeling it since the drop to 20 mg 5 days go.  But nothing really horrible, honest.

My normally very very long patience fuse is basically gone.  I am very easily annoyed, wired up, quickly reaching peak irritability at little things.  Not really my normal self.  But the part that is still normal is that I remain very easily amused.

The irritability manifests mostly while I’m working — remember, won’t you, that I LOVE my job.  Really.  It is a great job.  I am helping my company implement Health Care Reform.  Politics aside, actually non-existent on my planet, this is very good work for someone like me … Federal and State laws, intense deadlines, really complex business and systems problems to solve, really smart and hard working people to collaborate with, a few morons to keep things interesting (and ANNOYING), working at home most of the time because I have too much to do to spend commute time to drive into the office.

Aside:  My workdays have been so intense that I have dispensed with proactive feeding of horses at home, which requires about 15 minutes — go find the hay cart, drag it to the hay barn, fill the cart with hay, deal with the annoying hay twine, drag the hay cart down to the pasture where the horses are, toss hay over the fence, fill the water troughs, chat with Pootie the Cat.  To save this 15 minutes that I typically don’t have when meetings start at 8 am and go to noon,   I have invented Horse Fast Food, which takes about 3 minutes:  Go to the barn gates, open them up and call the horses.  Wait for the first one in line to come through the gate.  This is usually Rainy, the Pork Butt sorrel mare center front in the photo below.  Point the lead horse to the hay barn.  The others will follow.  Voila.  Horse Fast Food.  Hours later go check on the horses.  For no reason.  Because there is Food, there is no need to go anywhere.

So let’s talk a bit about the Morons, since this is how my patience fuse got blown a few times this week.    These are people that have jobs in my company.  Mostly they are merely voices, since we do most of our work via telecom and Webex.  Some of these Morons are actually very intelligent people.  They just don’t do anything except speak a lot of words to demonstrate their intelligence.  I go into meetings with a mission, agenda, things that need to be accomplished so I can get Something Done and then get onto the next conference call.  Morons go into meetings to talk.  Some of them are academics — they know a lot of stuff, and they need to tell everyone what they know, all of the time.

Some are really Sales or PR folks deep down, they talk as a performance.  They “raise issues” and poke holes at things and speak the Execu-speak that they think makes them sound like they are VP material and if they keep speaking that way, eventually someone will promote them.

Some are merely auditory communicators — they have words stacked up in their esophagi like big long freeway traffic jams and they MUST speak each and every word in the order in which they have stacked it, without variation of any kind.  If you interrupt them, or in my language “So-and-so, there were too many words in what you just said. Could you restate more concisely?” , they raise their voices and backtrack, rewind and start over where they were five minutes ago.  I could really go truly psycho.  If this happens on a conference call,  I Mute and Multi-Task  — do something else while playing the phone meeting voices on low volume, sort of like the Relaxing Sounds of the Ocean that my clock radio has to help me fall asleep to.  That I still don’t fall asleep to since [1]  I don’t sleep in the room that has that clock radio in it,  since that is my bedroom and since Insomnia Galore, I can’t fall asleep in my bed and [2] also because of Insomnia Galore, relaxing sounds of the ocean are really annoying sounds of the ocean.

To finish up with the Morons:  I try to punish them for talking so much by giving them ACTION ITEMS.  These are tasks that the Morons need to complete.  This only works to the extent that I get the malicious glee from causing them to panic.  Since they usually don’t have to do anything other than produce words, like the balloon words that come out of the characters in comic strips, they get a bit weird about getting Action Items.

Aside:  Sandie will remember that we had a long philosophical, first year of college-age discussion, possibly under the influence, about what would happen if all of the words we spoke could be seen coming out of our mouths and floating into the air, like in comic strips.

Many other symptoms … head (brain/jaw) zaps (feelings of electrical shock); high energy/wired feeling; loss of appetite.  The loss of appetite is really strange.  I really don’t have desire to eat — I do, of course, but only when my stomach is screaming for something.   Pacing.  Racing thoughts but not like those that come with anxiety episodes.

I am still taking the Relaquil for the natural anxiety relief aspect.  I am convinced it is making a major difference.  I am dealing with all of these symptoms pretty well, and even the anxiety hits have been short and pretty easily managed.  And not to forget my major source of therapy — Mo the Horse — continues to be a huge help.  We are back to jumping again (bad ankle steadily improving) and so, the utter terror of jumping helps keep me calm and sane.

Ok, now that did sound a little nuts.

Stress: My surefire cure for anxiety

You might have noticed the absence of posts the past couple of weeks.  There are two reasons for this.  Reason #1 is that I have been rethinking FFFF and formulating Plan B, since Plan A has not been a huge success.  Or even close.  Like not even in the same county.   Or hemisphere.  It’s all good, however,  because I have successfully fooled myself into having high hopes for Plan B.  More on that tomorrow, which just so happens to be April Fool’s Day.   What better cosmic timing for launching a fresh start?

Reason #2 is that I have a day job that requires me to work hard and a lot.  Inconceivable as it might be, writing does not earn me any money.  Yet.  Until it does, I get jobs to earn money.  In the past couple of weeks, my current engagement has gone from a really-busy-but-mostly-normal day job to a day-nite-wee hours-early morning-lather-rinse-repeat  job.

This is okay with me.   I love-love-love my job.   If I have to work and earn a living to be able to afford my lifestyle and The Horse and the Internet satellite dish on my roof that allows me to blog and toy with fiction and buy handbags on-line and, come to think of it, do my day job nights and weekends from ranch, then I might as well be enjoying it.

I love my job even more that it has been a wee bit crazy lately, roughly equivalent to the wee bit crazy that is the resident population of Napa State (Mental) Hospital.   Crazy amount of work, crazy fast-paced environment.   But not criminally insane.  I don’t think.  Yet.   So yes, stress.  But that kind of stress that comes with riding the rollercoaster at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.  Exhilarating, terrifying, screaming fun.  What’s not to love?

My career orientation has been project management, since 1986 or so.   Mostly systems engineering and IT projects, with a few others sprinkled in here and there.   Federal, State, County and commercial projects, small, medium and large.  I have been a contract consultant “hired gun” in this for about ten years, prior to that an employee of a large beltway bandit for most of the time.

A Project Manager is something like the Ringmaster of a three-ring circus.   (Remember, you are on my planet now.  So bear with me.)   The Ringmaster’s goal is to deliver the Greatest Show On Earth, or whatever the audience of customers is paying for.  A talented Ringmaster not only delivers the show, but creates and maintains non-stop delight, amusement and awe  in the customers so they want to come back again and again and tell all of their friends and co-workers about it.

The show has to start and finish on time.    Performances need to be going in all three rings simultaneously.   For each ring, the schedule of acts is performed in sequence, with careful timing of the finish of one act to the start of the next.  Each act needs to be performed with experience and precision and showmanship, and without injury or death.

The circus environment, the Big Top, must be constructed for efficient, repeatable set up, maintenance  and disassembly.  There are the logistics of finding performers and putting them in costumes and scheduling their acts in the show.    There are risks and costs to be managed to ensure the Circus makes a profit and gets good reviews from Circus critics and doesn’t have lawsuits from the dancing elephants getting loose and trampling the audience.

There is sawdust and popcorn and hot dogs and cotton candy and clowns and acrobats and heavy labor and quick thinking when something unexpected happens.  Like when one of the tamed  lions temporarily forgets it is tamed and eats the lion tamer.

This job requires spinning a lot of plates, and knowing which ones to let fall, and how to let them fall  gently with forethought, without breaking them,  so they can be picked up and set spinning again later.  It requires juggling, swinging on a trapeze without a net, and careening around the ring in a teeny tiny toy car with 13 other clowns squished inside with you.    All at the same time.  It requires energy, cheerful enthusiasm,  the ability to make order, or the appearance of order, out of chaos.  A healthy sense of humor.   Calm in the midst of frenzy.  Friendly co-existence of humility and arrogance … enough humility to make the success of the Circus the most important thing, enough arrogance to inspire energy, confidence and a vision for a better Circus with more and happier customers next season.

Stress, yes.  But perhaps you can see now how anxiety,  the disordered sort that I suffer,  has not even been a twinkle in my bloodshot eye the past few weeks.  Except maybe for a touch of claustrophobia that struck after one  too many hours in back-to-back meetings in a conference room in San Francisco’s Financial District.  But even I can do claustrophobia if it’s in a San Francisco high-rise.  And my boss, who is a Grand Master Ringmaster and someone who I want to be like when I grow up, was very understanding.

So, it should go without writing that I have been living, thanks to God’s grace and provision,  fully and full-time in my top train the past few weeks.   Hoping it lasts!

P.S.  Stay tuned for FFFF Plan B.