Time moves quickly

It's already the end of October. Tomorrow the fake cobwebs will be pulled off the trees and the plastic gravestones pulled out for another year. The cranberries, yams, and jumbo turkeys will be put on prominent display and we will be inundated with drippy versions of holiday music. The only traces of Halloween - SO last month - the on-sale candy I look at greedily.

I've been at the Hillsboro Family Resource Center for two months, and I can't tell if I feel like I've been there forever or have barely got a handle on things. At times I feel like I'm bumbling my way through, directing a program for 200+ families with little but a yearly report and some materials from last year. What happens if we fall behind in the interview schedule? Who made the emergency Christmas baskets last year? Who knows - but it just makes me determined to write down every possible detail for the next poor, hapless Americorps member.

That's a bit how I feel right now - hapless and hopefully under-prepared for each new day. Sure, I have strengths. I can soothe a sponsor's fears with my calm voice. I know I'm devoted to my job, and will make sure what needs to be done is done. But this program, this Help for Holiday program, is sucking the life out of me. It works in the style of Adopt-a-Family: we find sponsors, sign up families, and then match the two. And monitor them closely, it sounds like...

But I wouldn't know, because the report left by the past member (who has slowly been painted herself in my mind as a god-like Americorps member of efficiency and perfection) seems complete and yet is nicely vague on the details. And then I wonder how I could only gather 200 sponsors, when she found 275 (never mind that there was one more full-time staff at the HFRC than we have now). And how many details I'm missing that I will smack myself for later (but how can I know them, and if I did how could I fit them into my days?). And why I need to spend so much time on this program when it is an organizational pain in the arse and such short-term help to the families.

Such dispirited thoughts! Part of it is, as I said, the frustration with literally spending months of work on a program that serves to provide a si day of food and gifts. Sure, the holidays are important - but I feel like I could hold a fundraiser, plan three classes, and expand our more overlooked programs in this amount of time.

I'm also distracted by friends and other things, and coming up on the most intense work week since I started - three days of work, a day of family interview, a six-hours Americorps meeting, another day of signups, and a day of training. (That's seven days, if you're counting.)

Stupid holidays! Geez.