Gulp, our orbit scientist is leaving

I knew she would leave in the next year.  I just figured it would more likely not happen until 2-3 months from now and that there would be 4 weeks notice rather than 2 weeks so the handoff of what she developed would not be so rushed.

The good news is that I drove over 450 miles to northern Wyoming and rode 100 miles this weekend.  Tanza did well.  Our pace was slower than what I'd like to be at but I haven't done enough conditioning and on day 1 it was ride with folks who were going to go over 8 mph or stay with the slower group.   Slower group ended up with 6 mph pace, rather than 6.5 to 7 I would have liked.  Oh well.   On Day 2 Tanza stuck with young riders who were doing 8 mph pace on the first loop.  Actually he insisted on passing them towards end of loop.   And then starting loop 2 he was getting tired and as they started out cantering and passed us he was "meh, I don't need to stay with them."   I don't love that our pace slowed down so much that overall ride pace was only 6 mph by the end of the day but he was on day 2 and I have not done enough conditioning miles on him to push him past the pace he was volunteering.  

I enjoyed the weekend overall,  a few minutes here and there of feeling over heated and over tired but I remembered to enjoy being on the trail on my awesome horse most of the time.   Met a gal on my route and had the wonderful blessing of having her drive a good part of the way from where I picked her up on Friday (I only drove 90 miles after her place and she drove the rest which was about 180 miles)  and she drove around 120 miles on Sunday which made things much easier for me.  She also crewed for me a bit on Sunday,  she was hurting from riding on Saturday and just volunteered in camp on Sunday.  

That gave her lots of time to visit with the other folks attending the ride and she had a great weekend and is excited to get into the sport here.   She used to live in upstate New York, moving, having a saddle fit issue that ended up with getting bucked off and a back injury had resulted in her not riding much since moving to WY a couple years ago.  So I helped promote the local rides to a new person, yay me.   She recently got a rescue Akhal Teke horse and one of the gals at the ride is a huge lover and promoter of the AT breed so that was a nice side benefit for S too.   

Its snowing

Not unusual,  I remember loading horses in a light snow to head to memorial weekend rides in SD and having nice weather to ride in, although the horses always thought I was nuts loading them up to go ride when it was snowing.

Tanza and Lady got bute a couple hours after their vaccinations and no reactions.  So Tanza should be good to go ride.  Because of the forecast, my vaccination reaction worries and general OMG I'm so behind feelings I decided I will ride on Sunday.  So current plan is to haul to Casper or hopefully Thermopolis on Fridaay and overnight at a fairgrounds and then a short drive to ride site Saturday morning.   Donate the unicorn poster and half chaps as ride awards.

Work is continuing to be a madhouse.  It should not be so, but the group manager wants to maintain direct handling of low level tasks and then doesn't have enough hours in the day to keep track of and communicate the big tasks that need to be done to the team.  Plus he, or he and/or  the program manager keep refusing to hire another software engineer and admin support person so both the ops group and the admins are stressed having to be 100% all the time and still feeling like we are falling behind.   I am going to have to ding all the management for this when input for *their* APRs is sought by the higher ups.    Sick and tired of their attitude of pinching pennies on things that are needed and then being lavish on extras.

Yay its Friday.

Boss is gone,  the simulation is done.   The defective switch that caused extra work and stress for me and the official ops monitor last weekend and the whole team through Wednesday was replaced on Thursday.  Yesterday one of the horses was in pasture (had stepped over fence.   I let all horses out for a bit, while I organized supplies and replaced one broken off post and did a temp patch of the wires to that post with string, then called it good and told dad he had to help me fix fence on Friday.  Today I dug 3 post holes and Dad tamped in the posts and did most of the staples.   He was not going to tighten the one section of fence but I found where a splice was and proceeded and he helped me get that sorted and done.   Now that paddock fence should keep the horses in.  And since neighbor A helped dad fix the pasture fence a few weeks ago its not like we have to panic that horses will go through the pasture fence and be on the road if they do get out into the pasture overnight, but I still want to limit their grass and introduce it gradually.

Lady seems to be doing pretty well.  I will have vet look at her when he does vaccinations but I think she will be fine for D and her kids to ride this summer.  I am a bit nervous about vaccinating on Tuesday and planning to enter a ride on Saturday but it should be OK.  Tanza has not had reactions to the shots that I have noticed.

Wed I have to take my car in for servicing by 10 am and the boss has scheduled for me to join meeting to discuss how to work on next set of CWPD.  Well at least I was coming in early anyway but I don't know why I have to be in that meeting.  I was not wrestling with that group's data two years ago so I have no back knowledge.   Perhaps they want D to hand more of that work to me because they need him to get something else done,  who knows with the stupid chaotic management.

Group boss wanted me to give him raw data not plots for stats on Tuesday evening.  I did this but we run stats on two parameters and I ran the stats #s for the old parameter that *I* think of for stats and not for the newer parameter.  Then he didn't recognize that the numbers were normal for that old parameter and just tell me "I wanted the new parameter" but emailed me asking didn't I think the values were too small.   Finally he sent me a plot with "isn't this the normal?"  late Wed evening.   I hadn't registered myself that the raw #s didn't show in the header what parameter the stats are for but only the height level, mean, RMS and # of obs used.     Luckily since I still had all the tabs up I was able to generate what he wanted pretty quickly but I was not thrilled that he isn't familiar enough with both stats plots to have recognized "oh these are the old parameter and just asked me right away to generate the stats #s for the newer parameter instead of having to have the back and forth and me not get the info I needed to know what he wanted until so late.

Tomorrow and Sunday are the charity ride I like to do and then next weekend I am off to my first competition of the year.  I feel so ill prepared but I keep reminding myself that Tanza is a rock star and I will muddle through.  Its not like the course is horribly steep or long.  I loved it last year for a first ride of the season.

Well made it through the work week from hell, (mostly, my day is not done yet)

But I am soooo over my boss and even over the group unofficial leader right now.   I know she and the designated helper on being the conduit to N have been busy and having to concentrate with the new tasks but how exactly does she expect things to work after actual launch if she and H are the only ones who know the process?  They can't cover 8 intensive days in a row with just two people IMO, plus, I *know* the eventual plan is that whomever is on 'ops' would handle forwarding payload requests and things.    But they don't want to deviate from the plan and/or take a little time to explain the process for me to be able to do any of those tasks so whatever.  Its not like I have not been busy and stressing, what with the bosses pet project clocks failing.

I did manage to fix one fragility issue with the clocks in spite of how hard it is to figure out his system so wooHoo.

I have to be more zen.  I like this paycheck, I don't want to jump to a new job with limited PTO and flexibility of hours when I have a great horse NOW.  Plus I do feel like I provide some useful help to the team in keeping things going and I want the mission to work at least a year or two so S, J, etc get data for their science.  Especially S who spent a huge amount of time proving we meet some stupid requirements that the dumb ass bosses wrote up without doing homework on did we need to be that accurate in this or that particular and how hard will it be to show we meet this goal.

But speaking of dumb ass managers.   Top guy will only listen to other scientists and our group manager just refuses to comprehend that he doesn't know that much about software engineering, and will NOT support the software folks asking for more help to be hired; to look at how we could migrate to a more modern system etc etc.    And both bosses have been told that the group needs a daily operations manager since group manager is traveling all the time, trying to find new projects for us to do.  Well yay for funding but we have two BIG *contracts*  where the management (not us lowly ops team members) signed on the dotted line that we will be an operations center vs just doing research level processing on a best efforts basis.   And they have just stuck those requests for a daily ops manager in a rhetorical drawer,  and not taken step 1 to either promote the unofficial leader to being a manager nor to bring in a specialist in program/software team management.  SMH.  I must remember,  I want to help things succeed not for those two cads but for S, and J etc.

I have the top layer of the deck mom had made from recycled wood from old shed removed.  I think dad is kind of like "why are you ripping out what mom built?"  but he knows the thing had rotted out.  I'm actually feeling a bit of "aww its a shame, mom spent so much time on this"  myself but I cannot go back in time and nag dad to apply water seal and do any other maintenance or make time to do it myself and having a deck with sections rotted out where the boards literally would break when stepped on was a liability hazard even if it was just a ground level deck only 6-8 inches off the ground vs a 2nd floor deck like at sis' house.

I cannot really keep up with maintaining the place.  I should bite the bullet and try to find someone who would do some house cleaning and light yard work in exchange for a bedroom or two.  The news channels are nattering often about how hard it is for folks to afford to live in the general area.  I just hate the thought of trying to find someone willing to put up with us old rednecks plus do some actual work.   I suspect it would take quite a bit of sorting to find someone.  And I suppose at some level I feel like "why should I even have to bother,   *I* don't need the place to bring top dollar when dad passes away for my retirement,  I'm only worried about it for the sake of the sibs.

At least I feel less like crying

Was feeling very weepy this morning.  I tried to take some load off our Software Engineer, web expert yesterday and it wasn't a full disaster, but was not completely smooth and appreciated either.  Yesterday I spent most of the day wrestling with issues caused by code developed by the boss who fancy's hisself a professional code developer.   The actual code is not bad AFAICT which isn't very far, but boss has scientist mindset of not sharing work until publication/copyright is in place and that doesn't work with code.  Especially when he has to spend a huge percentage of his time in travel and meetings with the funding agencies.   Some of yesterdays issues were because of my dumb "aaagh fix this move" early in the morning that I forgot to undo, rest was boss, cuz he had changed file naming format and that change got pushed to the production machine yesterday when he was trying to quick fix things but I did realize that to make the needed change on my script that fetches his product and renames it.   Its so hard to work with his code because he won't tell me what is doing what so I can look into anything and he writes in object oriented code style so the main code that I CAN find is just a few lines of "call this input routine that you don't need to know where it lives"  now call this piece that will call other objects.   I hates it, I does.  

We have a few really GOOD people on the team - if I thought the boss(es) were doing everything possible to try to make work life easy for the good people and had contingency plans for filling in and replacing them if/when they do jump to greener pastures I'd feel confident.   But no,  I feel like the bosses are blowing off the best people.  We are not implementing things developed by the scientists,  boss who likes to code does not follow the protocols which makes the sys admin frustrated and I doubt they will even do the paperwork to promote him to be making some outreach of "hey we understand your value and would like to keep you for a year or 2 past you getting your degree" 

Fairly productive weekend

The sour note is I was grumpier than an old bear with dad on Saturday when he asked if I wanted to fix fence that afternoon.   Blew up and shouted that no, I wanted him to take neighbor A up on A's offer to help with the fence cuz I was tired after putting hay mulch on grass I seeded last weekend, wanted to ride and then was going to burn brush pile later.    I did have a decent ride on Tanza, I am so blessed that god send this horse into my life.   Also burned one brush pile and roasted my hot dogs, barely (I did not rig or borrow proper camp fire toasting forks and the long grill fork is not long enough for an open brush pile fire.)    Washed on load of laundry.

Sunday I rode Sadie,   raked up weeds in the garden and got them burned,  raked some of the stomped and pissed on hay away from the feeders in the big horse pen.  (darn horses not just eating all their hay, but I have been giving that group the stalkier bales cuz they are plenty fat.)   Fixed some fence with dad so the project would not be so big for him and A on Tuesday.  Also did 2 more loads of laundry, cooked spaghetti and ran the Bissel over mom's chairs that I took out of the shed.  I decided I'm just using these, cuz with bed bugs and flea concerns I don't think folks will buy 2nd hand soft upholstered furniture if the thrift stores even take it.   Plus we deserve nicer chairs upstairs.   I'm throwing away one old ugly yellow chair that the arm broke off.    I had to leave my 2nd brush pile,  the wind kept gusting all day on Sunday.

I also got my grass watered both days and this morning and burned the barrel contents from burn barrel that neighbor P loaned us.   I *will* get rid of some of the bushy weeds, cardboard and small branches around here.  I'll also get another burn permit  so I can get rid of the big pile of thicker branches.   And the velcro strap to hold the saddle pad from slipping forward when riding Tanza is working great.   I was feeling bad about forgetting to do it over the winter but at least the pad did its working forward thing on just a short ride at home and I got it fixed now before doing 25-50 mile ride with the issue.

dagnabit I don't want to switch jobs/careers

But I feel like the idiot bosses are trending hard towards failure.  Smart folks on the team are making plans to leave before the metaphorical ship sinking and bosses are full heads in the sand vs even making an effort to try to retain core people by promoting them to be at least a little more competitive with the regional job marketplace.   I want to bail out of this state since its veering into commie shithole as fast as it can and I had hoped to be able to maybe just retire somewhat early and move to WY after my position or this whole project peters out (thinking that would probably be 5-6 years down the road; maybe moving and working part time after 2-4 years.   But if the effing bosses are going to crater in fast and completely kill the project in 1.5 to 2 years it might be dumb for me to not explore some kind of business or put out resumes now.