My Brain Hurts

This week we had a national review of the program I coordinate. There are 25 of my programs across the US and we've been working on this evaluation as a system for almost 2 years. So needless to say it was a pretty big deal. It happened to be hosted in Charleston because the other training program being evaluated is located in Charleston (I'm not going to go into the specifics of the whole thing since it would bore most of you to tears). So, since I was the closest reserve to Charleston I was one of the 'host' CTP coordinators for the whole thing. In short it was quite the week - I think I have emotional whiplash.

We started out the week on Monday picking up people at the airport. I served as the shuttle service since I was here in Charleston and it was cheaper to have me pick up multiple people at a time then reimburse them all for taxi rides. There were 7 panel members (although one is located in Charleston so she didn't need picking up), 3 federal staff who help oversee our programs, and 2 other CTP coordinators flying in. Then there was also a third coordinator driving down from the other SC reserve, and a forth coordinator flying in the next day, in addition to the staff from the other NOAA training program that lived in Charleston. Monday was pretty eventless. I went with them to dinner, which was late, but good to get to meet them and know them all a bit better.

Tuesday morning I was in the 'nervous excitement' mode. We had been working on this for so long and I'd put so much time into it that it was exciting to see it finally here, but a little un-nerving since we didn't really know what all to expect. The day went really well, and it was much more boring than we had originally expected because the panel spent the better portion of the afternoon in 'closed' session, which meant we hung out in the atrium and chatted. The thing was even though we weren't presenting or being interviewed we were still on edge because you never really knew if you were going to be called in to be interviewed. Lisa flew in that day, which made me VERY happy because since we didn't get a winter CTP meeting this year we hadn't seen each other since last October. Once she arrived we headed out for dinner, and chatted most of the dinner about performance measures with one of the panel members (yes, I know only the very sick and pathetic of the world can chat performance measures for an hour over dinner). Official day 1 (semi day 2) ended and I headed home pretty much just to sleep and get up again to head back downtown.

Wednesday was my 'hyper' day. I woke up ready to go at 5am, went into work to pick stuff up, and got down to the hotel to eat breakfast and star the day. I was running on about 16 cylinders for some reason, I'm not sure why, but I was 'awake, alert, and enthusiastic' to say the least. After a morning of presentations, we were heading to Edisto for a boat ride and interviews with some of the people I work with down there (they did a lot of phone interviews throughout the week, so we figured it would be nice for them to talk with real people that day). The boat trip thing didn't really work out because they had to respond to an emergency call and couldn't get the boat to the interpretive center on time, but the panel just walked around and had lunch, and then we set up for interviews. My Edisto folks were awesome, and it was cool to see them be interviewed on what my program did (the didn't close that session for whatever reason so we could stay in). We headed back to Charleston, went out to dinner at Basil (my favorite!) and I stayed in Lisa's room for a little 'sleepover' which was super fun.

Thursday was when the emotional whiplash started setting in. The panel decided the day before to scratch the presentations that were set for that morning. Lisa and I were supposed to present on performance measures, which is something rather important to us and one of the major things we wanted commented on through this evaluation. We were a little concerned that they didn't want a presentation, but figured they may understand more than we though of our system and they still wanted us to come in for an hour for questions so we figured we would just be answering questions on it, which would be fine. Since the morning was all changed around we ended up with 3 hours of nothing to do, so we went to a cute little coffee shop and sat out in the patio and chatted, then some of us when shopping while others did work back at the hotel, and then around lunch we headed over for interviews. When we got into the room and we saw the questions they were going to ask us up on the screen my stomach sunk. There was only one question on performance monitoring. To most people this would be a welcome relief, but as the workgroup chair and ex-chair Lisa and I really needed to get information from them on our system so we could work on it, and we had been concerned when the agenda was put together that this discussion was kept for the last day. You can only fight so hard to get something changed though and we had lost, so we were a little concerned it wouldn't get the attention it needed coming into it. Beyond the fact that it's stressful to try to answer questions for an entire system in addition to thinking through aspects of your program to answer these questions, I was also starting to get tired from having to do it for the past 3 days, and I was frustrated about the performance monitoring thing. When we left that interview to head to lunch I had about 2 grams of energy. We tried to distract ourselves by shopping before dinner but it didn't really work. We did find out that other coordinators had talked to the panel on the first day about performance (which would have been REALLY useful to know going into Thursday) but it didn't really make us feel better that we hadn't done our job. Plus the fatigue of 'being on' all the time was starting to set in, and Lisa was leaving, which made me sad, and the review was winding down which was so much of my focus for the past 6 months that it was wierd to think of it almost being over. After another dinner for 'talking shop' I went to bed ready for my brain to rest.

This morning I woke up totally exhaused. My brain was tired of thinking, I was tired of caring about the outcome of the thing, I was tired of trying to make myself not care about the outcome (it's hard when you love your job not to care about your job), and I was tired of needing to be interesting, excited, upbeat, and informative. I went over to the hotel to make sure there was no need for me to shuttle people to the meeting place, found out they were going to do a 'debrief' which actually made me feel a little better because I kinda needed some closure to the whole thing, and then went to work for a few hours. I went back over to 'debrief', take people to the airport, have my last lunch with some of the other coordinators and then back to work.

Back at the office I was feeling fine because Maia and I were playing with pictures for Julia's door (more on that topic in a later post), but when I left and came home I was in this wierd limbo land emotionally. I was tired, but not sleepy, my brain was full, but I couldn't make it stop thinking, my house was a mess and I had 100 e-mails sitting on my work computer to read and respond to but I couldn't motivate myself and I was feeling kinda like the last person left after a big party when everyone else has headed home and you have to finish up cleaning. I laid on the bed with the dog for a while and finally fell asleep for an hour and then I got up and sat outside reading my devotional, and came back in to start cleaning the house. For some reason cleaning the house is a kind of reset button for me. If I can get to the motivation point to get myself going it helps me reset my brain and refocus my attention on mundane tasks so I can stop thinking.

So, it actually did work as far as making me feel better, but I'm still a bit out of it and I think it may take a while to get back into the world again. It was a wierd week. Great fun, hilarious laughter at points, total frustration at others, lots of thinking and coordinating thoughts, motivation from meeting with the other coordinators, and it's rewarding to have the review done and seem successful enough to jusify 2 years of working on the project, but at the same time I almost feel lost with it all being over. I think by the end of the weekend my brain will have been able to completely reset, but as for now I'm going to finish drinking my tea and attempt to head to bed. I've still got half the house to clean, a week worth of work to do, plus normal weekend relaxing to attempt. We'll see how it goes...

'my people' - Steve, Tina, Chris, me, Lisa, Nicole and Matt - yes frightingly enough there are others like me with this weird skill set that leads to being a CTP person