I’m entering the second month of work wind-down, and so far, it’s been very busy. I feel like I’m putting more of myself into a lot of different projects than I was before, and staying busy right now is a good thing.
People at work seem surprised that I haven’t completely checked out, including the COO, who I talked with briefly on Friday. I laughed and told him that as long as they’re still paying me, I’m working for them. It’s a measure of how strongly I feel about the mission and the organization; I have no beef with them, other than the fact that they didn’t plan well enough, but I want to see WRI succeed. I like to think I’ve also finally learned something from leaving some of my previous jobs, where I did a terrible job of staying in touch with people—some who I really liked, and some who I didn’t. I have a lot of regrets about that, actually. I was never able to maintain long-term friendships going back to the days when my family moved around a lot, and with a few exceptions, I don’t talk much to my friend group from high school. I’ve never been good at maintaining these kind of things, because I’m afraid those people won’t want to talk to me, but I’ve been working to get over myself and put myself out there some more.
In the meantime, I’m trying to average sending 1-2 resumes out per day, depending on what’s posted, but I’ve only heard one thanks-but-no-thanks reply. There are a number of job websites out there with pretty decent listings, but a lot of the social media stuff that’s suddenly entered my algorithm is about how people haven’t been able to get past the AI bots to have their cover letter seen by a human being. Having been on the other side of this, I know how hard it is to weed the wheat from the chaff, especially when you’re getting 200 applications each day, but I always did try to take the time to look at every submission myself. This new way of doing things seems capricious and arbitrary. I’m doing that thing I hate doing the most [see paragraph above] where I reach out to my network and kindly ask if anyone might know of anything. I’ve actually gotten a couple of good leads from friends, and I’m hopeful that the network will do what the bots will not. The LinkedIn post I put up about ‘moving on from WRI’ got a HUGE response from people, and I made sure to reply back to everyone that posted to boost it further. Here’s to hoping the right people see it.
I’m also looking at other ways to start generating income. There’s money to be made doing housepainting and light carpentry, which I have plenty of experience with, and our old friend Jen, a realtor, can funnel me work. I can load the OG-V with carpentry and painting gear and work for hire without a contractor’s license for what I’m told is pretty decent money, and she could share my name around with her peers. It got me through college, and it can work in the short term now.
I’m headed over to Brian’s this weekend to take stock of the EV project. Making a go of this would be the best possible option, although it would take me away from home for long periods of time. He’s been busy with personal stuff, but I’m hoping we can make a serious go of it in December.
At the house, I’m finishing up the Travelall floor and also looking at inexpensive ways to insulate for winter. I got to thinking a couple of weeks ago about the underside of the front porch floor, which had originally been sealed up with some sheets of plywood over the joists, which were filled with insulation. When Brian and I shot foam against the sill plate shared with the ice room, we never covered that area back up, and there’s a section of the office floor that hangs out over that open space. I got under there and covered it back up a few weeks ago, but I then thought about how our kitchen floor is always cold. In the basement we have insulation up against the underside of the floor but it’s not sealed with anything, which I’ve learned is basically useless. I did some research and found that some simple sheets of 2″ semi-permeable foam sealing the cavity between the joists would keep heat from soaking downwards into the unheated basement. So I’m going to do some experiments in the next week with that to see how well it works.
Meanwhile, my left wrist has been bothering me for the last couple of days—right after I had my checkup with my GP. I’m going to make another appointment to go back in and have him look it over, but what I fear is that this is the beginning of arthritis. About 30 years ago, I was mountain biking with Rob, and we were riding downhill toward our car at dusk on a dim single track. I cartwheeled over a chain spread across the trail, invisible in the fading light, and did a half-decent tuck and roll, avoiding a cracked skull—but I planted both wrists on the pavement as I tumbled. They hurt pretty bad for a week or so after that, but as a newly minted graduate with no health insurance, I couldn’t have them looked at. I’m pretty sure I fractured or tore some cartilage that day, and I’d bet it’s coming home to roost now that I’m older and the weather is colder.
I found out at the beginning of October that I was being laid off from World Resources Institute. For reasons far out of my control (but which anyone could see coming) our funding was constricted due to world politics and ongoing institutional challenges that weren’t addressed over years of rapid growth. My position, lofty as it sounds, became redundant, and my tenure made me expensive, so it was pretty clear I was on the chopping block. This seems to be a common issue with Gen X professionals in middle management—we’re too experienced and expensive to keep but haven’t ascended to the C-level to become bulletproof. They don’t offer a severance package, but they’re keeping us RIF’d folks on until December 1, and we keep our healthcare until December 31, so I’ve had some breathing room to get my affairs in order, polish the resume, and start blasting it out as much as possible.
After speedrunning through the first three stages of grief—I spent all of 30 seconds on denial, five minutes on anger, and two minutes on bargaining—I’ve been cycling between depression and acceptance, punctuated with moments of panic. I ran some numbers through Monarch, our handy money management app, and when I saw the first number it returned for our monthly outlay I nearly had a heart attack. I’ve been laid off twice before, and having always been paranoid about money, I keep an Oh-Shit fund at all times. Monarch’s estimate was much higher than I had bargained for, but when I started reviewing it I was able to chip away at a bunch of unnecessary line items to get to a number that was much easier to accept.
The big issue is going to be health insurance. COBRA, which has never been affordable or equitable, is the first option, and the number I got from our HR reps at work was more than our combined mortgage, car payment, and phone bill. The ACA Marketplace was my next stop, and while I didn’t dig too deep, the pricing there was more affordable per month—but with an astronomical deductible. So we’ve got to make some hard choices there. Next week I’m going to dive into that particular nest of snakes and do some comparison shopping.
I’ve signed up for several job search websites, some paid and some free, and have been using Claude to help me tailor cover letters to each position I’ve applied to. I’ve found it’s easy to ask AI to get the letter started, and then do a massive rewrite in my own voice to remove the robot from the text. As I expected, I haven’t heard much back yet, but I’ve got some friends at work who are putting the word out for me, with some success so far.
Another, more interesting lifeline could be teaming up with Brian to renew our work on Slowflake the EV project, with a goal of getting it running so that we can show it locally and drum up a project where someone else will pay us to convert their vehicle. There’s a lot to work out with this plan: I’d have to stay in Chestertown through the week and come home on weekends; I’d most likely be taking home renovation work on with Brian to cover our mortgage and bills; and I’d be away from the girls for a long period of time. But this one, I feel, has the most potential for growth. I’ve been thinking for a long while about my future as a creative with the ascendancy of AI, and it seems like a safer bet to stay employed is to make something with your hands that can’t be replicated with four prompts in a browser window. And if we owned a business we’d be in control of our own destiny instead of depending on others to make sure the train stays on the track. I’m still young, I’m healthy, and I can work with my hands—it’s something I look forward to. Maybe this is the time to take the chance and see where it goes.
The first step is to travel over to Brian’s, review our progress, and come up with a plan. If I’m out on the bricks in December, and we can plot out a solution to get Slowflake running—and make it happen, God willing—then we’d have a completed project to show and drum up some business. If we could get a paying project in the door for conversion, that would go a long way to making this a reality.
a few years ago, I was asked by the faculty at MICA to supply data for a class in the Data Vizualization graduate program, and if I could sit in and help with critique for a few of the classes. I’ve done it for two semesters now, and one of the students in the last cohort got in touch with me after the final class and asked if I’d come and give her students at the Yale School of Management a presentation on how WRI uses data visualization. That sure sounded like fun, so I immediately agreed.
I’ve spent the last week or so working on the deck and my delivery, and I had it down pretty good by the time I had to board the train to New Haven. They paid for my ticket and a hotel room, which was very nice of them, and after checking in and doing a final runthrough I took an Uber to the shiny School of Management building for my big show. After some technical challenges with the room A/V setup—my work laptop would not connect, but luckily I had my personal machine with me, and that played nice—I went through my deck and our work successfully. The students seemed to respond well to it, and there were more than a few who were from the School of Environment, so I had some good questions to answer at the end.
From there, they took me out for a delicious Italian dinner, and a few more faculty from the Urban Studies program joined us, where I learned they are working with WRI on a project I’m involved with. The conversation was far-ranging and very interesting—I was worried we’d only talk shop, but the topics went from the environment to architecture to personal histories to where the best thrift stores are (I said Austin; one of the students suggested London).
This morning I woke to sunshine coming through the window. I got a coffee and a muffin at a crunchy cafe down the street and walked back over to the campus to meet one of the Urban Studies folks I met last night. I was there to look at a room in the Sterling Library where WRI will be exhibiting an installation featuring five years of the WRI Ross Prize. I’d been in the fancy new Management building on Wednesday, but the Library was like I was walking through a Harry Potter set. With my reconnaisance done, I got a car back to the train station and headed back home.
I was nervous going into it, but I think seven years of teaching and other opportunities I’ve had to do public speaking have gone a long way to making it easier to do. As a kid, I never thought I’d be doing this kind of stuff, but I find it a fun challenge, and I have to say, I kind of enjoy it.
Monday morning: there’s about 2″ of very damp snow on the ground, and the outside temperatures are 34˚. We were supposed to have a boiler repairman come by sometime between 10 and 2 today, but as of 11:45 this morning I have heard nothing from the company. We’ve got space heaters working overtime to keep things warm, and it’s averaging about 65˚ inside, but I’d really like to have our heat back.
Update: they sent a nice plumber out to look at the system, who admitted sheepishly that he’s not an HVAC guy, and rescheduled for tomorrow morning. I don’t blame him in the least, but that’s an asshole move by the company.
I spent most of Sunday putting the final touches on a presentation I’m going to be giving at the Yale School of Management on Wednesday about data visualization for social good, an invitation I was very pleased to accept after helping teach a graduate course at MICA last semester. I’m still practicing my delivery, and after doing the talk for Jen on Sunday afternoon I wound up re-ordering a whole section. I’m hopping a train on Wednesday morning, doing the presentation that afternoon, and they’re taking me out to dinner in the evening. They put me up in a hotel overnight and I take a train back on Thursday morning. It should be a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to the experience.
[frantically returns to practice]
This morning, theoretically, I am on day one of my second sabbatical at WRI. I spent the last three months cranking on a big project at work and with a few small details left, got it over the finish line (more details on that soon). I’ll have to plug in for a couple of small meetings next week, but hopefully I can step away and enjoy the next five weeks doing some personal projects and seeing family—because in the fall, things are going to get very busy again. Brian is looking at a Nissan Leaf parked in his driveway and wants help disassembling it for his electrification project, and I’m hoping I can put in a couple of solid weeks helping him with that. I’d actually like to keep working on that through the winter because I am keenly interested in that project. And as always, there are projects here around the house to tackle, and I’ve got a red truck that I wanna get on the road before the snow flies. I’m also signed up to get my concealed carry license next week, and I intend to put some time in at the range.
I will never own a watch this expensive in my life, but watching this guy disassemble, clean, and reassemble an original Rolex GMT was fascinating. This watch is gorgeous, and would be everything I would want in a vintage timepiece. That bakelite bezel is beautiful—the rich color and typography are absolutely perfect, and the wear on the whole watch is just right.
I’m currently taking a class/working group for creative directors run by the CD at Ogilvy Canada. I found it through my social media feed and signed up for it on a whim. I was lucky to get WRI to pay for it (after 11 years, this is the first class I’ve asked them to pay for) and so far it’s been pretty good. The class size is much bigger than I was expecting, and there are a lot of people who are in the place I was after about two years at WRI—they had the title, had been doing the work, but are still trying to figure out how their role fits in at whatever agency/company they’re at. This Thursday we went through the creative brief and roughly half the class had never written or used one, which I found kind of shocking. But something I’m finding universal is the lack of any formal training or mentorship for this role; if you’re lucky you work for a CD somewhere as a design or art director and they show you the ropes. My experience involved little mentorship—I had to figure it out along the way, which has been the theme of my entire career. The class will run through most of my sabbatical but that means I’ll be able to focus on the homework better.
Speaking in an episode of the conservative “Ruthless” podcast released on Tuesday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the move was “basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion”.
The US is poised to gut its current carbon emissions standards as part of Project 2025, which is terrible, terrible news for our country, our children, and our environment. This clown referring to “Climate change religion” is telling; another way to weaponize words along the fascist playbook. Personally, I’m happy to belong to this religion instead of “soulless corporate greed fuck-you billionaire religion”.
For the first time in 11 years, I went on a company retreat with my department outside the office. In years past, we have gathered in the office conference room for six to eight-hour days to talk about strategy and planning, with brief side trips to local restaurants or activity areas. This was the first time we’ve actually gone to a different city as a group.
The planning team chose Charlottesville for its proximity and easy access by train. We made it to our hotel before noon, had some lunch, and gathered for a kickoff, then took a short drive to go to Monticello for our afternoon activity. Splitting up into two groups, I chose to tour the house and was pleasantly surprised to see that Jefferson’s complicated history has not yet been erased by the revisionist white supremacists. It’s still as beautiful and disturbing as it was the last time we were there, and that’s a good thing.
Retreats are always a tough balance between focused strategy sessions and teambuilding, and in years past our group seemed to lead heavily into days of focus and a lot less on teambuilding, which got exhausting quickly. This time the balance was much more in favor of talking to and interacting with people we don’t normally get to see. As our group has gotten more global we have more people on our team living and working remotely, so it was good to meet people from different countries and get to know them.
We spent 2 1/2 days in Charlottesville and I would say it was by far the best retreat focus on my group that I’ve been to since I’ve been at WRI.
While I was there I had two rolls of 35mm B/W developed from our trip to Portugal. Some of the highlights:
Jeff Bezos’s $10bn philanthropic fund has stopped backing the world’s leading voluntary climate standard setter, following rising scrutiny over its influence on the body, in a move seen as the billionaire’s latest effort to curry favour with US President Donald Trump.
WRI has several large projects funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, which have done excellent work so far. We learned that Andrew Steer was stepping down from the Fund last week; several other colleagues who followed him have also left. Make your own inferences there.
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Happy to have this completed. My team was awesome; I couldn’t be prouder of all of them.