Jobs and such

You're in for a high-text, low-photo blog post today. Since last update, I spent 4 days in Oakland, CA at a conference (with non-conference highlights that included dinner with older bro Rafi and an outing to san fran to see a friend's son-in-law-to-be play in a band); had a long-weekend visit from Mike's mom (highlights of which included a moonlight snowshoe, where it was too dark to take pictures, visits to several nearby wineries, and some good down time), and a skate-(cross-country)-skiing outing (faster and a bit more cardiovascular than classic cross-country skiing it seems) about an hour from home (where it was snowing and cloudy so I again didn't take pictures).

While weather-wise, we had really thawed out quite a bit over the last month or so, this week the snow came back, so we're back at about 8 inches at home (although in wenatchee it's been almost all rain -- so it's been an odd commute to work recently -- from winter to not-so-winter and back again everyday). Despite the snow, preparations are underway for spring! Temporary fencing (so we can graze the goats outside their regular pen and minimize lawn mowing, see construction fencing debacle of last year) is in a box in our back room. Seed catalog order for the garden is just in. Oh, and Mike figured out how to use these glass-cutting kits to turn empty wine bottles into glasses -- now we just need a way to do a better job sanding (melting?) the not-so-sharp-anymore-but-still-not-super-smooth edges.

But in this post, I'm mostly going to talk about work. Because I haven't in a while. So, I've just finished my super busy season at work, as you may have noticed -- November through February (so I guess really a good third of the year) is just filled with travel and presentations and reports and grantwriting and long days. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but here's part of the problem: I don't really seem to care all that much about what it is that I'm doing most of the time at work -- I don't really think that what I'm talking about in presentations is all that important, the conferences are sort of hit or miss, the reports, well, just kind of have to be done, and the grant writing is at times interesting but also a decent pain in the neck to coordinate, and I'm spending a lot of time (all indoors) doing it. And not caring about the content of your work is not necessarily a bad thing either, but it's somehow under-motivating.

But here's the thing. Back when I started (going on 3 years ago), I really thought I would care more about this work. I thought I would really like my job. And a lot of the people around me really care about what they're doing, so it's not like it's not-care-about-able or anything... So what's the deal? Attention deficit need for constant new content material? Maybe, but I don't think so. I worked on farm bill stuff for 5 years without getting sick of it (I was totally sick of the PhD process, but not really the topic area) -- and actually, I recently gave a presentation about farm bill stuff, and it was part of what made me notice my disenchantment with current work. Because I really liked talking about farm bills again. Of course it's easier to like things when it's a one-off opportunity and you don't have to stick with it day-in and day-out, but I don't think that's the issue here.

In this case, I think it's that the aspects of my current job that I most liked have fallen away, leaving mostly just the aspects I find boring. What appealed to me about the job in the first place (see this old post and this one, from long ago) was the complex-problem-solving aspect of it -- the idea of helping lots of different people with contrasting perspectives and an inability to get along because of them resolve relevant issues (probably the same reason I like(d) farm bill stuff). But here it's pesticide use and safety. Which is fine -- I like pesticide safety -- I think it's important to phase out nastier pesticides and use nicer alternatives. I like feeling like farm work can become a little safer and agriculture can become a little smarter through what I do.

But the aspects that really addressed those kinds of issues have grown smaller over time. I used to talk more with environmental groups and try to find common ground with tree fruit industry types, and now I don't much. There just wasn't the institutional support behind it, and I guess I didn't have the commitment to stick with it on my own (or perhaps more to the point, there was little I could actually offer groups in terms of negotiating compromises, because I wasn't authorized to change much on my end). I used to at least think I could do more in terms of farm worker safety education, but I feel like I mostly give presentations to people who are there for the pesticide license credits and may or may not listen to what I'm saying, which may or may not be relevant to them anyway. And I used to think more about what might make growers inclined to change pest management practices, but now that's mostly been reduced to editing survey questions and crunching numbers (which has never been my favorite).

Every once in a while, there's a flurry of big picture discussion or teamwork or deeper thinking or problem-solving, but mostly the ratio of interesting ideas to tedium that has always been a bit of an issue for me in research has dropped a little below my threshold. It's interesting, though -- I see one of my bosses (the social science one), who just loves the details. She likes the big picture too, but she can just dive into spreadsheets of numbers and make tables and spend hours thinking about the best wording for a particular question -- things that I just don't have the patience for. It means we work well together (from 4 hours away), she writes up the data parts of presentations and abstracts and papers, and I add the implications and philosophical parts. But seeing the way she works with details and data just sort of reconfirms that it's not my thing. And my other boss (the entomologist) is just so nice, and such a good boss for work-life balance stuff and on a personal level, but is overbooked and his deeper interests lie elsewhere (bugs), so it can be harder on a work-content level.

So, some of this I've talked about before. But here are the newer pieces. First, enter grant-writing. I was approached this past fall by some people I've worked with at the University of Washington (Seattle) agricultural safety and health center about putting in a grant for their 5-year center renewal (i.e. the 7-10 projects they'll work on over the next 5 years). So I put a proposal together to essentially bring the problem-solving pieces back into my job. The project would focus on the fact that while many farm workers feel super vulnerable and exposed to unsafe chemicals at work, many growers feel that workers are not very exposed, that chemicals used are reasonably safe and are used carefully, and that concerns are overblown. This situation of course makes it hard to do much, as the relevant parties (not to mention all the other players involved) totally disagree as to whether or not there's even a problem.

So the idea would be to go around and talk to members of all these relevant groups individually and find out more about how they see pesticide use and pesticide safety, etc. And then convene a board with representatives of each of these groups and show the whole board the results -- so everyone can see fairly transparently, guided by some sort of third party, how different these perspectives are... and how at the end of the day it probably matters less who is right (because they're probably all right to some extent) and more that there may be certain areas of commonality to work with despite the differences. And then this board would get to figure out what those areas of commonality might be and come up with some plans to work on them. There are a few more researchy type things in there too, but that's the gist.

I'm not really sure if it would be a pointless nightmare of entrenchment or something really interesting and rewarding. I'd like to think that it might, once the wrestling is over with, yield some useful solutions to pesticide problems in agriculture, at least more than I feel pesticide license class presentations and survey data do. And in any case, it would certainly put the problem-solving and complicated worldviews and diplomacy aspects that I tend to like back into my job. Now, it may or may not get funded. And if it did, it would be half time. Then it could be paired with half time on a biological control (insect predators that eat insect pests) project I'm on. And somehow also worked out with another 10% time position I've been written into on someone else's grant to help do insect computer model outreach classes in Spanish and Spanish-speaking videos of insect information. Certainly, working 110% time is not what I'm shooting for, but it's unlikely that all three grants would be funded, and if they were, I could probably back out of one of them, leaving me at a more ideal slightly-less-than-full-time schedule.

Now the newest development is that the entire agricultural health and safety center program that the University of Washington is part of is currently on the federal budget chopping block. So this new grant may not even be an issue. And although it's the project of the three which is probably of most interest to me, without it I guess I'd be easily less-than-full-time, which could be nice too.

Here's the second piece of this that relates. It's not quite job related, but has given me a surfeit of group problem solving to keep me busy. When Mike left his job at the CSA (veggie box subscription) and produce market, the organization he worked for asked if I would be on their board of directors. And I said sure. And then their president stepped down (his work commitments had grown), and they asked me to be president. And I said, "while I don't know that it's wise to have such a new board member be president, I can see that there aren't that many other options at the moment (due to a variety of reasons), so sure." So I'm the board president now. It's probably a good time for it, actually, now that my regular job has just chilled out a bit, and also because the group is undertaking a "strategic planning" process, trying to move from a seat-of-the-pants do-stuff organization (which has been quite successful that way) to one that has a vision for the future, and plans of how to get there. And one that goes beyond the personalities of its founders to bring more people into the fold and have a little more varied input in decision-making.

So, what does that become? A lot of group dynamics, complicated problem-solving, bridging really different perspectives on what should happen and how, mitigating power dynamics that are less helpful and pushing them towards ones that are more helpful, getting somewhere and making decisions rather than revolving around the same discussions over and over, etc. etc. etc. It's kind of psychology, and kind of sociology, and kind of organizational development, and all for the sake of getting to think about agriculture and eating. In some ways a big pain in the neck. But mostly, it's super interesting, and keeps me engaged, and continues to make me want to help get us towards a mutually-acceptable solution, and makes me oddly confident that if we wrestle through all the mess, we'll (pretty soon) get somewhere that was better than we would have gotten if we had just left well enough alone. I guess I'll let you know if that turns out to have been overly naive (but I don't actually think it is)...

So, that's work. Some boredom, some options for mitigating or improving that, and on the whole, well, who knows. But while we're at it, let's just add another element in (in terms of work schedules and various grants and commitments and part/full time questions) -- which I actually wasn't going to mention quite yet, but, well, here goes -- lots of excitement lately at home since, if all goes well, Mike & I will be adding a new human baby to our flock in late August (ish)! I figured I was going to have to tell you sometime before the pictures of us working in the garden involved me with a noticeably larger belly, and you started asking questions... It's not there yet, but well, there's the scoop! :) (see, there are rewards to reading through 'til the end of a long text-y post). Will keep you posted, I'm sure.

On that note, it's off til next time!