Work/Life Balance

I am still crazy at work with multiple PennDOT and PA Turnpike projects in addition to a big project with the City of Charleston, WV.  I worked late tonight onsite at PennDOT, leaving at 6:15. 

My inbox is as full as it ever has been in my current job, and I really struggle to keep up with it.  Hard to believe that for most of my 8 years at the commonwealth I tried to keep the number of emails in my inbox to 100 or less every day.  How did I do that?

The work onsite at PennDOT has been quite rewarding, although very challenging.  I am rewriting the entire backend for the Oracle Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS).  I get to use my technical database skills and writing Oracle Stored Procedures to create the 2M record HPMS data set that has to be reported to the FHWA in June. 

I made some major changes to the program yesterday because I realized I wasn't splitting the records properly so that I would get the correct mileage numbers for the Urban Areas.  That set me back a few days and I inadvertently caused some errors that I am now trying to fix so that I can give the PennDOT management team the updated road mileages for the State Mileage Certification Letter that is due June 1.  All of the data that we deliver 2 weeks later has to be within 1 mile of that number, which is not an easy thing to accomplish.  Unfortunately I was out of the office at the Turnpike today twice for Asset Management meetings, which took away from my ability to get the programs debugged.  That's where I start again tomorrow morning.

Kim and I had planned to work outside around the house this weekend, but sounds like we're going to get lots of rain.  May be time to clean up the basement - it is a mess, and I need to start going through things and pitching them so that Kim won't have to some day.  That sounds a bit morbid, but I am a packrat, and have boxes of college books and notes downstairs plus many hundreds of books from the authors I read and collect.  FYI, I just added 60+ new books last weekend at the Penn State AAUW Used Book Sale. :)  I'm getting ready to turn in for the night and (re)read The Talisman by King/Straub.

I may lose my ability to speak in the next year if the progress continues at the same pace and will be forced to depend on a computer to help me with verbal communication.  The nurse at Hershey assured me that "There is an app for that!"  My ability to speak clearly comes and goes - today was a pretty good day altogether for speaking, but my capabilities are definitely declining due to my partially paralyzed tongue, vocal cords, and face.

My family and friends have been wonderful and amazing.  The unfortunate thing with my disease, Bulbar ALS, is that it affects your emotional state quite severely, so I am often so moved by the smallest kindness that I am moved to tears and become verklempt (thanks Mike Myers).  Same with sappy TV programs.  I really struggle to communicate.  I told PennDOT today of my situation and they were very kind and compassionate. 

My dear friends and family, thank you for your prayers, emotional and physical support over the past months and especially over the past few weeks as I have struggled to communicate and arrive at a diagnosis. 

I have received a lot of spiritual guidance and support from many people.  Kim and I have not been active in church, but I am still a believer.  I think it will be helpful to find a church and become a more spiritual person in the days and months ahead.  Lord knows I need a lot of help to be a better husband, brother, son, coworker and friend.

Please forgive my ramblings, I'm tired.   But it was a good day, and I know that there is a lot of work for me at PennDOT and the PTC in the next 12-24 months if I am capable of working that long.

We moved my meeting with the Hershey team to next week.  I thought it was just with the speech pathologist, and Kim told me it was with the ALS Clinic team - SP, doctor, nurses, social worker, nutrionist, etc. and would take several hours.  Kim was right, and I was wrong, of course.  Maureen was kind enough to move it to next week so that I could take care of my work commitments this morning.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that some of this information is useful to you as writing it is helpful and cathartic to me.