Greenstorm's Journal

I don't have the energy to make it upstairs to have dinner, so I'll write about work.

One of my strengths is that I can, believe it or not, generally interpret people. I'm pretty good at figuring out people's working goals (not the same as their stated goals, long term goals, whatever-- just what they're looking for from an interaction) and putting that information to use. When there are multiple parties involved, I'm pretty good at interpreting those working goals from one person to the other person.

I can also sort out my own working goals and translate those for whoever I'm talking to. I can also, once I know a bit about a system, immediately spot holes in implementation and in efficiency, or rather, in the trade-offs of varying kinds of efficiency.

Furthermore, I'm pretty good at keeping meetings going usefully and efficiently when the people running them start flailing.

When I'm impressing people at work I'm generally trading on these skills.

It's just exhausting.

I haven't been doing a ton of this at work lately; I haven't been incentivized to do it. I just take care of my little corner of the universe. The last couple months has had some work meetings that, whatever management tried to make them look like, were a bit of a cage match for person power/defend your program/whatever. That culminated in today, which... I'd just had the work I liked taken away from me, and been dropped another contract management and data review sort of thing in my lap, this one with extra extra fiddly rules that few people know about so I'm almost certain to do things wrong.

I think I'm going to have to step into politicking if I want to do what I want to do. Sell the idea that it's important to collect data (!!) with some shiny graphs and numbers, and also do a sales pitch for my colleague who does the same thing I like doing except he's better at it than I am, so we can keep the program. He's feeling (reasonably) defensive, and I'm not sure-- ugh.

I'm pretty sure management's goal wasn't to lower our impossible-to-hire-for staffing even further by threatening to give them all work they didn't like, but it happened. I hate this part. I hate where I can get involved, gently steer people (management could use some training in how to handle people in a story-and-incentive-based way, people could use a different lens through which they could market themselves without feeling defensive, the meetings could use structure, a good opening, and better clarity on results and take-aways, blah blah blah) and then end up running things and then I have to keep running things. Running things is exhausting.

These are the skills that get me called manipulative. I used to feel like it was just being helpful to use them. Now? I think people should learn their own goddamn people management skills if they're being paid to manage people.

We'll see what I end up doing: stepping up, just doing a bit of marketing, or stepping back and letting the whole thing do what it will.

One of a couple highlights though: when my supervisor opened up his laptop to load the presentation, the windows opening screen had a couple different autism adverlinks in it. Because those are tailored ads, it's super likely he's been looking into autism. I don't think it's on my account; I'm not out. So that's kind of cool.

OTOH Windows should probably be sued into the next century for disclosing that kind of thing on the opening screen.

I've picked up skills since I've lived out here. One of those skills is driving. I couldn't drive at all when I came up north; my company pretty much taught me and I did my road test up here. There's a lot of snow and ice on the roads some days but very little traffic; I've learned. So now when I back down a steep snowy hillside to turn around in the silly little work truck and find myself going backwards instead of forwards when I go to pull out, I pop her into 4-lo and lock the diff and out I come. I wouldn't have known to do that three years ago and I'd be sitting beside the road, stuck, feeling embarrassed.

I was driving the work truck in the snow because I'd taken an evening away from the conference to go see someone (the only other someone in this half of the province?) with my breed of pigs. These folks happen to be related to my closest coworker so an original failed contact got renewed. I don't fully know how to convey the buoyancy in my belly and the way I want to tell this to everyone and maybe yell it a little, but: they have a line of Ossabaws that's related to mine years back but looks like it captured a distinct set of genetics. That is, the line was imported into Ontario, the guy imported "quite a few" and at the time swapped boars with my pig person. She got one of the boars he brought in, and he bred his others.

The pigs I found locally are from the other boars he imported. My current boar is 50% from that original boar swapped down here. And there's a clear phenotypic/visual difference: the local pigs are a little longer, much smaller, white with big black spots, very sleek. The local guy wants a boar and he'll get one; I'm trying to decide if I want a second boar in trade, or if I want a boar and a sow. IF I had a boar and sow I could sell breeding groups that would take any buyers for a couple generations.

But mostly it's... you know, mine are the only Ossabaws I've seen in person. It's such a thrill to see these, slightly different but similar. They're gorgeous animals, very wild-looking and competent, and diversity-but-familiarity is so viscerally pleasant. I was walking on air all the way back to the conference.

There was some more interpersonal stuff that came up this week too, some good and some bad, but I'll dig into that more in a different post.

What I can do without thinking that I couldn't do a year ago
-and the next piece I'm learning

Keep a fire running for a month straight at a time
-find and cut enough wood for the whole winter

Feed and care for up to 12 groups/ types of animals daily (dogs, cats, rabbits, quail, ducks geese chickens, pigs)
-build infrastructure and routines to make this process easier

Drive to and from work in any conditions in winter
- drive the further distance to Prince George in more conditions

Manage -40C and/or 3' of snow
-better plan snowblower paths and deep-snow fencing

Create, document, implement, and data manage the timber valuation process for an area of about 6 million ha spread over about 12 million ha
-quality control on remote contractors
-negotiating with government entities to facilitate the process
-navigate internal company politics

Work at a desk
- without it hurting

Eat mostly meat I produce
-improve my ability to slaughter alone
- my own veggies 3/4 of the year
-my own grains

Ok, I guess I've been doing something with the last year

On the weekend Josh came over and we cleaned my chimney. I had already taken out the chunk of chimney between the stove and the ceiling, so it was just a matter of putting the brush in and attaching one after another long fibreglass rod to clean the next 2.5 stories' worth of steel pipe. I had picked up a system for containing the creosote and soot on some forums -- basically poke a small hole in a garbage bag, tape the garbage bag around the chimney hole, and feed the pipes in through that.

We were cleaning the chimney because it needed to be cleaned and no one in town would clean it. I'd pushed it last year and ended up with a spring chimney fire -- luckily no damage was done. Because of that chimney fire we had to also remove, clean, and replace the catalytic converter on my stove, which meant buying a new gasket to seal the catalytic converter in place. During the first fire the gasket expands, so all the hot air is forced through the catalytic converter (which looks like a honeycomb, basically it has a magic surface that burns the creosote so it 1) doesn't plug up the chimney and 2) produces more heat).

I was nervous about doing the thing myself, and when I'm nervous about something I'll often wait till Josh can help. He's an engineer and is much better at sorting physical things than I am.

We cleaned the chimney Sunday and lit the fire up. I kept it running more or less continuously till last night It wasn't acting how I remembered. The bypass door handle was stiff. Then last night there was a thunk and the bypass handle was extra stiff, there was a clunk, and suddenly it moved freely without a sense of weight behind it.

There was a fire in the stove at the time.

So I added a little more wood (it was a cold evening) and determined to figure out what was going on tonight.

In the morning the fire had burnt itself out and the stove was cold. I'm always more confident and enthusiastic in the morning, so I took the morning off work.

First I took the chimney back down. Then I took the catalytic converter out. The bypass door is a flap of metal that channels the air either through the catalytic converter or straight up the chimney -- when everything is cold the smoke needs to go straight up the chimney, then when it's warm enough it is channeled through the converter. I couldn't get that door to hang properly off the rod that attached to the handle so I stuck my phone inside it and took some pictures and sent them to Josh. While doing that I found a slot the door was supposed to slide into, got everything sorted, put the chimney back on, reversed some loose metal bits that had been put in wrong on the weekend, and cleaned myself up.

A stop at the hardware store revealed that they were out of gaskets, so I am awaiting a shipment of those. I know how to put them in, at least, because we did that on the weekend already. Then I can start a fire again. Luckily I have backup electric heat.

This is a steep learning curve. Even just learning to start a fire properly in the stove required the manual (you lay the logs front-to-back, whereas in a normal stove you lay them side-to-side, like in yule log pictures). Plus: cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, sourcing wood.

And the thing is, everything up here is like that. Raise some meat birds? Learn to fence (no one around here does fencing), learn to make a bird shed, learn to slaughter and pluck and gut and cut up and freeze - the nearest waterfowl slaughter location is 8 hours away. Learn to remove your door and put it back on to get the freezer into the house, no one's gonna do it for you. While you're at it, learn to plumb in an outdoor tap that won't freeze, the main waterline is easy to access from inside the house at least.

Following the chain of something up from one piece of knowledge to the next used to be a hobby: I like gardening, so I learn to cook and make booze from grown food, and then I learn to preserve what I cook, then I learn to make dishes to eat from, then I learn to grow animals to more efficiently compost/return nutrients to the soil. I do that sort of thing naturally.

Here nearly everything is like that.

I've come up and dived right in, to be sure. A house in the city would require less learning. A house without animals would require less learning. A house with an electric or gas furnace, with attachment to city sewer and water, a job that was the same as I'd done before: all less learning.

It's pretty tiring sometimes, when I just want a thing to be done. Some things I can put off: last year I paid to have my driveway ploughed, this year I got a snowblower (And of course there is no snow to be seen). I considered replacing my wood stove with a pellet stove after the fire. My house is not off-grid, and I've put off getting milking/hay eating/ruminant animals that can be fussy digestively. I did not end up on a snowmobile last year at all.

So this is less specialisation. It reminds me of the Heinlein quote about what "a man" should be able to do. It gives me a lot to think about.

I think I know my environment better than I did in the city. I know better how the things around me work.
I have less ability to trade money for free time than I did in the city, and probably less free time regardless (more things are externalised in a situation like this).
The threshold for asking for help from people is higher here than in the city, because...
A thing going wrong is less worthy of a helpless flail, and more worthy of just fixing it.
Fewer people make youtube videos about things that need to be done out here as compared to things I wanted to do in the city.
There are more shared experiences here than in the city: society is not as stratified in terms of actual activities or behaviours.

And so on.

Anyhow, tired, but I've been thinking about this some and wanted to get it down.

Looks like I'm being given actual employee staff in addition to my zillion contractors next year (though to be fair we're trying to simplify the contractor landscape).

It would be *really helpful* if I knew how to manage people at this point in my life.