i have been busy lately. but it’s a different kind of busy than usual. when i am usually busy, it means i am passionate about something i’m doing, i’m fired up about something new and daylight or going home or eating all fall by the wayside.

school is another kind of busy. school busy means i’m forced to jump through hoops for the sake of self-improvement by specified arbitrary deadlines. and the payoff is not something i have to live with or work with or support for months afterward, but something i can abandon and forget the moment the deadline passes. [i am looking forward to the end of this kind of busy. the best part of school is the people and i will sorely sorely miss that.]

my technical assistance trips to farawayplaces present a whole other kind of busy. during these trips i get dropped in a foreign world and for five or so days i have to do amazing feats interpersonally and technically, and then i disappear. and maybe i come back to update what i did the first time, or maybe the amazing feats of database programming can be useful at home. it’s sort of a blend of the two busies above and the one below.

the busy i’m experiencing this week was unexpected. for instance, today i got to work at 10am (i was pushing for 9am) and i left at just before 11pm. without saying much that does violate some kind of non-disclosure agreement or isn’t already obvious, we are trying to prepare a five year, $70 million dollar budget. our current project was bid for $22 million and was eventually increased to $47, lasting a sixth year. $70 million dollars is a lot of money, a lot to account for, and a lot of spreadsheets. the final proposal in it’s entirety will take up nearly four 3-inch binders. with the budget itself requiring at least two of those.

and that is what i’m working on. relentlessly formating, paginating, editing, revising countless spreadsheets. it’s not just that i’m bolding headers (which I’ve been doing a lot of) but occasionally discovering and fixing errors in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. and suddenly you’ve got 200,000 or 600,000 that you didn’t have before. and the budget has to balance to 70,000,000.00. to the penny.

the coolest thing is that this proposal, if accepted, is the lifeblood of the next five years of our project. my name is in several lines of that budget, my salary is accounted for. and so all of my effort whether it be debugging or hole-punching (i have not done that yet) seem entirely appropriate. i would be jealous otherwise.

–justin