Ramblings about my trip to DC

Went to DC this week for a conference and some meetings about money. The nonprofit organization I work at is funded largely through federal grants and 2 of them have been tricky. After the conference I had meetings with people holding the purse strings for those 2 tricky grants.

The meetings were on Friday. Thursday night I woke up in the middle of the night all in a panic about those meetings. And wondering how much longer I can do this job.

Plenty of people run nonprofit organizations for decades, which is much longer than I have so far. And I'm sure they've had these moments of panic, stress, anxiety, malaise, and general less-than-thrilled-about-the-job feelings. As has everyone throughout history.

The first meeting went pretty much as expected, which is, not too bad. Then I had lunch with some friends and vented. And then went to the meeting I was really dreading, because it was with a federal auditor.

Plus, I got off at the wrong Metro stop, had to walk blocks in the 80 degree weather, still got lost on the way to his office and showed up shiny and sweaty. However, we went to Starbucks, I got hydrated, we sat outside and worked things through. It went much better than expected.

The guy used to live in Atlanta so we chatted about that, and he also visited Taiwan at about the same time when I lived in Taiwan, and we're about the same age, and I tried to be my most charming and competent best, so all in all, my meetings went pretty well.

Still, the malaise and general less-than-thrilled-about-the-job feelings continue.

On the upside, I was staying at Sister's place and it was nice to see her and hang out. Unfortunately, she had to put down one of her cats last week who was old and suffering from some kind of cancer. Today, she picked up the ashes and I put the wooden box of ashed on the shelf next to her Han Solo bobble head doll.

Now I'm home and I see that I've finally gotten the long-promised CD of pictures from the fellowship trip I did 15 months ago. On the last day of the trip, one of the other fellows offered to copy our pics from our digital cameras onto his laptop and then burn all our pictures onto one disc so we could see everyone else's pictures.

And now, 15 months later, the disc is here!