{"id":93,"date":"2015-01-22T09:44:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-22T15:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/well-that-was-exciting.html"},"modified":"2015-02-24T21:38:51","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T03:38:51","slug":"well-that-was-exciting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/well-that-was-exciting.html","title":{"rendered":"Well, that was exciting. . ."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

and I don\u2019t mean that sarcastically.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, as we were finishing up dinner, I pulled out the iPad to look up children\u2019s book author Brandon Mull, since he\u2019ll be doing a talk and book signing at a library near us tomorrow and my son is a big fan (middle son, not the artist), and then looked at my pageviews (as, yes, I tend to do as part of my iPad-checking routine: \u00a0facebook, e-mail, twitter, blog pageviews and comments). \u00a0And there it was: \u00a0traffic from instapundit.com<\/a>. \u00a0And not just any ol\u2019 insta-lanche, either, but this:<\/p>\n

AN INTERESTING BLOG:\u00a0<\/span>Jane The Actuary.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

which, I have to tell you, really, really<\/i> made my day. \u00a0The whole family watched the pageviews climb over the course of the evening.<\/p>\n

That, and I think<\/i>\u00a0I\u2019ve been un-blocked on National Review Online. \u00a0Either that, or they\u2019ve got a super-secret way of hiding the fact that you\u2019ve been blocked, with comments visible to you, but no one else. \u00a0But I was looking at the Disqus screen that lets you scroll through comments that you\u2019ve made on various Disqus-using sites, and my prior NRO comments were no longer showing as \u201cremoved,\u201d so I made a test-comment on Kay Hymnowitz\u2019s recent article on family leave<\/a> and that comment still seems to be there, so that\u2019s promising. \u00a0(Though I never did get a reply to the e-mail I sent them.) \u00a0And as much as I was trying to adopt my best \u201csour grapes\u201d attitude, it\u2019s quite frustrating to be excluded from replying to an article, or replying to a comment, and NRO is a pretty good source for opinion on a variety of topics. <\/p>\n

But at the same time, it\u2019s performance review time at work, and, simultaneously, engagement survey time, and the latter always gets me in a sour mood. \u00a0Not that I think they use the engagement survey to determine pay raises, but their philosophy has lately become very focused on using the entire \u201craise budget\u201d on the top performers (which mostly means, around here, the ones who work the most overtime), with only scraps, at best, for the average among us (that is, those who spend their spare time with parenting, blogging, reading, etc.), regardless of the degree to which we\u2019ve learned new things and contributed to the team results. <\/p>\n

Yeah, I blog anonymously. \u00a0And it\u2019s my impression that this is the norm at many employers these days, so I don\u2019t think that in griping about my employer I\u2019m revealing information that instantly identifies them. \u00a0But it still has me thinking about where I\u2019m headed career-wise, and blogging-wise, and how I can get the two to intersect \u2014 and that, without working full-time or relocating to the East Coast. \u00a0It seems a bit of a long shot to try to do a Megan McArdle \u2014 that is, in the way she was offered her first journalism job based on her asymmetricalinformation blog. \u00a0And the just-down-the-road Society of Actuaries is hiring a \u201cRetirement Research Actuary<\/a>\u201d but that demands a lot more technical skills than I\u2019ve got. \u00a0I\u2019d love to land at someplace like the Center for Retirement Research<\/a>, but, again, I haven\u2019t quite figured out how to get from here to there, or even if there\u2019s a path at all. \u00a0(They do have a job opening<\/a> \u2014 think they\u2019d take a part-time telecommuter?)<\/p>\n

And I have continually good intentions of going on down to the local Republican organization and seeing what I can do there. \u00a0But our candidates last year were really \u00a0lousy. \u00a0Heck, sometimes I contemplate running for Congress, knowing full well the seat has been gifted to the Democrats by redistricting, just so that the GOP candidate isn\u2019t such an embarrassment as was the case last time.<\/p>\n

But in the meantime, a couple years ago, I published an article in a retirement-focused publication, and I\u2019m working on another one now, though it\u2019s proving to be difficult to flesh out my ideas. \u00a0But we\u2019ll see how it goes. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

and I don\u2019t mean that sarcastically. 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