setting the bar

For most of my career I have always been the one setting the bar in whatever group I've been in. I'm now working in a large group again after eight years of working with anywhere from 3 others to just myself and my manager. After 8 months of trying to follow someone else's lead, I've finally given up and decided to go my own way with things again. I was hoping to be able to follow either the alpha Admin in the group, or the consensus opinion, but the joke was on me, because this group doesn't have either. Not that I'm interested in being the Alpha, but at the same time I'm tired of being the loner in a room full of people.

The flip side of this is that I should be able to easily manufacture an afternoon or two a week for continuing to try to learn Python. And the key word here is try, because it's not coming easy, which bothers me a lot. I still call myself a programmer after all of these years, even though I've not been paid to be a full-time programmer in 9 years now. I very much want to live up to that, but perhaps the realities of old age are starting to set in early, as I'm not "getting it". I'm not find the zone with it, and this is scary, because Python is a fairly simply programming language. I know that part of it is that I am somewhat directionless with it, as I don't have a canned assignment to work on. But the other part is that typing in the sample programs in the books I have and playing with them is either an exercise in "so what" because they are too simplistic, or just leaving me with having typed in so many characters into a file that don't really flow into a logical outcome that I can play around with.

For now, I'm juggling three projects, being on-call ever 10 weeks, and trying to help out the other people in the group with some of the day-to-day issues so I don't get further apart from everyone.

At least next week I get to get away for 7 days and will hopefully come back with a new perspective on things.