In 2016, I left my job to start a company. I still vividly remember an exchange with an older guy shortly thereafter.

OLD GUY
Oh. So you started your own company?

TROY
Yeah. I’m a little nervous but more excited.

OLD GUY
Sure. Fun stuff. Being your own boss is great. Want to know the best thing about having your own company?

TROY
Sure. What ...

MARTY
This is Marty's tenth year back in the classroom, after taking a nine year hiatus to stay home with our kids. This year she returned to peak form. She would have gotten there sooner, but the covid-disruption set everyone's plans back. She is a marvel in the classroom and is someone who connects with young people far better than most. I see this every time we go to a school event in the w...

this week i'm going to be be doing something a little different. the more astute of you may have noticed that i have let this year's monthly gallery section lapse, by quite a bit. there have been times in the past where i've missed a month or two but could dig out without much issue. this year, i have fallen 8 months behind which will require a bit more to recover.

first, in explanation of the arrears, in January my company won a contract that we kinda thought we weren't going to win. the good side was this was a huge get for our small and new company. the bad side is this meant a whole lot of work for our small and new company. this is why the last gallery post happened in February.

so i have made a plan to mend this motley fence by posting two long-form pieces. the first is about family pets and the second is about family lessons. this week will be a five-part story about our experience fostering dogs.

Part 1 - Mom hates dogs.

bella and i were having one of our, what she calls "red-leather chair chats". these happen when she and i are both around and have twenty open minutes. she will ask if we can meet in my office. this is a request i have rarely, if ever, said no to. once settled into our respective chairs we catch up with each other's life. these largely replace what used to be our dad hours which haven't happened for bella too routinely since, honestly, she began middle school. i blame this largely on me no longer being able too pull her out at lunch time for our father-daughter lunches like i used to in elementary. problem in both middle and high school is their lunches are not long enough for me to sneak them away and get them back in time for their next class, which is a bit bizarre to me.

on this day, after getting me up to speed on her life she asked what was going on in my world. i shared that we had just started a new marketing outreach campaign and i had to call about twenty people a day to see if they were interested in our service.

BELLA
why do you sound so unexcited about it? that is unlike you.

TROY
i don't know. it just hasn't been turning out the way i thought it would and i'm a little discouraged by it.

BELLA
how long have you been doing it?

TROY
two days.

BELLA
two days! that's it?

TROY
uhh. yeah.

BELLA
and who are you calling?

TROY
law school registrars.

BELLA
dad. you can't give up after two days. i mean you're still getting your script worked out. it took me weeks before i had my approach down at club fitness. AND the people you are talking to are professionals. they can't even be mean to you. has anyone hung up on you.

TROY
no.

BELLA
six or seven of the people i call every day just hang up on me. don't even say a word. just hang up.

TROY
i guess i didn't think of it that way.

BELLA
you can't quit after two days. it's not the dearmitt-way.

the next day i made ten calls. seven people answered. and all of them were pleasant and helpful. when i was done for the day i may have even thought to myself--well, that was kinda fun, but i would never tell bella that.

ok. so i've been away for a bit. i know. it's not that i don't still love you all or that my interest in this website has waned. neither of those things are true. the basic answer is over the last few months i have had less time available to document my life.

the first reason for this is my children. when your kids are young life often feels like a merciless beat-down that takes all of your time and energy. and this is true in many regards. you are often told that when your children are older you get your life back. this is also true in many regards. the problem no one mentions is when your children are older they like doing cool things, cool things that you want to do with them. fact is they sorta start looking like grown, real people. and not just people but people you like, i guess maybe in part because you are alike in a lot of regards. but it is also true that you start getting your own life back, which is great. problem is you don't have the bounty of free time you had when you were 25 so now you're trying to shoe-horn your own interest inbetween moments of hanging out with these, in my case, three new adults you like spending time with.

all this equates to more living of life and less writing about life.

and as if this didn't throw enought sand in the gears of time, i have a new child of sorts--my company ofCourse Scheduling. it obviously has placed certain demands on my time that aren't the sorts of things that can be back-burnered. while there is usually a natural divide between my new company and my old life, there are occasional overlaps. one collision recently happended when two months ago i decided i should start a newsletter about my industry. in doing this planning one of the things i realized was i needed a body of seed content to start the newsletter off. so i have been writing, fervently, for the last two months, only i've been writing about something other than myself, my wife and my children. while most civilians aren't probably into course scheduling for universities the evidence of my labors can be seen here: The ofCourse newsletter.

but, now that that boulder is safely perched atop its hill, i'm eager to turn my writing cycles back to the crazed lot i live with. i thought a sensible starting point might be to share a recent moment from each of the cast. so this week we will have five updates to the family scrapbook, one day for each person. obviously you can't really lead off with anyone other than the family matriarch so here i introduce the first recap: Family Scrapbook (Marty) - Your vagina is how old?.

the short story is this:

• in mid-june i resigned my position of ten years at my most-recent employer, washington university in st. louis.
• i spent the next three weeks feverishly working to make my exit a clean and competent one. fwiw i spent the five weeks prior as well, starting my work after making the decision to leave. this effort was largely in the name of my staff who i didn't w ...
  View in Family Scrapbook >>>

yesterday i talked about my old job. today let me introduce you to my new job.

in 2010 i was asked by my employer to modernize a dated scheduling system they used to set their school's semester course schedule. for many years this had been a fully manual process and was buckling under present-day demands. they were hoping for something that c...