So, how's your employment situation these days?

My employment situation is good, for the time being. But it is very shaky.

A company that hires the guys who hire me decided they don't want to outsource their analytic work anymore. They canceled every product line the guys offer except for one: my econometric models. While this is good for me and my standing with both companies, it's bad because the relationship between my guys and the departing company has really soured. I'm like a child in the middle of a divorce.

My guys want to sever ties completely because of the way the separation agreement has been going along thus far. This will have a significant impact on me, because the departing company accounts for 90% of my billable work.

It's been pretty bad. Save for a few things that have started to trickle in, I haven't had any billable work in three months. It's okay though. When I signed on with the guys I worked out a minimum income guarantee in exchange for the exclusivity agreement they wanted. Until the work comes in, I'll still get paid. I have to make back all that money, of course, assuming I can. But if I can't, the accrual resets to zero every June 30 (otherwise I'd be an indentured servant for the foreseeable future). But it's not like I can expect the guys to do this forever. They're running a business, not a charity.

But it isn't all bad. The guys have seen this coming for a while, so they've formed new alliances that are beginning to bring in contracts for me. And the loss of departing company's business has freed me to take up another product line the guys offer. Sales there are strong right now because of the bad economy. And then there's a new product I developed that we will be marketing later this summer. The company so believes in this new product that they are hiring a PR guy to market it.

Let's hope it takes off.

If it does take off, then it will be really good for me. I am paid by units sold. If the thing really takes off, then I'll get an analyst or two to help push them out cookie-cutter style, over and over and over and over. I'll still get my cut for every single one, because it's my intellectual property. Like a royalty. How cool would that be?

Don't get too excited for me though. We're talking low-volume sales here... 30 a year at best. And these aren't the best of times. Our sector has suffered like a lot of the economy. Sales have slowed overall.

Just the same, never in my life did I ever think I'd fall into something like this. I'm just a lazy dumb redneck from Pennsylvania. But there it is. Right there before me... in the suckiest of economic times.

So, here's to shaky times and good fortune ahead.

Not gossip-worthy

I think it's a sign of progress, especially where we live, that Courtney has to regularly "come-out" at work.

It's not like she hides the fact that we're married. A wedding picture, among other obvious indicators, is featured prominently in her cubicle. Nevertheless, she regularly gets drawn into a conversation with someone at her workplace where one thing leads to another, which ultimately leads to the whole "I'm gay" thing.

The latest conversation was over Courtney's vanity license plate, which includes the letters M-R-S as in "Dr. & Mrs. S." Of course for most people, where there is a Mrs., it is assumed there is a Mr. Add in a bit of sexism about "Dr." equating to "male" and well, most people are bound to assume that Courtney is in a heterosexual marriage.

So yesterday someone asked Courtney about her license plate, which led to "Which hospital is your husband on staff with... blah blah blah." And once again Courtney had to disclose that she has a wife, not a husband.

Of course she also had to disclose that her spouse isn't a real doctor, but I digress.

Here's what is remarkable to me. This is East Jesus. Courtney's been in her job a year now, yet over and over she's still having these coming out conversations with people. The place is gossip-central, yet no one ever seems to have the goods on Courtney. Apparently,the fact that she's a lesbian isn't gossip-worthy.

End of summer purge

I'm sorry to see summer come to an end. It's been a good summer. It's the easy time of my calendar. Soon financial aid season will be upon me and I'll be at my laptop for hours upon hours, days and weeks at a stretch. Not looking forward to that. In fact, I'm dreading it.

I had my annual physical last week and though I don't have all the lab results yet, I don't expect any surprises. I'm feeling better than I have in a long time. The coughing that had me down during spring (likely allergies), is long gone. The nausea that began last year and worsened this past spring is also gone. It left with Celexa.

Speaking of Celexa, I think I'm finally through the withdrawal. Looking back on it, the process probably hit its apex when I was in Oregon in June. I was so miserable that weekend I wanted to die. I wasn't depressed or suicidal. I just wanted to die. Hard to explain. It's all behind me thankfully. I feel great, both emotionally and physically.

I think my thyroid may be off kilter a bit, so I half-expect to get a call from my doctor to change my Levoxyl dosage. I say half-expect because if my thyroid was off like I think it is, I'd be dropping a lot more weight. I have been dropping weight, but it's because I've been working at it.

After a seven month stretch when I took a break from weight loss and rarely exercised, I picked it up again, in earnest. I came off a stressful winter/consulting season with a serious case of cabin fever. When work wound down, I busted out. I've spent every possible minute of every day this summer outside (or in the pool), doing something.

The batting cage is the perfect compliment to Frisbee golf [I throw from left-to-right and swing from right-to-left]. Just saying.

I've had a lot of time for the outdoors because this is my off season. I've not been especially busy with work. I do a different kind of modeling in my off season. I do these cookie-cutter, assembly line, predictive models. I get a fixed price per model, and there are enough to do that I earn half of my year in my off-season. Yet I hardly work at all.

Unfortunately, the rest of my year doesn't come so easily. I haven't figured out how to adapt my econometric models to an assembly line system so that I can get the same price-to-effort ratio. I need to work on that.

When one can't work, one must play. Playtime aplenty has had its rewards. I dropped 10 pounds over the summer.

I've dropped 50 pounds since quitting my day job 14 months ago. My knees are a lot happier and I no longer suffer from GERD.

I'm working hard to drop 25 more. Then my plan is to clean up the rest of my act just long enough to pass a physical for affordable health insurance. The difference between Fat Trop and Lean Trop is about $200/month in premiums. Cha-ching.

I've blogged enough for now about banjo, except for this cute thing. The kid in the lesson before mine is an 8-year-old girl learning guitar. She's just starting out and already she's doing a respectable rendition of Walk the Line. When her lesson was wrapping up, I overheard her tell the instructor "They're going to make a movie about me, just like in Walk the Line." So. Cute.

If there was a movie about your life, what celebrity would play your part? No clue who would play me in a Trop biopic.

Another reason I'm sad to see summer end: Amanda. I enjoy being home with her through the day. I'm so lucky to have that. We'll still have it after school starts, but it won't be the same.

Amanda has been pumped for school after her first two orientation classes; her full schedule starts tomorrow. I hope she takes to college the way I did. I hated high school so much that I almost skipped out on college. As it was I delayed college until I was 20. That was the right thing for me. I hope this is the right thing for her.

I am so desperate to see Amanda blossom.

Courtney and I spent a lot of date nights this summer at city stadium, where the Hillcats play. Minor league baseball is a lot of fun. We went to the game last night and saw a great fireworks show afterward. I'm going to miss nights out at the stadium.

NASCAR has been SO much fun this summer because my guy has been at the top of the charts most of the season. He had a bad night last night though. Hope that's the last one. NASCAR lasts until November, so there's a lot of racing left.

Finally, I'm sorry to see summer end because with fall comes another birthday (October). I'm going to be 49 this time, and that's hitting me HARD.

I'm on a break

Ugh. I don't know what to do about this blog. Could it be any more boring?

No wonder few people bother to stop by.

Earlier this week I finished six projects in as many days. Now there is nothing in the queue until the 23rd. I'm left with a lot of free time and it's hard to keep from being bored. It's summer and I can't stand to be indoors. The last place I want to be is sitting at a computer. So, the blog suffers.

I fill my days will a lot of exercise, including at least one hour in the pool swimming laps every weekday, and at least four miles of walking every day. I've shed about 45 pounds over the past year, and I need to lose another 25, which I'd love to accomplish by the end of 2009. I'm sick of being fat and I am driven to get rid of it. I need to be constantly moving.

All that exercise is helping me emotionally too. I'm committed to managing my depression without medication. That's a tall order. It's an even taller order when life deals you a hard blow.

I don't want to talk about it, but something horrible happened last month. The fallout is that we were trying to have a baby and now we are not. My marriage has been under some strain as a result.

We're going to be fine. Everyone is okay.

In the meantime, I'm just trying to make sense of everything. I've kind of checked-out emotionally and mentally. I've been closed off, inside my thoughts. I'm the kind of person who needs to process everything. And while all that is going on I've been too vulnerable to let anyone in, even my wife. That's what's been so hard.

I'll snap out of it, and sooner as opposed to later. In the meantime, I'll just keep on moving.

I'm feeling a surge

This withdrawal is the strangest thing. I'm at a place now where half the time I am a basket case, and the other half of the time I'm feeling better than ever.

My appetite is back. I'm not nauseous all the time. In fact, I got a hankering for favorite of mine and made the most excellent meal the other night.

I've been exercising again, and spending a lot of time in the sun outside (I have the poison ivy to prove it).

I'm staying ahead of my work. I'm back to cranking out cookie-cutter models. It's easy money compared the financial aid models I do in the fall and winter. I have better concentration too. I'm less ADHD-like when working; I actually stay on task and am less easily distracted by twitters and blogs and email. Sometimes my workday, which starts at around 7:00am, is wrapped up by 11:00am. It used to be, for lack of focus, that the same amount of work got stretched over the entire day.

On the down side, I find being around people a challenge. I am exceedingly impatient and crabby. I am prone to meltdowns. Conversations frustrate me. I also have frequent days where crying comes way too easy. I could do with a lot less of all this. I don't like being a bitch.

Off to Portland

We're off to Portland, OR this afternoon. I have to be there for staff meetings (Sunday and Monday).

I'm hoping to hook up for happy hour with a few PNW bloggers on Saturday.

On Monday we'll be spending the night with this guy.

Finally, some breathing room

I've really dropped the ball on blogging. I've sucked at following everyone's blogs too.

It's been an intense consulting cycle. In fact, it was so stressful that one of the people I work with is currently on a 30-day medical leave-of-absence. She completely buckled under the pressure.

I had my moments, but managed to pull through.

At the beginning of the cycle I decided to completely overhaul the deliverable. I made a lot of changes that our clients really like and will save me a lot of time. But like any upgrade, there were some kinks and bugs along the way. That didn't help stress levels.

And then we had some unusual challenges too.

We're through the worst of it. And now I just have to cross my fingers and hope the wrecked economy doesn't render everything I've done useless. The credit crunch is squeezing families hard. I'm in the predicting business, and it's hard to predict anything with any certainty these days.

The good news is, I automated so many tasks that project completion time has gone from 160 hours to about 40 hours. Doing the math, that's like getting a $60 per hour raise (I get paid by the project, not by the hour).

Score one for slackers like me.

Those of you savvy enough to do the math backwards and guesstimate my annual income, well, good for you. If your calculations are correct you'll find that I'm not getting rich doing this. I'm not even breaking even with my community college salary just yet. But I could get rich doing this. And that excites me. I may want a simple life, but I'm not opposed to getting rich either. I will have earned it.

Nevertheless, I am my own brand of slacker. Just in time for spring, I'm not having to be at the computer so much. I won't have any income for the next month or two, but that's just fine by me. I'm ready to relax, read books, volunteer (Meals on Wheels needs drivers), and start working on those buff arms I promised myself on NYE.

So while the R&R will be very good for me, it's not going to be especially good for blogging. I'll Tweet every now and again.

Did you feel that?

Instead of my SOP of putting things off beyond the last minute, I worked on a project this morning and got it done.



It's not due until Friday.


Something's wrong with me.

The exorcism of Trop

I have an annoying, self- destructive trait. I am an avoider. A procrastinator. I function in the last minute.

Most of the time this doesn't present a serious problem. I'll back myself into a corner and then stressfully get a thing done with not a moment to spare.

Of course, with the not-a-moment-to-spare stress comes the adrenaline rush.

It's the adrenaline I need. That's why things get delayed. I can't seem to move without that adrenaline. Can I get it in pills?

It was like this with my dissertation. I knew I should be writing daily; this wasn't something that was going to get done at the last minute. But I function in the last minute. It's always been that way with me.

It's a fucking curse.

About my dissertation, a wise person told me "When the pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of doing it, you'll get it done." So I focused on the pain of not doing it, and that drove me forward.

Back then my pain threshold was a lot lower than it is today.

I have a project with a client that's been weighing me down since last October.

I could have finished it off before things got really busy, but I just couldn't make myself work on it. Then things got busy, and it was the project that always got bumped down in priority. What was supposed to be a three week timeline stretched into three months. Then four. I started losing sleep. I lost my appetite. Yet I still couldn't work on the project.

It became like a toothache that had gone on for so long and hurt so bad that I wanted to grab the pliers and yank it out myself.

On Wednesday, I finally did it. It took me all of 10 hours.

I feel like I've been through an exorcism.


Had I done that 10 hours of work months ago I could have avoided so much agony. I've done it to myself so many times. And I'll surely do it again.

Because Sassy asked....

This is a picture
of my office.

This made me LOL

The college finally found a replacement for me. He's a real winner.

An indispensable tool for doing that job is Excel (or any other spreadsheet tool). It's necessary for summarizing information in tables and charts, among other things. Anybody who has done anything with data has to have worked with spreadsheets. Certainly an institutional researcher like the new guy must possess this expertise.

The replacement recently reported for duty, and his first task will be the annual strategic plan. The whole thing is done in Excel, using a home grown system that yours truly developed. It's basically just a framework for gathering and reporting annual goals, objectives and budgetary requirements for every department/ division in the college. It's very low tech and simple; the goal was to make it easy for managers to input their plans.

Everyone loved it.

It replaced a very cumbersome and slow-moving (not to mention expensive) Filemaker-based system that was Bully VP's baby (he had the job before I had it). When I first introduced my home grown Excel tool to the president's team, the president loved it so much that he got on his knees and bowed before me, in front of them all. No kidding.

Coincidentally, Bully VP's bullying began when my home grown Excel tool started getting all the love.

While the user interface of the home-grown planning tool is simple and straightforward, the reporting aspect is a little more complicated. That doesn't matter, since it only affects the person charged with compiling the report, which, until now, was me. I set things up to accomplish in a few hours what Bully VP (and a supporting staff) needed weeks to do with the old system that everyone hated.

Now it's the new guy's problem.

There is a little bit of genius involved in getting Excel to do a big job like that in a few hours, but it is nothing a user with a moderate level of expertise can't figure out. New guy will have to figure it out, because I kept the intellectual property for myself when I quit. If the guy digs back a few years he'll find a file with all the programming. But to find it he'll have to know what he's looking for.

Well guess what? The new guy doesn't know Excel. He doesn't know spreadsheets. I don't know how he got so far into a career in institutional research without this critical expertise.

I'm having a good, hearty belly laugh at all this, because Bully VP headed up the search committee that picked this guy. Bully VP went out four times to get the right person. And for all his trouble he got a dude who doesn't even know spreadsheets.


Karma is sweet.

Where some of the stimulus money ought to go

Three years ago, when I went with Court to city offices to apply for her name change, I was appalled that staffers there were working on PC's still operating in DOS.

Government PCs haven't gotten much better since then. Court started her city job this week, and she's having to re-learn Windows 93. She says her PC crawls.

That would drive me insane.

I'm in the top three

CareerCast just published their rankings of the best & worst jobs in America today. My job ranked third.


Best jobs:
1. Mathematician
2. Actuary
3. Statistician
4. Biologist
5. Software engineer

Worst jobs:
196. EMT
197. Seaman
198. Taxi driver
199. Dairy farmer
200. Lumberjack

Trop rants

Ugh. I'm running on about six hours sleep since Tuesday. When I'm sleep deprived I get crabby.

And right now I'm crabby about a client.

As a rule, we require a three week turn-around to build the models I build. There are other models we do that are less time intensive; I can bang one of those out in an afternoon.

But my models (I'm the only one in the firm that does them), are an entirely different beast.

It doesn't actually take three weeks of labor to build one, but it does take a few days to a week typically. A lot of work is involved: data manipulation, model fitting, diagnostics. Then there is the actual deliverable, which is a vast web of formulas in a big Excel workbook of detailed tables and charts.

Millions of dollars are a stake with each one. It has to be right. Sometimes getting it right takes time and painstaking effort.

I have a track record of getting it right. I know what I'm doing.

I'm crabby and sleep deprived because I was given data on Tuesday and had to turn it into a deliverable by 8:00 this morning.

I knew this was coming and that there would be a crunch this week. We go out of our way to accommodate clients, though reducing a three week turn-around to 48-hours is a bit much, especially for a slacker like me. But for the good of the company, I did it. And wouldn't you know it, this one was one of the more difficult models I've had to fit. It just kept coming up wrong. I finally got it working at about midnight last night.

And what did I get for my trouble?

A hijacked meeting.

Every now and then I encounter a wise ass who thinks they know more about what I do than I know. If you run in academic circles or attend conferences where papers are presented you've seen this person. They come for a presentation and then hijack it by challenging every esoteric detail they can retrieve from their graduate school glory days [eye-roll]. It's not that such details aren't legitimate and important, but for purposes of the presentation, they don't much matter.

One of our clients has a wise ass on his staff. Whenever she's in the meeting she hijacks it with really technical questions of the kind I didn't even get at my dissertation defense. She did it again today. There was no point to her questions except to show off. I really have no patience for people like her.

She was so annoying that I seriously considered faking a dropped call just so I could scream.

Grrrrrr!

Done

Done the old-fashioned way.



















But wait... There's still the back yard.

Is it a bad thing?

Is it bad that I went to the bathroom this morning during a conference call with my two bosses?

My wife is mean

Look at the card she tucked into my luggage.




Tease.






I was in Kansas City this week for staff meetings. The company is six full-time people. Business is up 45% this year, and we expect it to go up at least as much next year. We'll be adding two more full-time people this year (one guy straight out of college in June). It's exciting.

Mike started the company ten years ago. And for a long time it was just him. He's a good person. He really cares about us all. He wants us to have our dreams. It's sounds cliche to tell it. But he is genuinely interested in what we want from life, and how being in the company can make that happen. I've talked to him several times over the years about what I want from life. And thanks to Mike, I'm on my way.

I had a great meal at Room 39. The weather sucked. I was stranded for hours in Atlanta last night.

Our next staff meeting is in Portland next summer. I may finally meet Guy after all these years.

Busy, busy, busy

I just finished my fourth model this week (I usually average just six per month). I also finished a financial aid post-mortem, the first of several on the To-Do list.

It's financial aid season, the busiest time of my year. I'm trying to get a lot done before Wednesday, when I leave for a three day business trip.

I don't enjoy business travel. I'm looking forward to getting this trip over with.

Keep your fingers crossed

I'm in talks with a local university to teach a demography course next semester.

Back from the reunion

We had a great weekend in Ohio for the reunion. It was a real step back in time for me.

Everyone looked great. We've all been knocked around in the years since we were first-time grad students. But you wouldn't have known it to see us this weekend.

Court & I spent much of our time visiting with Margaret, who made me laugh with her squirrel stories. She's terrified of squirrels. And they know it; they chase her all the time.

I'm too old and out of shape for late night parties, three nights in a row. It was worth how tired I'm still feeling.

Right after we arrived in BG Thursday afternoon, I got a call from the consultants. Another analyst has been slammed with projects, and they wanted to know if I would do some of the work. Of course I said yes. And, as these things usually go, a couple of things were due Monday. I spent a good bit of our trip working. I wasn't so happy about that.

The election was a frequent topic of discussion. It was a decidedly partisan group. I was honest and told everyone Obama hadn't sold me. All I got by way of response was how awful Sarah Palin is. The last time I saw this much loathing for a political figure, was when Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court.

I worried we'd have to drive through Ike to get home on Sunday, but the storm blew north leaving us with great weather for the trek back to East Jesus.

It's good to be home.