No, it isn’t

Life in Austin has not been pleasant recently.  We lost several people on our team to buyouts and layoffs at the same time as a huge spike in workload, and all of us left are run into the ground.  (Probably I haven’t mentioned this, but ever since last May I’ve been working on a level-3 escalations team, lots of visibility and lots of stress.)  Our managers are letting us work all sorts of overtime if we will (and I have to, just to keep up); new people are being hired, but it will be weeks if not months before they’re much use.  It takes that long to learn what we do and how to deal with it.  I come home and lie down and that may be all that I do all evening.  I don’t have energy to do anything else, although I need to find some.  My insulin and other diabetes medicines are causing me to gain weight (most of them do), and I badly need to start walking again—but I feel no motivation at all.  I don’t feel anything but beat down.

And the house is just about to cost us a lot of money.  Our house insurance carrier came and did an inspection in December then sent us a letter in January saying we had to (1) fix all the busted or dry-rotted window frames and repaint them all, (2) find someone who can replace the missing siding shingles, (3) clear out the eBay room of all the crap we’ve thrown in there, (4) re-floor M’s room, (5) re-floor M’s bathroom and fix the subfloor and flooring in our bathroom, and (6) butcher back our pecan trees so they don’t overhang the house, all of this to be done by first November or they’ll non-renew.  We don’t have anything like that amount of money hanging around, aside from the purely practical issues of getting everything done in eight months.  I’ll probably have to try to arrange to borrow against my 401(k), as I did when we fixed the roof, and then spend the next three years paying it all off.

Spring pledge drive for KUT and KUTX is coming up at the end of the month, and for the first time in 38 years, I won’t be involved with it.  Management decided that between online pledging and sustaining (i.e., auto-renewing) memberships, the phone call volume didn’t justify setting up a phone bank, so all they’re going to have phone volunteers do is make outbound “thank-you” calls to higher-dollar members.  And I’m not gonna do that.  I have to spend too much time on the phone at the Empire being professionally polite to people to want to do more of the same when I’m not there.  I had a phone conversation about this with a member of the development staff who’s been around for a while, but she didn’t have much to offer.  And most of the other events for which the stations need volunteers are either during the day or on such short notice that I can’t work it into the house calendar.  So I don’t know what I will do about it.