I had forgotten how hard it can be to discipline oneself to blog frequently enough to hold people's interest! Tonight I feel utterly uninspired, but I'm trying to get something going here as I don't want to fail in my first week back at blogging.

This week and next week are probably the busiest two-week period in the year for me at work. Because we work closely with school districts and this is the back-to-school time in Ohio, I am running like crazy from district to district to participate in their opening convocations and benefits fairs. On top of that, our board held its annual strategic planning session today, which involved a lot of work on my part and the rest of the executive management team in preparation and leading the meeting.

Have I mentioned yet how fortunate I am to work closely with two colleagues who I genuinely like and respect and trust? Tara and Jerry are the CFO and COO, respectively, of the credit union. The three of us report directly to the President. All three of us have similar values. We form a very effective team, and I think it's a classic case of where the whole is better than the sum of the parts. (And that's no dig on the parts -- we're each very well qualified for our jobs, thank you very much!) I am more extroverted than the other two; Tara is amazingly insightful; Jerry has a sharp analytical ability. Put us together, and we rock -- and have fun doing it.

After the strategic planning session today, Tara invited the other two of us to her house for a glass of wine and debriefing. (But we all kept our briefs on.) It was so relaxing. I feel so lucky we work together so well. Actually, the question of succession planning came up at the board meeting, and there was some discussion about whether Dick, our President, was grooming one of us to be his successor and whether he should. I'm glad we deflected it. I hope one of us does succeed Dick, but for the time being I think it's best we continue working as the strong team we are. When the time comes I'm confident we will transition smoothly into whatever new roles we assume.

This feels like pretty boring writing to me, so I'm not going to belabor it. At least I wrote something -- once I get better at just passing that hurdle, I'll try to raise the bar on the quality of the content.