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Well, Gustav is blowing through, and I’m actually a little scared. Just about every tree has dropped, at my guess, 1/3 of its branches. Some have cracked halfway up; others just dropping limbs as big as a 16 inches in diameter. I live in an older neighborhood, full of trees, which is what makes it so wonderful, until a day like today, and then it’s just downright scary. 3-4 more hours to go… Every time the wind changes, a new set of limbs drop. One fairly large tree, on our property line, just in front of both my house and my neighbors, just broke halfway up and fell just onto the edge of our neighbors house. Hopefully not too much damage, but you can’t really tell because the whole thing is as tall as the house. (They are ok.) Gonna be fun to clean all this up…
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Today, I’m sitting around the house, waiting for Gustav to come and go. The transformer around the block has groaned at least 4 times already this morning, so I’m guessing the neighborhood will be without power, shortly. So far, things have been relatively calm. We’ve had several inches of rain, and a ton of small twigs, leaves and branches clear out of the trees. Every little bump or thump makes me look up out of the windows.
It’s funny how people have different attitudes about hurricanes. I grew up here; to me, they are big nasty storms that you prepare for a little, and then you just wait through them. Sometimes you come out just fine, sometimes you lose something. Or everything. It’s just part and parcel of living down here. To be fair, Baton Rouge is the first stop out of the evacuation zone – so what we get is not even comparable to what the true coastal zones take. I’ve never evacuated, never left everything behind knowing full well it might not be there when I returned.
My husband is from California and Texas, and his attitude is wholly different. Maybe it’s just the humidity down here, but he views losing power for a few days or a week as about the worst thing that can happen, short of our house being destroyed. To me, it’s an opportunity to really clean out the fridge. Getting a gas-line automatic generator seriously eased his nervousness about personal discomfort; we’ll have just about everything except our washer and dryer, unless something breaks a gas line. Our refrigerator may not get cleaned in its lifetime.
EOC and LSU this time are completely on the ball. I assume part of it is our change in governmental leadership, and part of it is the lessons we learned from Katrina. My husband works at the EOC during emergencies – one of his office’s functions is geological mapping, so he helps provide maps of water levels along with a whole bunch of other stuff. He said that EOC yesterday (1 day prior) was already at the same point as it was 2 days after Katrina passed. LSU put out a call for volunteers ahead of time, has announced closure through Wednesday, and really prepared campus for those staying as well as those who will be sheltering there. So I think the state is in good shape.
Now there’s nothing to do but wait for it to pass…
Tomorrow I will start Bob Mixon’s online course which should teach me a little about what is necessary, architecturally, to create a successful implementation of Sharepoint. I’m actually really looking forward to it, since I have been dragging my heels since Sharepoint was dumped in my lap. Read my review next week.
I am also very much looking forward to getting my new hire started, which should help clear my desk enough that I can focus on something – anything – for more than the usual 20 minutes I get to myself now. Maybe I won’t have to resort to completely pretending to be out of the office if I can offload some of my smaller tasks… and maybe I’ll be able to make some progress on the larger projects that I have been wanting to work on for over a year…
Part of the reason that I like knitting is that it is the inverse of work – there is time for perfection, there is time to throw it away and start over again and make it right, or just better. Only these socks I’ve been working on… I’ve totally missed a column of pattern stitches and it is taking every ounce of teeth-grinding I’ve got not to rip back 1/2 of the sock and start again. You don’t notice when they are on, and I’ve got other projects I’d really like to start. Not being a multiple project person, ripping back would mean waiting another month to start on christmas presents that probably already won’t get finished. And I keep finding new things to make! So hard…
I’ve been reading Drucker’s Management lately, which is – totally surprisingly – a truly interesting read. Just about everything has an antecdote to illustrate, and it’s broken into lots of little digestible bits. I find myself picking it up and reading a few pages when I’m ready to throw the socks out the window, which is pretty high praise for what is essentially a textbook. One of the most interesting aspects is the books focus on the knowledge worker and how that differs from the traditional task-oriented worker – something which I really appreciate, being in IT. Lots of goodies there…
Lately, I have had a fascination, almost a hunger, for children’s stories. Well, young adult stories. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was I just too tired to read my normal range of fiction? Bored? Regressing into stupidity and a smaller vocabulary?
Then, randomly playing songs on my iPod, I heard David Crosby’s “Hero”. It has a couple of lines that struck a chord:
“It was one of those great stories that you can’t put down at night. The hero knows what he has to do, and he wasn’t afraid to fight. The villian goes to jail while the hero goes free. I wish it were that simple for me.”
… and …
“And the reason that she loved him was the reason I loved him, too. He never wondered what was right or wrong; he just knew.”
That’s the attraction; the young adult stories that I’ve been reading address the adult problems of the world, with black and white solutions – absolutely wrong or right – and it’s O.K.
Harry Potter and Lord Voldermort who is unquestionably bad – Lord Voldermort gets it in the end, and even if there is a cost, it’s unquestionably worth it. It’s a battle unquestionably worth fighting.
Thomas Pullman’s Lyra in The Golden Compass (which I read for the first time years ago, and have picked up again since seeing the movie) and subsequent stories – … along with Madam Coulter…
Fiction with clearly defined, clearly bad, bad guys and clearly defined, clearly good, good guys – even when they have flaws – is just soothing, because everything is either right or wrong, good or bad, and no one sits on the fence. Those who do are traitors, and therefore bad, even if they occasionally contribute to whatever good is up to.
Unfortunately, life isn’t ever that clear, and people such as my DH who see just about everything in terms of black and white drive me absolutely bonkers. The world isn’t black and white. Those stories are fictions, because, magic aside, they wouldn’t really happen that way in the real world. Hardly anyone can be good (or bad) all the time, and the situations we face are rarely clean-cut either. There’s always at least two sides to everything. So it’s soothing to get into a fiction where right and wrong are as clearly opposite as black and white.
Of course, this type of fiction is always a little shallow; the best stories are the ones that mash it all up (Ender’s Game, for example). Why? Because they are a better reflection of reality, of ourselves, and easier to connect to and really feel. But it’s not as easy to cheer our characters on, because we see do a little of the not-so-good along with the good. We want to smack them upside the head and yell, “You moron! what the hell were you thinking?!?!?” If you notice, young adult fiction doesn’t often have the hero do things that warrant that.
As a kid, those simplified versions of the world act as a sort of lesson – here’s what to expect when you get there, and here’s the moralized ideal of how to act when you face whatever it is. Which, I supppose, is as good a starting point as any. As an adult, though, it’s a nice escape back into a simpler place where those very same moralized ideals rarely work out-of-the-box.
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So, I’ve had over a week now to process what I learned at ALI about MBTI, especially as it relates to me. At the institute, there was a lot of “Oh, so that’s why I’m that way!” going around. Which seems kind of silly, because it’s a description of how you are, not what makes you the way your are… but anyway, while it all rang true, coming home, being aware, I’ve had little revelations all week,
like, the reason I have trouble giving student workers projects is because I am not specific enough about what I want, and I have trouble being specific because it’s not usually fully defined in my head yet. I know what I want, what’s in my mind… Why don’t you?
Having international graduate students has actually helped this some, because I have different expectations for how I’m going to have to explain what I want; I just need to carry that over to the rest of them…
like, the reason I have nearly 30 unplanned skeins of yarn is the interest in starting something new, in suddenly knowing what that yarn needs to be, and the reason I can’t bring myself to finish the last 8 rows of a second sock while I wind yarn I don’t have plans for yet is because the sock is old news and I’m ready for something new….
like, I’m becoming more (socially) confident as I get older, maybe because I care a great deal less about what others think, or maybe because I’m just getting more practice, but when I have a period where I pull out of myself, I end up needing a period nearly twice as long where I can pull down the shutters and go on vacation from everyone else…
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Specifically as it relates to management, I’m having a lot of new experiences this week. I have an employee to whom I gave a reasonably well defined (in my mind) assignment. We had numerous discussions about workflow and business logic, and that all seemed well and good. She told me repeatedly that everything was on schedule. Friday was the deadline, and I begin to go through it to test, and not a single screen actually works. The back-end code is pretty decent, and mostly functional, but the UI is totally not functional – as in no action results in anything but an error.
While I was off in my own world of work for the last 6 weeks, it never occurred to me to go digging around in my employee’s work world – if she had trouble, she’d let me know, right? Add to this that she is an immigrant, so we have cultural mis-communications as well. Rather than tell me “No, I can’t do that” it is better to agree and then not deliver. Absolutely not my preference.
So this weekend, I am culling through the application, rewriting and finishing every screen I can, and thinking very hard about my lesson: Just because people say they can do something, doesn’t mean they can or will. Not everyone will ‘fess up and say they can’t, or won’t. I’ve got to pay closer attention, and try to ask in ways that don’t require them to say no. Ugh. I’ve always sucked at learning other languages; I can’t imagine learning different languages for different people is going to be any easier, even if it is all English.
