Tag Archives: planning

Revising the plan…

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More than a decade ago I finally got around to asking a lawyer to officially draw up a will and do some end of life planning. Having something on file in the event of “what if” felt like the prudent thing to do in my 30s.  Honestly, I packaged it off to the county courthouse and then pretty much didn’t think of it at all for almost 11 years. 

I’ve learned a lot about myself in the intervening years. More specifically, bouncing around between hospitals and specialists since last summer has absolutely focused my mind a bit about what I’d want to happen should things go sideways in a hurry. No one seems to think I’m on the threshold of keeling over, but I am on the precipice of falling over into the back half of my 40s. Dusting things off and giving it all an update felt, once again, like the prudent course of action.

I don’t think anyone ever really enjoys peering through the glass at their own mortality. Going through the bits and bobs certainly wasn’t a laugh riot, but I feel better for having started the process. There is, if nothing else, some small comfort in having the ability to have your intentions known even when you can no longer speak for yourself.

I assume it’ll take a little bit of time for the legal eagles to get things caught up, but overall I feel like I’ve done a good thing. If nothing else, may it was a good way to start drawing a line under my year of medical fuckery and getting on with things. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Results. I’m a reasonably intelligent man with a fairly analytical mind, but I’m at a loss for what to do when results from something like an MRI drop into my online patient portal long before my doctor has a chance to look at and comment on them. As wide as my academic interests are, it’s never ranged as far as internal medicine, so the reports end up being a lot of gibberish with lines, arrows, and color codes that mean precisely nothing to me. That, of course, doesn’t prevent me from using Google to try gleaning a bit of understanding… which never results in anything other than low grade panic or mild confusion. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I almost miss the olden days when the doctor received the report and the patient didn’t know dick about it until the medical professionals called to explain what’s what. I’m not at all sure this current model of complete transparency is helping me in any way.

2. Retirement. In my little slice of Uncle’s big green machine, there are 3 people who do more or less what I do. We’ve been a decent little team for the last half a decade or so. One of the three (lucky bastard) is retiring in a few days. His backfill is nowhere in sight. With three people, in all but the most extraordinary circumstances, we could work around everyone’s schedules and keep the trains running on time. With two, well, I’ve already identified two days that’ll be listed with “no coverage” in the next two months. That number will explode when the other guy adds his scheduled time off to the mix. All of that’s before we’ve even talked about the week or two gap for Christmas and New Year’s. None of those issues should be surprising. We’ve been warning the bosses about it for months. But not to worry… there’s allegedly a “temporary” fill-in coming and the bosses are going to hire a permanent replacement with all the speed and agility the U.S. Government is famous for displaying. With the pace at which the bureaucracy moves, I don’t expect to see either of those things happen until well after the new year, if ever. The only thing I know for sure is that for the foreseeable future, there’s going to be 24 manhours per day of work to do and only 16 manhours of personnel on hand to do it. The math, as they say, just doesn’t math. I know I won’t magically be doing an extra 4 hours of whatever every day, so I reckon the powers that be should probably get prepared for a diminished baseline of productivity and discovering that they’re just going to have to wait until we get around to some things. That’ll go over like a fart in church, but this was an issue that could have been addressed any time in the last six months…  so, I’ll be damned if I’ll be treating the inevitable result of bureaucratic fuckery as any kind of emergency for me. 

3. Exercise. Everyone on the internet loves to tell you that “once exercise becomes part of your routine, you’ll love it.” Maybe that’s true for them, but for me, I can assure you that no, the fuck I will not. Every daily walk or session on the exercise bike is 30-40 minutes I’m allocating under protest, because it’s sucking up an incredibly finite resource that I’d much rather put towards reading, or writing, or anything that I might even partially enjoy. Maybe it’s better than being stabbed in the kidney, but as something to pass the time, exercise is easily the least enjoyable part of my day. I’ll do it because it’s being required of me by someone who has far more knowledge about modern medical theory and practice than I have. Still, there isn’t a power on earth or in heaven that can convince me I’m having a good time. 

Georgia on my mind…

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I’m not sure if I’ve written about it here before. If I have, I can only beg your indulgence. You try writing up 4,000+ posts across more than a decade while trying not to cover the same ground too often and see how well it works for you. In any case, it’s a thought that has crept up on me repeatedly in the past few weeks, so I’m giving it voice.

I assume this particular memory keeps cropping up because of the relationship I have with my employer and planning. A few of the same themes keep coming up time and time again. To understand why it has stuck with me, though, maybe I need to take you back to the beginning.

We had all, about 30 of us, just arrived at what was then called Fort Lee on the outskirts of historic Petersburg, Virginia. By just arrived, I mean I still had boxes stacked everywhere in my apartment and the ink wasn’t yet dry on my in-processing paperwork. I’d been an employee for less than a week and the powers that be announced on Wednesday or maybe Thursday of that first week that on Saturday morning, we’d all be loading up on a tour bus and using our three-day weekend to take a group road trip.

Destination: Savannah, Georgia.

It was a well intentioned notion – taking this group of fresh new logisticians in training to observe first hand the load out of the famed 3rd Infantry Division as they prepared their equipment to leave by rail and sea in route to the then new “second Gulf War.” Folk wisdom will tell you that timing is everything. Maybe “everything” is an exaggeration, but it’s important. How I know it’s important is that while we were driving down from Virginia, the transports loaded with a division’s worth of equipment had cleared port and were out to sea. The marshalling yard was empty. The railhead was empty. The port was empty. The mighty ROROs the bosses so badly wanted us to see had sailed at first light.

With nothing else to do, we were granted a DONSA – a day of no specified activities – in beautiful Savannah. Leadership extracted a promise that we would all solemnly swear to get ourselves back to the motel before departure time the next morning. So, we did what a bunch of early 20-somethings do when cut loose in a strange town and headed for the downtown entertainment district. I have no idea how many bars we hopped in and out of. I do remember there was a carriage ride and later in the evening a booze laden ghost tour in a hearse.

I have no idea how we got back to the motel. There’s a very vague memory of an over capacity taxi, but it’s… fuzzy. The motel, well, is probably worthy of a story all its own. Seedy doesn’t even begin to describe some of the business being transacted there in the dead of night.

In retrospect, it was great fun and games – or what passes for great fun and games when you’re 24. Back then, it was a guy who had just eaten the cost to move himself to Petersburg, hadn’t been paid in six weeks, and was desperately afraid every swipe of his credit card was going to be one swipe too much. That early winter of 2003 was the closest I’ve ever come to slipping sideways into default. It was horrifying and just a little exhilarating. File that under things you do when you’re too young to know better.

Anyway, I just assume it’s that early experience that’s left me deeply distrustful of whatever best laid plans this great green machine comes up with.

The end off the cuff budgeting…

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I’ve never been much of a budgeter. That’s not to say I don’t keep an eye on cash flow and know more or less what’s coming in and what’s going out. However, sitting down and putting together a real pen and ink budget has all the appeal of a back alley root canal.

Having said that, I couldn’t help but notice that the spate of vet bills coming through these last four months has put more than a little bit of strain on my mental accounting. In fact, keeping the accounts balanced put me in a highly unusual (and disagreeable) position of either needing to sell assets or take on debt to float the bills until inflow caught up with outflow.

I’m a collector by nature, so the process of acquiring things has always come easy. I’m less comfortable when the time comes to sell some of those things off – even if I picked them up originally with a vague plan that someday I may need to convert them to cash if I ever found myself pinched. I know many people enjoy that side of the process as much as they do acquiring things in the first place. Not me. I tend to acquire and then hold on grimly.

With the current, almost punitive rate of interest on consumer borrowing, though, letting a few things go was the lesser of two evils. Maybe it’s only lesser because I know full well I’ll end up buying them back whenever the opportunity presents itself in the future.

The point of all that is to say I’m finally coming around to the idea of putting a bit more academic rigor into my household budgeting process. The personal finance gurus would probably disagree, but step one is funding a much more robust “self-insurance” account for future veterinary expenses – the one thing I can find that consistently blasts gaping holes in my operating budget. After that, everything else just sort of takes care of itself… or at least that’s what the numbers seem to be telling me.

The summer motivation trough… 

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This time of year is not a good one for job-related motivation. June is bookended with good times – the week off I take for my birthday and the week off I take in conjunction with Independence Day. Over a span of six weeks, it creates two motivational high points and a corresponding four week motivational trough. Now they’ve thrown in a new federal holiday right between the two. All else between those two points is me trying my hardest to at least present the illusion of giving a damn… or at least enough of a damn not to draw unnecessary managerial attention.

I do a reasonable job of tying up loose ends before walking away for my early June holiday. Then I come back and find it hard to mentally justify ramping up any new efforts, knowing that in a couple of weeks, I’ll be in the middle of another 9 days out of sight and hopefully out of mind.  Throw a spanking new holiday when a bunch of other people are taking time off and making it hard to get anything accomplished and the opportunity to do much in the way of great new work is pretty minimal. 

I won’t go so far as to say I plan it that way, but it is a happy coincidence.

After Independence Day, we’re in the long march towards the fall holidays. That, of course, is demotivational in a completely different way.  As a professional bureaucrat, truly the cycles of the year have a savage beauty all their own.

May 31st…

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It’s May 31st. It’s not a birthday or an anniversary, but every year it’s among the most celebrated days on my personal calendar. You see, according to the calculations made by the United States Government, May 31st in the year 2035 is the date my age and years of service will make me eligible for full retirement benefits.

According to the running countdown on my office white board, that leaves me with precisely 12 years left to run in this rather accidental career of mine.

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions feeding into that particular date. It’s assuming that the wise and distinguished members of the U.S. Congress don’t meddle too much with the Federal Employees Retirement System. It’s assuming that the U.S. economy doesn’t either collapse or slip into a decade long recessive nightmare. It’s assuming that I’m putting enough cash aside to be my own paymaster. It’s assuming I don’t drop dead sometime between now and then.

Like I said, there are a lot of assumptions going into the idea that I’ll be able to hang it up in 12 years, but it’s a happy, happy thought. How good, or practical, it looks on the eve of my 57th birthday remains to be seen, but it’s absolutely my guiding star. 

Making my bet…

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was considering taking the last of my retirement accounts – a long held Roth IRA – out of the hands of a new advisor and tending to it myself. Well, that transfer was finalized Friday afternoon. Exclusive of whatever a federal pension looks like in 12 or 13 years and discounting almost completely the idea that I’ll ever see a nickel of the cash I’ve poured into the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security, I’m now the chief cook and bottle washer for every last scrap of cash I’m counting on to keep me from living under a bridge and eating cat food in retirement.

I’m mostly feeling good about that decision. I’ll feel even better once I’ve unwound that account and gotten everything into low-fee, index tracking funds that just bump along into the upper right quadrant without needing a whole lot of thought or analysis. It’s not exotic or adventurous, but it’s the kind of thing that was good enough for Jack Bogle when he built Vanguard and for Warren Buffett to recommend for his wife. That should be good enough for me by any measure. 

So yeah, I’m going to go ahead and place a big (for me) bet that the international economic order isn’t going to blow itself apart in the next three decades… or if it does, there will be a 1950s style boom decade while it all gets put back together. Past performance, as they say, is not indicative of future results, but over the long term, I’m comfortable coming down on the side of people always wanting to make money and buy stuff. In fact I believe in free markets and free people so much, I’m staking the last third of my life on it.

A blow against the forces of chaos…

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A few days ago, I was requested and required to provide an update on the current status of the annual spring event that I find both loathsome and obnoxious. Historically these sessions have always been fraught with danger. Gotcha questions, deep diving irrelevant details, adding requirements to no real advantage, and generally just busting my balls was the order of the day.

Not so this time around. We passed on the relevant information. Provided a broad overview of progress, the expected way ahead, and our proposed timeline and milestones. There were several clarifying questions and then approval to proceed as planned.

I walked into the room planning on needing every bit of bureaucratic arms and armor I could carry along. Not a bit of it was called for. In fact, the whole thing felt so unnatural that I’ve spent the last 48 hours expecting the other shoe to come hurtling out of the sky and land directly on my head.

This dog and pony show is still the bane of my existence, but it’s nice to be dealing with someone who doesn’t seem determined to make the slog harder than it needs to be “just because.” Is it possible that I’ve encountered a rare supporter in trying to stave off unnecessary chaos?

I was not expecting that to happen right square in the middle of the week, but here we are. It’s a brave new world.

It’s dog and pony season…

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I spent most of my productive time today working on details of two separate events. I use the word “events” here purposefully instead of “projects.” It’s intentional, because these two items are absolutely events – occasions if you will. So, break out the floral arrangements and reserve your best rented tux, because it’s dog and pony season.

The first, a three-day series of informational briefings to contractors about how we plan on spending our cut of the defense budget over the next two years, is, as ever, the bane of my existence. This will be my 9th year though this particular wicket. For a while I had a series of supervisors who’d always promise that “next year we’ll get someone else on this.” Nine years on, my various supervisors don’t even bother saying the words. Death, resignation, or retirement seem to be the only path away from this particular bit of fuckery.

The other, decidedly less labor intensive event, is what amounts to an overgrown trade show hosted in northern Alabama every spring. Laying out who should attend, if we want to nominate some special bit of equipment or process for a demonstration, and reminding everyone to get their hotel rooms booked early or they’ll be staying in 50 miles away from the conference center is the regular drumbeat of my life in January and February.

I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating, that none of this is especially hard work. Like most of my projects, I’m more a facilitator than a doer. I try to make sure the right people have the right conversations and nudge them back into alignment when they wander too far afield. None of it is hard, but every bit of it is a time consuming pain in the ass.

Almost every day, I ponder what one must be thinking to decide that I am the one who should be draped in the glory of planning conferences, events, and all manner of dog and pony related activities. My well-noted misanthropic opinions alone should make me uniquely unsuited for any assignment in which the goal is to engage and entertain large groups of people. But here we are. Again.

I’ll do it. Everything will exceed the baseline standard of “good enough.” If, however, you think I won’t bitch and complain about the process, the attendees, the inability of our own bosses to get documentation approved on time, and my general disdain for in person boondoggles and the utterly unnecessary logistics tail that accompanies them, you must not know me at all.

Expecting the unexpected…

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About once every six weeks or so I start thinking that hey, maybe it’s time I add another dog to the menagerie. Two always felt like the right number of dogs in my mind, though I’m not sure if that was a function or Winston and Maggie being so well paired, or if there’s any actual data to back up my wild assertions. 

It doesn’t take long between having that thought and finding myself scouring Petfinder, local Facebook groups, and checking in on some reputable breeder’s pages. Before you know it, I’m hours down a rabbit hole looking at available dogs 300 miles away.

After a bit of that, though, I remember the times when there were puppies in the house. Young Winston gnawed through the rails of my kitchen chairs like a psychotic beaver. I’d arrive home from a day’s work to find young Maggie covered from tip to tail in poo that she seemed to take great pleasure in rolling in. Jorah, though not really a pup when he came along, relegated us all to six months of living in the easy-to-bleach confines of the kitchen because of his determined inability to grasp the basics of going outside to pee.

The fact is, life is significantly easier (and less expensive) with one dog instead of two. Even if it weren’t easier, I’m not in any way sure Jorah will be particularly welcoming to a new canine friend. His track record with meeting and interacting with unfamiliar animals isn’t great. When confronted with a new dog, he swings between attempting to hide under the nearest piece of furniture or growling like he’s been training to go to the fighting pits.

Every time the idea of bringing home another one takes hold, I seem to come up with a bunch of perfectly valid reasons why that’s a perfectly dumb idea. I haven’t ruled anything out, of course. Over the years I seem to have come by most of my animals some kind of accidentally, so at this point I’m just letting nature take its course and expecting the next fuzzball to show up more or less unexpectedly.