Saturday, January 23, 2010

Shift Happens - and sometimes it's Tectonic

The earthquake in Haiti has been tragic. Hundreds of thousands killed, injured, left homeless, their lives disrupted beyond resolution. Tectonic plates shift and nothing is ever like it was again.

It's been eighteen months since I last posted. Eighteen months since my experiment lapsed - my experiment to see if I had anything interesting to say, often enough, to make a blog. My tentative conclusion, at least from the lapse, would be to say that I apparently didn't have anything interesting to say.

Or, as likely, nothing I was interested in saying. Those eighteen months carried with them too many unspeakables - hospice and death, business failure and bankruptcy, recession and depression, despair and hopefulness, redemption (or so I glimpsed and pretended).

Now, I post as an employee - of a National Lab. Not sure what the rules are about blogging - so I'll leave the details vague. For those who want to know, there are easy ways to learn given social media, Linked-in, Plaxo, and other such sites. A new stop on the journey - a journey looking more like a psychopathic roller coaster - the chaos of the change cycle.

Funny, the plateaus of the status quo get shorter and shorter. I thought, as I got older and older, they'd get longer and longer.

Now I work with a Federal program - helping them figure out who they are, how they are, what they're up to, and how they can go about changing the world. Of all things, turning grass and wood chips into fuel. Who'd a thunk it?

Problem is, that even if we succeed, it's still taking carbon from the soil and turning into CO2 in the atmosphere. Better than mining it from deep below the surface (?) Now we mine it from the top soil.

Humans are such strange beings. Infestations, really, on the planet.

And DC is a very interesting place to live.

And I love getting a regular paycheck.

And I miss consulting - and all of my wonderful clients. And I love my new work family.

I've been here ten months now - and the hardest parts seem to be smoothing out. Maybe I'll write about that later. The tearing world of bridging two very incompatible corporate cultures.

Shift Happens.

Stay tuned.

Amy