Ups and Downs
Jul. 20th, 2009 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthThe last week has been filled with ups and downs, though it's had some notable downs. However, it just had a very odd but incredibly reassuring good, so I thought I'd sketch things out quickly. Note that almost all of this pertains to my job.
Over last weekend,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schenker28 was in town, and we hung out, and that was fun. Ate yummy Greek food. Not much else to it. ;) I was in a foul mood all Friday and Saturday, and even at the time I suspected it was hormonal, and time has proven me right, which is somehow small comfort, but at least I'm learning to recognize when I'm having a mood that is "outside" my control.
On Saturday night I went to a baseball game, and the Mets actually won. Another good thing.
On Monday and Tuesday, I got to meet one of mom's friends, a lady named CJ who is from Germany. She's really awesome - I met her husband a few months ago - and it was nice to get to spend time with her. Her English was really good. I spent a lot of time on both days running around trying to gather housing related stuff.
However, Tuesday also marked the first bad. Really bad. Right as CJ was trying to leave, mom got a phone call. One of the companies longest term clients, calling out of the blue, fired us. Just like that, poof! Aside from the money, it was a blow also because just the day before, mom had been telling me how they more than anyone were a client that she'd be willing to go to bat for, that she wanted to help, and then they just call and basically said, "yeah, but what have you done for me recently?" (which wasn't even accurate) and that was that.
Wednesday, I met up with Aaron for lunch andclaireon for dinner, and had a nice day of it - it's good to catch up with people; I've been trying to do that the last few days.
On Thursday, the list of winners for our other proposal (I mentioned we had one that we did four grants, and didn't win any, and that we had three other grants we were still waiting for) came out. We had already received whispers through the grape vine that one of those had won - that was confirmed by the list, but so was the fact that we didn't win either of the other two. So the tally for this winters grant writing binge is:
8 written
7 submitted
1 awarded
Not great. But I had resolved to myself that probably hadn't won ANY of the TAH grants, so it didn't actually hurt much.
What does hurt, though, is that I didn't write a single winning proposal (mom was the lead on the one that won). I've been trying not to feel a fair amount of self-pity over this, and failing pretty dismally. I mean, one of the ones that I wrote wasn't all that good (mostly through no fault of my own, their needs data was pitiful) but I thought the other was awesome, and I put a LOT of work in to it, and it was very disappointing that it didn't win cause it would have been great.
Also on Thursday, I went out to White Plains and signed my contract of sale for the house. Now I have to wait for the seller to sign it.
On Friday, I spent the day at one of our summer activities, and got rewarded in a general sense by getting to see all the awesome ways in which teachers utilize that they learn in the programs that we evaluate (and that we wrote the grants for) - this one is for one of the first proposals that I really helped mom write (I edited it. a lot) and it's now in it's third year, and the teachers had a great time and they had wonderful presentations that I got to see on the last day about ways of integrating history into great lesson plans. It was the best set of presentations I've ever seen.
On Saturday, I worked and got shit done. Actually, that's been a hallmark of most of these days; I'm finally getting back into a rhythm for working regularly; I've set myself a minimum of three hours per day (every day) and though that won't ultimately be enough to meet my end of August deadlines, that's not really the point - the point is to get back into the habit and stop letting stuff pile up, and it's felt good to start feeling like I'm on top of things again. I sat watching the ballgame (which we won) followingthelisafaerie's suggestion - I visited a furniture store, found a bunch of stuff I liked, marked down it's measurements, and then cut out a model of my new apartment and the furniture and started to play around with it. I was still missing some, though (I went to Staples today and picked out some desks and a chair that was heavenly to add to my collection of graph paper household goods...).
Yesterday (Sunday) sucked. To start things off, I got a crappy sunburn on Saturday, and it hurt enough that I had trouble sleeping (I can't lift my arms without discomfort). Then, (TMI WARNING, TMI WARNING) I had major cramps and a very upset stomach that kept me not wanting to wander far from a bathroom, to the point that (TMI DONE) I canceled my other plans for the day (I was going to go the Met) so that I wouldn't have to venture far. Thirds, while doing a bunch of the work stuff I'd been procrastinating a LOT, I discovered that I'd given a bunch of teachers the wrong survey last summer, which will make getting the data I need a pain in the ass. Fourth, I went to go get groceries, and locked myself out of my apartment while carrying only my debit card and my CD player - not even my cell phone. A bunch of quarters and some knocking on doors later determined thatmistress_sin (who had my spare keys) was unavailable, my super was no where to be found, and my downstairs neighbor was out. Having thus eliminated the three viable, free options (using my extra keys, using the supers key, or breaking in through the fire escape) I was left with getting moms help (via pay phone) to hire a locksmith. He got me in, alright, after drilling my old lock. Cost to bring in a locksmith on a Sunday and get a new lock? $250. Just what I needed...
What's most frustrating, though, is because so many things have gone wrong, I've started anticipating the next bad thing, and of course, as soon as one happens, I ascribe it to the (actually non-existent) pattern. This means that, in my own head, I've been downplaying the significance of the good things (buying a house, datingozziel), and playing up the bad things because they fit the fricken pattern. And I can't seem to help it. But I don't want to see my life as a day-to-day existent periodically punctuated by inevitable spells of anticipated bad things. Who wants to live that way? But the bad things have been happening with enough regularity that I haven't been able to push past them.
Today was mostly a mixed bag. I got stuff done, but was kind of listless, and had plans with mom, but she wasn't feeling well. I ended up wasting a bunch of time, but I got done the bare minimum of what I had to so that I can go to the very early thing I have to do tomorrow, so that was good.
On the way home, though, I got an e-mail from a client: they had their 21st CCLC peer review forms back. My heart started to pound. These peer review sheets are the key. These answer what has become, for me, one of the most critical questions: did we lose the grant because we fucked up, or did we lose because the bar was raised so fricken high this year? (to a cut of 93 points when it had previously been 75). It was all I could do not to run home, and I was repeating to myself in my head that I should be prepared for the worst.
The worst didn't happen. I can't disclose their average, but I'll suffice it to say that it's the highest average score that a grant I wrote has EVER received. Last year, this grant would have won easily. As it was, it wasn't all THAT far from winning this year. I know it might be ridiculous - a loss is a loss, after all, and often it's the closest ones that hurt most - but in truth, I'm so relieved at this news that I could cry. It wasn't me. I didn't blow it. I can deal with changing conditions - that's part of life - but I knew I had done my best on those grants, and the possibility that I could have tried so hard and gotten a bad score had been really crushing my spirit. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulder - I tried REALLY HARD and that hard work was recognized - the fact that there wasn't enough money is a factor outside of my control and is hardly relevant. To say it another way, my greatest fear was that I might have written a grant that would have failed, say, last year when the cut off was lower, and that possibility was a part of what had upset me so badly. And so it's just really great to know that that's not what happened; that it was just the vagaries of available funding, not an excess of sucking on my part, that led to the proposal not getting funded. Because I thought that proposal was one of the strongest I'd ever written, and I thought the client had a wonderful program that would have really been great for the kids, and I wanted to do them justice - and now I know that I did. The rest is in the hands of god (read: NYSED). Because I did what I could, and in any previous round of funding, it would have been more than enough.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but it makes me feel so much better.
Also, the check arrived from my grand father, which means I now officially have the money on hand to put all of my down payment down and cover all of the other housing expenses. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll even have a little left over so that I can pay the locksmith!
Anyway, tonight, I'm getting dinner withbakanekotoo; tomorrow I have to get out to Queens in the very early morning, and over the next few weeks I'm gonna be kicking up my work schedule - aiming for more like 4 or 5 hours a day, and trying to start to clear the projects I have to do off my desk one by one. Because I have 6 annual progress reports due on the 31st of August, and it's gonna be a lot of work, but if I can get going early, there's not reason I shouldn't be able to finish with more than enough time to deal with the inevitable last minute crises, and not have to come back from Gencon into a start of near panic and frenetic work (which is what I had to do last year, and that was with only 1 APR due on the 31st!).
Hopefully, I can get myself back on track. With some weight of my shoulder, and showing some progress with work, and the summer plods on, day after sweltering day...
Over last weekend,
schenker28 was in town, and we hung out, and that was fun. Ate yummy Greek food. Not much else to it. ;) I was in a foul mood all Friday and Saturday, and even at the time I suspected it was hormonal, and time has proven me right, which is somehow small comfort, but at least I'm learning to recognize when I'm having a mood that is "outside" my control.On Saturday night I went to a baseball game, and the Mets actually won. Another good thing.
On Monday and Tuesday, I got to meet one of mom's friends, a lady named CJ who is from Germany. She's really awesome - I met her husband a few months ago - and it was nice to get to spend time with her. Her English was really good. I spent a lot of time on both days running around trying to gather housing related stuff.
However, Tuesday also marked the first bad. Really bad. Right as CJ was trying to leave, mom got a phone call. One of the companies longest term clients, calling out of the blue, fired us. Just like that, poof! Aside from the money, it was a blow also because just the day before, mom had been telling me how they more than anyone were a client that she'd be willing to go to bat for, that she wanted to help, and then they just call and basically said, "yeah, but what have you done for me recently?" (which wasn't even accurate) and that was that.
Wednesday, I met up with Aaron for lunch and
claireon for dinner, and had a nice day of it - it's good to catch up with people; I've been trying to do that the last few days.On Thursday, the list of winners for our other proposal (I mentioned we had one that we did four grants, and didn't win any, and that we had three other grants we were still waiting for) came out. We had already received whispers through the grape vine that one of those had won - that was confirmed by the list, but so was the fact that we didn't win either of the other two. So the tally for this winters grant writing binge is:
8 written
7 submitted
1 awarded
Not great. But I had resolved to myself that probably hadn't won ANY of the TAH grants, so it didn't actually hurt much.
What does hurt, though, is that I didn't write a single winning proposal (mom was the lead on the one that won). I've been trying not to feel a fair amount of self-pity over this, and failing pretty dismally. I mean, one of the ones that I wrote wasn't all that good (mostly through no fault of my own, their needs data was pitiful) but I thought the other was awesome, and I put a LOT of work in to it, and it was very disappointing that it didn't win cause it would have been great.
Also on Thursday, I went out to White Plains and signed my contract of sale for the house. Now I have to wait for the seller to sign it.
On Friday, I spent the day at one of our summer activities, and got rewarded in a general sense by getting to see all the awesome ways in which teachers utilize that they learn in the programs that we evaluate (and that we wrote the grants for) - this one is for one of the first proposals that I really helped mom write (I edited it. a lot) and it's now in it's third year, and the teachers had a great time and they had wonderful presentations that I got to see on the last day about ways of integrating history into great lesson plans. It was the best set of presentations I've ever seen.
On Saturday, I worked and got shit done. Actually, that's been a hallmark of most of these days; I'm finally getting back into a rhythm for working regularly; I've set myself a minimum of three hours per day (every day) and though that won't ultimately be enough to meet my end of August deadlines, that's not really the point - the point is to get back into the habit and stop letting stuff pile up, and it's felt good to start feeling like I'm on top of things again. I sat watching the ballgame (which we won) following
thelisafaerie's suggestion - I visited a furniture store, found a bunch of stuff I liked, marked down it's measurements, and then cut out a model of my new apartment and the furniture and started to play around with it. I was still missing some, though (I went to Staples today and picked out some desks and a chair that was heavenly to add to my collection of graph paper household goods...).Yesterday (Sunday) sucked. To start things off, I got a crappy sunburn on Saturday, and it hurt enough that I had trouble sleeping (I can't lift my arms without discomfort). Then, (TMI WARNING, TMI WARNING) I had major cramps and a very upset stomach that kept me not wanting to wander far from a bathroom, to the point that (TMI DONE) I canceled my other plans for the day (I was going to go the Met) so that I wouldn't have to venture far. Thirds, while doing a bunch of the work stuff I'd been procrastinating a LOT, I discovered that I'd given a bunch of teachers the wrong survey last summer, which will make getting the data I need a pain in the ass. Fourth, I went to go get groceries, and locked myself out of my apartment while carrying only my debit card and my CD player - not even my cell phone. A bunch of quarters and some knocking on doors later determined that
mistress_sin (who had my spare keys) was unavailable, my super was no where to be found, and my downstairs neighbor was out. Having thus eliminated the three viable, free options (using my extra keys, using the supers key, or breaking in through the fire escape) I was left with getting moms help (via pay phone) to hire a locksmith. He got me in, alright, after drilling my old lock. Cost to bring in a locksmith on a Sunday and get a new lock? $250. Just what I needed...What's most frustrating, though, is because so many things have gone wrong, I've started anticipating the next bad thing, and of course, as soon as one happens, I ascribe it to the (actually non-existent) pattern. This means that, in my own head, I've been downplaying the significance of the good things (buying a house, dating
ozziel), and playing up the bad things because they fit the fricken pattern. And I can't seem to help it. But I don't want to see my life as a day-to-day existent periodically punctuated by inevitable spells of anticipated bad things. Who wants to live that way? But the bad things have been happening with enough regularity that I haven't been able to push past them.Today was mostly a mixed bag. I got stuff done, but was kind of listless, and had plans with mom, but she wasn't feeling well. I ended up wasting a bunch of time, but I got done the bare minimum of what I had to so that I can go to the very early thing I have to do tomorrow, so that was good.
On the way home, though, I got an e-mail from a client: they had their 21st CCLC peer review forms back. My heart started to pound. These peer review sheets are the key. These answer what has become, for me, one of the most critical questions: did we lose the grant because we fucked up, or did we lose because the bar was raised so fricken high this year? (to a cut of 93 points when it had previously been 75). It was all I could do not to run home, and I was repeating to myself in my head that I should be prepared for the worst.
The worst didn't happen. I can't disclose their average, but I'll suffice it to say that it's the highest average score that a grant I wrote has EVER received. Last year, this grant would have won easily. As it was, it wasn't all THAT far from winning this year. I know it might be ridiculous - a loss is a loss, after all, and often it's the closest ones that hurt most - but in truth, I'm so relieved at this news that I could cry. It wasn't me. I didn't blow it. I can deal with changing conditions - that's part of life - but I knew I had done my best on those grants, and the possibility that I could have tried so hard and gotten a bad score had been really crushing my spirit. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulder - I tried REALLY HARD and that hard work was recognized - the fact that there wasn't enough money is a factor outside of my control and is hardly relevant. To say it another way, my greatest fear was that I might have written a grant that would have failed, say, last year when the cut off was lower, and that possibility was a part of what had upset me so badly. And so it's just really great to know that that's not what happened; that it was just the vagaries of available funding, not an excess of sucking on my part, that led to the proposal not getting funded. Because I thought that proposal was one of the strongest I'd ever written, and I thought the client had a wonderful program that would have really been great for the kids, and I wanted to do them justice - and now I know that I did. The rest is in the hands of god (read: NYSED). Because I did what I could, and in any previous round of funding, it would have been more than enough.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but it makes me feel so much better.
Also, the check arrived from my grand father, which means I now officially have the money on hand to put all of my down payment down and cover all of the other housing expenses. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll even have a little left over so that I can pay the locksmith!
Anyway, tonight, I'm getting dinner with
bakanekotoo; tomorrow I have to get out to Queens in the very early morning, and over the next few weeks I'm gonna be kicking up my work schedule - aiming for more like 4 or 5 hours a day, and trying to start to clear the projects I have to do off my desk one by one. Because I have 6 annual progress reports due on the 31st of August, and it's gonna be a lot of work, but if I can get going early, there's not reason I shouldn't be able to finish with more than enough time to deal with the inevitable last minute crises, and not have to come back from Gencon into a start of near panic and frenetic work (which is what I had to do last year, and that was with only 1 APR due on the 31st!).Hopefully, I can get myself back on track. With some weight of my shoulder, and showing some progress with work, and the summer plods on, day after sweltering day...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-20 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 06:01 am (UTC)But seriously, I'm glad to hear that your Monday turned out to be much better, despite being a so-so day, than your Sunday. Sun-burns are no fun and getting locked out of your apartment just sucks. Hopefully the up-swing trend will continue and your Tuesday is going to be dynamite. Buy a lottery ticket. Who's to say to Ups can't be exponential =3
no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-21 05:25 pm (UTC)