Yes, I'm still alive

You’re probably looking at the datestamp of my previous entry and wondering: Where the heck has that loser Geoff disappeared to? Well, much to your chagrin (or reassurance, depending on your point of view), I’m still very much alive.

Yes, I’ve been very incommunicado. I’ve been exceedingly busy. Busier than I’ve been in my entire life. Busy in a way I can’t even begin to describe adequately. Busy in a way I can’t even appreciate myself.

I’ve been here in Costa Rica for a mere 9 months. And I gotta tell ya, it feels like two years.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. (Well, okay, maybe I am — just a little.) I didn’t have any allusions that when we came here that this would be easy. I knew this was going to be hard. I knew that I would definitely be doing things differently, that I would have to break my own rules, and I would have to put a lot of things on the line to make it work.

I’ll admit: I didn’t think it would be quite this hard.

We’re a startup. By mere definition of the word, that means that things start slowly and gain speed. That means more and more work the faster the machine turns. The question then becomes — as a startup — how do you grow to accomodate the work?

And not just get “butts in seats”. You can get people without too much trouble, if you’re desperate enough. You need to grow responsibly: get the right people (or people who can become the right people without a significant investment) at the right time (not all at once, and you need to grow earlier staff into more senior positions to help the newer staff).

That’s the trick. And it’s a tough one.

Why do I mention that? Because we’re in the growth phase. We’re getting more and more people almost weekly. That means more and more work, so we can keep them busy. That means more and more things that we have to keep track of.

It’s that last part that’s been doing me (and the rest of us gringos) in. You can only try handle so many things. Eventually the load gets so high that you start having trouble seeing the details, and work starts to suffer. That’s the next trick: keeping the balance.

For me, it’s doubly hard because I also have a family — I can’t spend every hour in the office, no matter how much work I have.

So yeah, things have had to take a backseat. Blogging, reading my RSS, personal emails (even work emails take me forever to catch up), and anything else that adds overhead to the two things that are most important to me: my family, and my job. (In that order, I might add. Or at least that’s the order I’m aiming for.)

It means almost no “time off”. No rest for the wicked, as it were. Take last week, for example: Alex, Mi Pequeña Niña, and I all flew up to Toronto to visit family. We flew Saturday, which was the only day I didn’t really do anything. Sunday night? Worked from 20:00 until 4:30 the following morning. Then a head cold set in, which wasn’t fun on Monday. Tuesday, went down like a tonne of bricks from the aforementioned cold. Wednesday? Yep. And Thursday and Friday were actual work days, except that I pulled 12+ hours on Friday due to a few difficulties combined with the two hour shift matching CR time.

Again, I’m not complaining. It’s just fact.

So this is an apology to those of you looking for more content. I promise more is coming. It’s just going to take awhile to write some more.

Heck, it’s taken almost a week just to write this…

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