Okay, perhaps it is time to show my cards as would be said in poker. Things are turning poor rather quickly at work. There is an incipient mutiny in one team that will need to be crushed shortly. There may be more. When I refer to mutiny, I am referring to rank-and-file actively working to topple their manager through not-kosher means.

The outlook at work is deteriorating in the run-up to the new processing year. That we don’t have stable appropriations past December 7th also complicates matters mightily for agency stability as we’ll suffer an operational collapse if we face a lapse in appropriations. We are quite literally running out of time to prepare to implement the most sweeping changes in the laws since 1986 that my agency administers. There is no fallback plan and we’re stuck in an Apollo 13 situation of failure not being an option.

After consultations as well as reviewing the listing of options at snowdrift.coop an account has been set up on Liberapay. It does mean that I would lose out on some legal protections if things were routed through the church properly (i.e. miss a legal test to be a wedding officiant, some minor tax exemptions I could not have apply to my house, etc.) but it would give me additional freedom to operate (i.e. not all work would have to be church-related, could resume podcasting, resume active Xubuntu contributing, etc.).

I state in pertinent part on the Liberapay profile at https://liberapay.com/smkellat where donations are sought:

I do domestic missions work. Donations would free me from having to deal with a "day job" to instead spend more time on that. I could expand the missions role and be able to actually use recent training in emergency management/disaster response to be able to coordinate church response to crises. We live in interesting times and with a small congregation it is hard enough for us to support a regular preacher and he has to have a regular weekday job himself just to support his family.

Another part of the domestic missions work is that I undertake quite a bit of printing and production work. I essentially act as the desktop publishing in-plant for the church. I make heavy use of LaTeX2e to get things accomplished in producing print material for the church. If I were able to walk away from my current day job I would be able to further boost my LaTeX proficiency and eventually hope to upstream contributions.

Previously I wrote documentation for Xubuntu. I would like to return to doing that.

The dollar amount is set presently without any cost-of-living adjustment to keep me steady enough so that I can keep a roof over my head and support my parents living with me. It'll be tight but I live in a mostly rural area with a lower cost of living. Since I don't have a covert Beowulf cluster hidden in my garage, I think I'll manage.

Further discussion of the domestic mission work can be found on my infamous website here: http://erielookingproductions.info/Ch0.S5.html

Discussion in general on my life outside “The Job” can be found at http://erielookingproductions.info and a downloadable PDFLaTeX document is available there. All these thoughts are, of course, incomplete for now.