("Tragically, no one ever seems to figure this out.")

I noted this on G+, but since I'd like another copy for posterity: Yesterday was my four-year anniversary at [employer]. Hooray! I don't know how I lucked into my first career employment being one I actually want to keep and develop long-term, but I'll take it. :)

Things I may want to post about soon/someday: Comparing ASOIAF to the Game of Thrones TV series; video games I have played recently; work-things; marriage, family, and the social implications of personal goals (touched on very briefly in response to tangerine42's excellent but locked post on same). For the moment, though, I turn to luinied, who gave me five questions!

1. It sounds, from the posts you've made since you got your job out there, that you've been doing relatively a lot of ladder climbing at work. Do you have a point in mind when you stop climbing? (Or maybe this has already happened?) If not, do you ever worry about ending up too far above the technical details that interest you and stuck with all not-so-fun management work? (I'm just going to go ahead and pretend this is one question.)

You've made a faulty assumption here: that management work is by its nature not-so-fun. As it happens, I've learned (a) that I really enjoy the management aspects of my job, and (b) necessarily relatedly, the best managers are the people who actually understand the work of the staff under them, who can teach and mentor their staff, and who are capable of stepping in as needed so the work still gets done if the staff are sick/on vacation/otherwise unable to work. The whole machine works much more smoothly when the people in charge have leadership and vision and the technical know-how not to assign people tasks too far above or beneath their abilities or on impossible timelines.

There's also the part where I get kind of bored by the technical work, because it's mostly not very boundary-pushing. I'm good at analysis, but it's not my passion. My real love is in solving the puzzles -- working one-on-one with the docs to figure out how to design a study, how to collect the right data to answer their questions, what the right approach is to analyzing the data and helping them interpret the results correctly. The actual execution of the tasks isn't nearly as interesting to me as making the decisions on what to do in the first place. (The wrangling of scientific results into publications and funding applications isn't too exciting either, but I have to generate some kind of work product, and at least those things make my CV look good.)

With that in mind -- no, I don't have a planned ceiling. I'm learning to think in five-to-ten-year timelines, to make sure my plan dovetails well with the intentions of the people above me in the hierarchy. This year I expect to be promoted either to an associate director or director level position, depending on what HR says about the work I'm actually doing right now and my boss's decision about how not to create a parity crisis in his division. If it's associate director, I'd give it 5-10 years until I'm made director, likely when the most senior research faculty member retires; if it's director, who knows -- I'd be content there for quite some time, provided the salary was right. I may go on to be a VP or vice-chair someday, provided there was a position that matched my skills and interests (the hospital has a lot of VPs though, so I wouldn't be too surprised). Division head and/or department chair are probably out since those roles seems to require having a medical degree, but I guess there's always the chance that the whole hospital leadership is replaced and they decide to section off research instead of integrating it. *shrug* I'm not too worried; I seem to be able to craft my job description more or less to match my own interests, so whatever those turn out to be over time, I'll figure out how to gain incremental money and seniority to do it. :)

2. Are the kitties getting along any better?

They are! They still fight once or twice a day, but Sigurd's usually the instigator, so I figure he's earned whatever he gets if Lulu gets sick of it and fights back. (I mean, he tries to bite her asshole. Can you really blame her for not being okay with that? I'm not okay with that.) Sometimes she still chases him, but it usually means she's just hungry or bored. Feeding them both on a tight schedule has mostly taken care of the former, and laser pointers are a good solution for the latter.

3. What, if anything, do you still miss about other places you've lived? (Especially but not just Madison.)

More than anything I've missed the people. I've left behind great friends from everywhere I've lived, and granted some of them have moved elsewhere in the interim too, but having my social network scattered all over the country is far and away the hardest part of relocating to a non-central area.

Other than that, LA has nearly everything I could want. I miss cheap gas and insurance, but those are largely conflated by time as well as location (and I appreciate the cheaper produce here). Every so often I'll get a craving for a Wisconsin-only beer, especially the Dane's Crop Circle Wheat. I miss "being in college" more than I miss anything specific about Wellesley...but yeah, if I could magically transport my friends and family out here whenever I wanted, I don't think I'd ever need to go back anywhere I'd previously been. (Which would be ideal, as I could spend my vacations overseas or in new/more interesting places in the US.)

4. Which food cart/truck is the best? Yes, I am requiring that you choose just one.

I know I'll be a minority on this, but if I could eat at one food truck every day, it would be the Jogasaki Truck. Sushi burrito, dude. They have enough varieties that I wouldn't get tired of eating it, either, and their side dishes are pretty tasty too. That said, for all-around "best" food for mass appeal (as opposed to my personal favorite), I'd probably recommend the Glowfish Truck or Little Frenchie, either of which could easily keep me fed for a year.

5. Have you read A Dance With Dragons yet? If not, why are you so cruel to your friends who want to discuss its plot with you?

No? It worked kind of like this: Last spring, the first season of Game of Thrones aired. I was very excited! The show was great (save the outrageous miscasting of Jon Snow, about which I am happy to opine at length if you like), and I got all back into ASOIAF just in time for ADWD to come out, or so I thought. Unfortunately, June happened. Specifically, a work-related day trip to Oakland during which I had no other entertainment with me aside from the ebooks of the entire Vorkosigan saga, and so I wound up halfheartedly giving Shards of Honor a glance using the Kindle for Android app. I got through a few chapters and thought "eh, that was all right," and so that weekend I decided to read the rest of that first book. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The thing is, I am sort of a serial monogamist when it comes to fandoms: I only really get deeply involved in (read: obsessed with) one property in one medium at a time. Meaning if I'm reading a book series, it's the only thing I'm reading (for fun), and I'm not playing video games or getting too deeply into any TV series. If I'm watching a show (e.g., Star Driver), that's it. And if my interest has rekindled in something to the point where I'm reading fic for a finished property, not only am I not reading fic for anything else, I'm also not watching or reading anything new.

So, Vorkosigans happened all through June and July and the first part of August. In the second part of August I went to Kansas City and found two novel-length fics for the saga that as far as I'm concerned are truer to canon than canon itself; I read those, read them again, and then decided tcdohl needed to read them too. At which point he abandoned his reread of AFFC and picked up the Vorkosigan Saga, and I wound up rereading most of the canon series along with him, and rereading the fics again even though he never quite got around to it, and I forget exactly how long that took but it was probably close to the end of the year. We didn't do much reading in Hawaii on account of actually hanging out with people, and since the new year began, I swung heavily back into video game mode, where my attention was firmly on Portal 2, then FFXIII-2, and finally the fourth Layton game (which actually started with about 20 hours in the "London Life" mini-RPG before I ever got to the main game).

The good news for you is, following Layton I'm kind of tired of games again, and the second season of Game of Thrones is airing which has rekindled my interest in that world. So last night I went to Tower of the Hand and reread all the chapter summaries for the third and fourth books, and then I cracked open ADWD and read through the appendices so I could remember who the hell all these minor characters were aligned with and who was alive/dead/unknown where I left off (dude, I had totally forgotten that Tyrion and Sansa were married for like three days, and also Asha got married at some point? Not sure about that one), and most importantly, I finally gave up on the idea of fully reinstating my previous level of obsessed-fan knowledge. I managed to read through the prologue and the first Tyrion chapter of ADWD (which I'd previously read, via Amazon's excerpts I think) before I decided what I really needed was sleep. :P So it's happening, albeit slowly. GRRM is a much better writer than Bujold, but my God his stories are dense, and reading his work is heavier mental lifting than I'd remembered.

You know the drill: comment with a request and I will try to give you five for you, as I am able to come up with relevant questions. This also assumes you're not tcdohl; if you are, I'll give you a second set if and only if you answer the first one. :D