Mid-year review

Wednesday night I stayed up for the second night in a row trying to come close to finishing a big report for work. With my 2 p.m. Thursday mid-year review meeting with my manager looming, I have tried to use the valuable extra time – when it turned out that last Thursday was a week early to get further ahead. I did not finish the report – though I made a lot of progress. My Thursday last week I had almost finished a shorter research summary and finished a draft of a survey – both of which my manager had wanted done by this week. I made more progress over the last week planning for clients for the next few Presbyterian Panel meetings, partly by taking the initiative and scheduling meetings with people my manager or I had thought might be promising clients.

Wednesday afternoon I had discovered that I had filled out the written Mid-year review wrong, and so I redid Wednesday afternoon and gave my manager a new copy.

Recall that one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve faced at this job was the ANNUAL (end of the year) review meeting with my previous manager 2 ½ years ago. And in January the new manager was a little tough on me for not getting some things done, and there was plenty more material to work with in this meeting (plenty of missed deadlines, according to the pretty ambitious schedule he had adopted for me in my 2009 performance goals. But this time he wasn’t tough on me. I had noticed that it appeared that one could actually change goals – including deadlines – mid-year – maybe even after one had missed some of the mid-year goals. He didn’t go for that but he did say in the section to the right of each goal I could not only note the goals I had achieved but also say something about why I’d miss other goals and re-set new deadlines for them (trying to be neither too conservative nor too aggressive in this deadline-setting is complex).

Some of those reasons in general include me having to still do more of my old job for a while this winter and spring, data problems with two projects, and perhaps a somewhat steeper learning curve than we imagined for this new job (my manager conceded that – since he’d been doing it for 21 years – he might not have entirely appreciated how much learning new things it would all entail).

Trying to prioritize things – which projects to try to finish first – is still sometimes a quandary – especially projects where there is not a deadline looming that a client set – just something we want to go ahead and get done for its own sake.

I always wonder – what we will come up to talk about – and then we go on forever. This may have set a record for me – 1 hour and 20 minutes – it’s just that we spent the majority of time talking about things over than the review. Also discussed were the following topics:

- his family’s new cat
- our struggles with another office partly over a controversial Panel summary he once tried to release early, our church’s Evangelism Committee
- the Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership whose meeting I’m going to with colleague Gail in three weeks and whether we can afford to stay in and whether I should stay on as Outreach Committee chairperson
- focus groups projects and how two newer colleagues had done on projects on which I worked with them

On the whole, our two managers still supervise what I do pretty heavily – and this comes new with him since he wasn’t a manager before and our old manager was in some respects pretty hands-off and so now there’s two of them – I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I’m getting all of this free, on-the-job training in areas that – I must confess – like survey research that I did not have that much experience with. On the other hand, it all feels like a lot of unnecessary micromanagement sometimes.

Anyway – pretty good review meeting – I’ve got a lot of work to do (including a little bit I’m taking on our vacation) – and – unless they have surprise big September layoffs – my job should be OK at least until the annual review in December (we’ll see if I’ve made any of my deadlines by then).

We tried to nail down our plans for leaving Friday afternoon to visit with Stephanie’s West Virginia relatives, and then on Saturday morning to a family reunion in a nearby town. But Frisco is sick – probably from something he ate on our Tuesday morning walk – and he’s staying overnight at the veterinarian’s – which may delay our departure. He may stay with the vet/at the boarding place at the vet’s – where they can monitor him, instead of staying with us in West Virginia and Ohio (and boarding for just 4 ½ days near the airport in Ohio while we’re in Vegas).
Frisco hadn’t eaten or defecated for a couple of days and he moped much of Thursday – though as we were dropping him off tonight at the vet’s he was pretty energetic.

Another companion animal complication: Thursday morning I noticed that our female turtle, Speckles (pictured below resting after the big event), who had been trying to lay eggs for several weeks, had indeed laid half a dozen eggs overnight. I was able to pick up all of them – she didn’t lay any more later this morning – and rescue most, setting up the whole incubation process again. By nightfall, at least half of them still seemed OK – others were sunken in. We already have a long list of turtle and plant care tasks that we’ve asked our friend Jessi, Vincent’s former prom date, to stop by with her mother to handle. Drying off some of the turtle egg incubation contraption is just something else we’re adding to that list, but we do feel a little bad about it. We’re hoping for turtle babies one of these summers.

Stephanie did try reaching Vincent by phone on Thursday, but he didn’t pick up. In the long run, this is a little worrisome because we don’t know exactly where he is, as his father may have moved.

More mix of news: We were unnerved to get – as I do each year – a renewed call to pay back my student loans – which I usually stall by getting economic hardship forbearance – while the government pays for some – but not all – of the interest that would be accruing. We’re already paying Stephanie’s back each month – and this is hard enough, even with help.

Better news: Mom says that Aunt June’s throat cancer is in remission, which is a big pleasant surprise. She still has trouble eating and still has a bunch of other health problems. But beating the cancer – at least for now – is a big miracle itself.

Another slightly unnerving event: I got into a little bit of an argument with one of our neighbor’s sons when we came home and a car – of a guest of theirs, it turns out – was parked in our carport. This is an important neighbor relationship since we and they share a driveway that (even though it’s technically mostly on the property of the house we rent, we still have to maintain cooperation/good spirits.

You might pray for contined healing for June, Frisco, and Speckles – and for my work and our finances

-- Perry