Worst VISTA Ever

Well, it's been several months, which is wrong in so many ways that I cannot even begin to count them. I've probably been labeled the "Worst VISTA Ever" by the Corporation, but since I don't have very ambivalent feelings about them, I don't really care. The fact is that I have been busy over the last 4+ months and if that means that I don't have time to blog for CTC, well, then that is what it means.

August was spent getting a new VISTA (Matthew Isaacs is officially the schnizzel!) and applying for $1.5m in NSF money. Unfortunately, a week before the deadline, the RFP was postponed because money had not come through from the STPHTR Congress. (If you are wondering, that would be "Screw the Poor, Help the Rich".) Putting this in my blog probably makes me an even stronger candidate for WVE. Bring it on, 'cause I'm adding to my résumé.

To be perfectly honest, I don't really know what happened to September. I know that there was a good amount of work. I know that I gave a presentation to the U of I Business Department about CUWiN, and that I presented CUWiN's work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to a Summit on Katrina. Actually, I should pause here to note a little something funny about the Summit. I was on a panel about social entrepreneurship in the contact of natural disaster relief. I didn't previously understand social entrepreneurship completely, but I do now. I also know now that half the panel ate up most of the panel's time talking about traditional entrepreneurship, so we couldn't get into questions about whether making money in a disaster is ethical. It was a convenient strategy for them, but was really annoying.

October was really about travel. I attended the Air Jaldi WSFII Conference in Dharamsala, India, and visited our partners in South Africa, who have put up a CUWiN network in Mamelodi Township. If you are interested in reading about the India portion of this trip, you can check out my actual blog (which is only slightly more used), at http://nsneedle.blogspot.com.

I returned to the US on 11 November and stepped right back into the grant writing frenzy. We had the grants from August due on November 15, and, well, let's just say that while I was away it didn't get done. Afterwards, I took a week off for Thanksgiving, which entailed the arrival of my best friend and a trip to Kansas, where Mom and Dad live, and Sister (and fiancé) was visiting. It was a good time, but it was by no means the rest and relaxation I was hoping for.

That brings me to this week. I'm preparing to take part in a meeting in San Diego in December, as well as trying to wrap up the hundreds of loose ends that predominate our work at the moment. Oh, and did I mention that I have been leading the organization's efforts to create internal structures? That's been a hoot and a half, especially trying to balance various people's hot buttons. But, so far so good, and I am actually the Secretary of the CUWiN Foundation. I'm also trying to develop a new part of the organization that would actually be responsible for doing network installations. It's a good way to bring in some cash, but it needs a lot of work before I can push it out.

So, that's it from here. I should note that this blog system is really unwieldy. I spent five minutes trying to recover from an attempt to add é. First it added &amp to the text, then it would not let me back into the editor, and when I finally made it into the editor, it only showed me the first four lines of this blog, although I had already written about twenty. I'm not angry. Nope. I'm just telling whoever is in charge that this happened and it would be nice if it didn't. Then again, with my WVE status in the bank, I probably shouldn't be taken seriously.