uhm, I might have begun scheduling myself - again - a bit aggressively?

I know lots of y'all saw my schedule before I began ramping down: 8 hours of conference calls in an 8 hour day.  I know you used to laugh at my desktop:  15 Excel workbooks up, 2 Oracle databases, a Microsoft SQL Server session up across 3, Q messages flying, a rain of emails.

I'm not so sure I don't inflict this shit on myself as I might have begun to schedule m'self a bit aggressively these days.  I see that now.  I'm booked every evening this week and there's a new meetup I've been told I really need to join on Sundays at 9pm.  And then, last night at the meetup, I went over the list of the things I'm involved in.

I'm scheduled for three nights of poetry readings, I'm participating in NaPoWriMo, so am writing a poem a day and plan to finish my fourth chapbook of poetry by September - fully polished to submit to the Walt Whitman contest.  I've been working in the garden.  I've got a short story deadline on the first of June.  Dave's Mom is flying over from Italy.  My friend's birthday is next Friday.  I have to make up some business cards for my poetry readings.  And that doesn't count working on the organization for my Code Sisters Seattle meetup.  I need to find some permanent west side space for that.  I'm still trying to figure out if I should put that on Meetup.

But back to last night.  There's a crazy number of tech meetups here in Seattle and the New Tech Meetup for Seattle got invited to the White House b/c it's like in the top 1% of all meetups nationwide.  I prolly got the stats wrong.  This was the third one I attended.  They have a very simple format and they hold to a schedule.  New Tech Seattle allows for an hour and a half of networking prior to a series of presentations given by startups who are looking for angel investors or talent and business support companies / angels & talent who are looking for tech startups.  There were several really interesting ones here again this evening.  This is my third one, but the first where I've worn a "blue" nametag.

They give you name tag colors based upon if you're job-searching (blue), looking to hire (red), or there for general purposes (white), including startup support.  The most wonderful thing about this meetup is that you get to hear about who's doing what and at what level they're doing it.  So, you have a broad range of "startups", or technology based companies giving their presentations.  These range from a two person shop, to Nordstrom's head of BI describing how they're tracking color preferences of their customers.  Very Kewl Beans.

I've started a meetup.  I'm not very good at it yet, but I have had all the chairs filled so far.  But return rate is not very impressive.  That means I have more to learn, tweak, and fix to bring people back for more than one adventure.  Code Sisters Seattle is a bootstrap operation for women who want to get together once a month to work on their own projects.  It's meant to keep you in touch with doing work for yourself.  Now, I just have to find a sustainable venue and figure out how it needs to be monitored.  I think I'm supposed to be doing the monitoring... if I started it up, I guess I'm supposed to control it.  uh...  By the way, my spirit guide is the Green Monster Middle Finger there off the center.