2025 Weeknote 36 : Quick and dirty

September 1 – 7

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

• This was the last week of my 4-day in-office schedule (Mon-Thu). Next week starts a new 3-day rotation where I will make the trek downtown on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with a default to remote work on Tuesdays and Fridays. All our organization’s managers are moving to this model this coming week. I know there are some hard feelings about it, but this is going to work out great for me. And just to be a dick about it, I’m kinda pleased there are some managers that are mad about it. I’ve long felt that a 1-day-in-office schedule for managers in particular was insufficient, not to mention the open indignance some demonstrated when asked to come in on other days. So… see you round the water cooler, folks.
• My work schedule is about to explode, and I posted the new model here on my blog. Some of my newly-rescheduled meetings started this week, but next week is the major start.
• I hosted the “dress rehearsal” for our monthly customer-facing tech update meeting (called the Tech Roundtable, but it’s not really a round table per se). That was fun. I was just filling in for our Chief of Staff, however. And I’m betting that meeting gets handed off to our new Communications person soon.
• We had a long conversation internally about what to do when our teams stumble across countywide problems that need process and technology help, but no single agency is trying to solve the problem (or is empowered to do so). This is a chicken-and-egg problem. We see a really dumb thing the county has stumbled into over the years, we see how to fix it, we have the talent to do so, but… no one in the county is asking us to fix this problem, so… we just leave it there? That doesn’t feel right at all.
  • We’re better paid than most agency staff across the county, and we use that money to hire creative, technically-savvy, experienced, and business-savvy people. We should use them for the most good we can get out of them.
  • But in most cases we hobble this creative staff’s attention and lock down their skills to focus on a few rote situations. It’s a waste of materials.
  • That said, without a countywide leader as a sponsor, we might find leading from the sidelines really challenging. Perhaps too challenging. But we’ve got to figure this out.

That’s all I’ve got for this 4-day work week. There were other events, of course, but I need to move on.

Personal weeknotes

Labor Day was wonderful. I needed a 3-day weekend to decompress, and with the great weather we had in central Ohio, it was especially restful. Whew.

My second job

I’ve continued daily or near-daily calls with my father to discuss the assisted living transition. And as of this week, we have a target move-again date of September 18-19. It took some haggling to get to that date, but we made it. My sister handled the re-packing in Tennessee, my brother will meet the movers during pickup on 9/18, and then I will meet the movers in Ohio on 9/19, where they will deliver the stuff to the second assisted living facility, this time in the Toledo area. We have broken up the work because I and my siblings have a variety of vacations this month, some of which overlap, and we had to split up the work to accommodate that, but also “level” the work across each sibling.

Meanwhile, my father keeps coming face-to-face with the ravages of my mother’s dementia. I got a call from my father on Saturday asking me to convince my mother, by phone, that she was sitting outside her own house, not a stranger’s house. I failed. He couldn’t do it in person, so I didn’t have much of a shot by phone. Thankfully these episodes are not every single day, and none of them have been dangerous. But they are ever-so-slowly escalating. My father hates the idea of a 24×7 memory care situation for my mother. Unfortunately, his perspective is pretty narrow—he’s thinking he would hate being locked in and having such a simplified existence. And he would. As would I.

But my mother is already partly there. I have to remind my father that when they’re at home, she often sits on the couch and either sleeps, stares at nothing, or watches endless hours of YouTube cat videos, as she can’t follow a narrative program any longer. She’s already 50% or more gone. It kills him to think about it, so he avoids it. But that leaves her with care that may not be best suited to her actual needs. Arghh… time will tell. First we have to get this assisted living situation organized. Again.

For now, I’m focused on the move assistance on the 19th, house cleanup on the 20th and 21st, final prep on the 23rd, and taking off early on the 24th for California.

There will be blood

Oh, speaking of looking ahead… for 2026 I’m going to map out a blood donation strategy to set a donation record for the year. I’m gonna start right in the first week of January and tightly schedule as many donations through the year I can muster (roughly every 8 weeks). Since starting donations in February 2022 I’m up to 17 units of blood. If I play my cards right, I should be able to get that to 24 by the end of 2026.

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