As I flipped through my Mom’s old photo album, looking for a childhood photo of myself to post, I couldn’t help but think about my family, and my childhood, and time’s relentless march. Not all of the memories are good ones, but I seem to have survived okay. And, like time, I keep marching on.

I couldn’t pick just one image, surprise surprise.

Sorry for the poor quality. These are pictures of pictures. My scanner isn’t communicating with my computer at the moment and I don’t have the patience to try and figure out why.

 

 

That pic was taken while I was in kindergarten. I remember that haircut. I HATED it. I think I hated it more because it was called a “pixie cut” than because of the way it looked.

 

 

I made that T-shirt. Well, I decorated it anyway. That heart was a free iron-on that came in my Mom’s Woman’s Day magazine. I remember the oddest stuff.

Yes, the quality of that image is especially poor, but I had to share it. I LOVED that pogo stick. I remember one time when I was counting jumps, I got to over 1,000 without stopping. I don’t remember the exact number, but I know it was over 1,000. Momentous accomplishments such as that are hard to forget.

Fast-forward to age 15. The beginning of my second year in high school.

 

 

I may have felt like a grown-up, but, looking back, I know I was still a kid there. A Mom at age 22. Think of all the girls who have babies even younger. I canNOT imagine…

I hope y’all enjoyed that whirlwind tour through my childhood.

It’s sort of obvious that I am still playing catch-up, so I decided not to mention that particular fact any more. Okay?

I’ve never really liked the way I look in pictures. I guess my image of myself is just different than reality. But that’s okay.

I do take a lot of selfies, relative to some people, but they’re usually sort of wacky and fun (I think) and rarely show my whole face. Thursday, I did one for the Challenge.

I hate it. It’s silly, really. I know this. I mean, that’s me.

I AM getting older. I do have wrinkles. I am carrying around more body weight than I should be. I don’t wear make-up. I’m a casual dresser. But my body and its accouterments are just a vessel. If I looked like a lovely princess, I’d have to act like one. And I’d be willing to bet I enjoy life more than a stuffy ole princess. I even have my own Prince Charming.

Speaking of which, or whom…

We’ve had a bit of nice weather recently. Nice enough, in fact, that my PC and I went for a motorcycle ride on Thursday. Woot!!!

It was awesome. We rode out to Flint Hill to the Griffin Tavern and ate dinner on the patio. In March.

Afterward, knowing I hated the selfie I captured earlier, I asked the prince to take a picture of me for this post. Here’s what he captured.

Does that mean my handsome prince loves his motorcycle more than me?

Nope. It means he’s a smart-ass. I love him anyway.

Then he captured this lovely image.

My hair is really getting long. Soon, I’ll try an experiment. If it fails, I’ll just revert back to short, sassy, and very low-maintenance.

If it’s a success, I think there may be more selfies to come.

Happy Saturday, everyone!

I write proposals for a living. Basically, customers tell us what services they need by submitting a request for proposal (RFP) and it’s my job to tell them how we will perform the services, how much experience we have, provide an overview of my company’s history, organizational details, etc., answer any other questions the client has, and figure out how much it will all cost.

I’ve doing basically the same thing for about 17 years. The first four of those years I worked for a large investment management company. There was a reorganization and my specific job was eliminated. I could have applied for other very similar positions, but wasn’t really interested in investment management. And, more important, I wanted to work closer to home instead of having to commute into downtown Baltimore on a daily basis.

That’s when I started writing proposals (and developing budgets) for a clinical research organization (CRO). A CRO is not a biotech, pharmaceutical, or device manufacturing company, but a company that provides some or all of the wide range of services that biotech, pharma, and/or device companies need to support clinical research studies.

It’s very deadline-oriented and can make for some long and/or intense days. I know enough about all of the different services and their cost drivers (number of subjects/patients, length of the study, location of the sites, number of sites, etc.) to piece together a basic text document and draft budget. The real challenge lies in getting all of the in-house functional experts to fill in all of the details and provide the specific input needed to finalize the text document (range from about 10 to 80 pages) and make sure the budget matches the specifications the client requires.

It sounds easy, but there are tons of variables to consider. For example, what phase of development is the study? Pre-clinical work is all the stuff that’s done before a drug or device is actually used on people. It could just be the regulatory filings needed to get a product approved for use in clinical studies, it could be toxicology tests (done in animals), in vitro studies (test tube stuff), or it could be a combination of both. Phase 1 studies are typically first-in-man trials (the first time a drug, device, or drug/device combo is administered to actual people). Phase 1 studies are typically done to test a product’s safety and/or identify the proper dosage strength and schedule. Most Phase 1 studies use healthy volunteers as opposed to patients suffering from a specific disease or condition. The main focus is safety, i.e., will a product cause any harm or more harm than it’s worth? There are different categories of studies within each phase of development, so the line can get a bit blurry.

Phase 2 studies (and many later-stage Phase 1 studies) are done in patients. The enrollment and/or treatment periods are typically longer, and there are usually a lot more patients. That’s when they start looking harder at safety — they ALWAYS look at safety — and start analyzing efficacy, i.e., does a product work? Tolerability is usually analyzed more closely, too (to determine what, if any, side effects there are). Phase 3 studies are even bigger and often longer. That’s when researchers look at longer-term effectiveness and monitor side effects over a longer period. Phase 4, also called “post-marketing,” are studies conducted over many years involving thousands of patients taking drug products or using devices that have already been approved for use.

I’m explaining it simply, but there is a lot of technical scientific, medical stuff involved.

If you want to know more about the whole drug development process, here’s a link to the FDA for you. I make it sound really simple and straightforward, but there are a lot of nuances and variables to consider. My company supports studies on a global basis, so there are not only US FDA regulations involved, but other regulatory bodies, too. Canada has it’s own group, similar to the FDA, known as Health Canada. The EU is governed by what is now known as the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which used to be called the EMEA (I forget what that stood for) until folks started using “EMEA” to refer to the geographic region containing some countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Am I boring you yet?

There really are lots of nuances and things to consider when developing a proposal and budget for a study or studies in any phase of clinical development.

I always chuckle when people find out I work from home then say they’d love to  work from home, too, and ask if my company is hiring. I don’t work from home because of the job, I work from home because I have acquired the skills that are needed to be able to do this job from home. It took many years to get here. And I am still learning. Proposal managers burn out quickly, for good reason. So people with my level of CRO experience are so hard to find that companies are willing to let people like me to work from home because they cannot find potential employees locally with just the right skill sets.

It’s interesting, challenging, and very unpredictable. Figuring out the costs is done using a multiple spreadsheet Excel workbook. Each spreadsheet has many rows and all of the worksheets are linked in various ways.

Once a proposal has been submitted to a client, they often come back — this is called a re-bid — so we can add services we may have left off, remove services the client doesn’t want, figure out how to reduce our costs in some way, etc. We might get a week or two to work on a new proposal, but the turnaround time on re-bids is usually a couple of days.

Oh, and I am also responsible for getting bids from third-party vendors (often more than one) for services we do not provide that are needed to support the study. It takes a lot of coordination.

I spend a lot of time on the phone asking and answering questions. And I use e-mail A LOT. I’m always chasing people down, nagging folks, nicely, to give me the info I need in a timely fashion. The thing is, those people all have other jobs to do. And they’re usually pretty busy and working under deadlines of their own.

This is why, when the work day is done, I typically don’t want to look at a computer for the rest of the night.

Now you know how I make a living. It was all crystal clear, right?

Even if I did fail to complete the BBBC in February, I owe it to myself and the other participants to address the final five prompt topics. The tweny-fifth topic on the list is “spice.” I don’t know WHAT I was thinking when I chose that word, but here goes.

In the truest sense of the word, a spice is something used to flavor food. Many foods, without a spice or two added, are bland and flavorless. Life, without some spice added every now and then, can be dull. “Variety is the spice of life,” right?

According to encyclopedia.com, that proverbial saying has been in use for a long time.

…late 18th century; originally as a quotation from the English poet William Cowper (1731–1800) in The Task (1785): ‘Variety’s the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour.’ An earlier version is found in the The Rover (1681) by the dramatist Aphra Behn (1640–89), ‘Variety is the soul of pleasure.’ The Greek dramatist Euripides (c.485–c.406 bc) in his Orestes has, ‘a change is always nice.’

Our forefathers liked to mix it up a bit, too.

There are some people who like things to be dull, uneventful, and predictable. I can understanding wanting a life without drama, but I like to change things up. My job is predictable in its unpredictability. I never know what each new day will bring, which is good and bad.

My life, for the most part, is quiet. Relatively predictable, too, especially since the kids are all grown and out of the nest. The dogs keep things interesting around the house. Even if they are getting old — about 9 (Belle) and 10 (K) — they’re quite amusing. Irritating at times, like when they bark at passersby, attack delivery people, yak on a rug, etc., but mostly entertaining. They make us laugh for one reason or another every single day.

So what’s my spice? How do I, or we, keep things interesting?

I have several hobbies. Lately, I’ve been doing some embroidery and a lot of sewing. I’m not great at either, but I’m just learning. And practice makes perfect, right? (I call that my PMP philosophy.)

My mother-in-law gave me some lessons on hand-quilting while she was here over Christmas. So I combined two embroidery projects with quilting and made a couple of pillows for my girlfriends.

Tracey has made some amazing gifts for me over the years and I know Carol appreciates hand-made gifts, so I thought it would be nice. Neither pillow is perfect, but they’re made with love, and that’s what matters.

In keeping with my PMP approach, I signed up for a quilting class, scheduled for February 20th. It was being offered by my friend Kelly through her business, Kelly Ann’s Quilting. So that I didn’t have to lug my 1958-model Kenmore sewing machine to the class site (it does one type of stitch and goes forward and backward), Kelly Ann let me borrow a machine that’s been sitting around her shop for awhile. It’s a fancy-schmancy Husqvarna model that I suspect can pretty much sew by itself. It has a bunch of stitch options, is computer-aided, doesn’t require oil, is lightweight, and runs quietly, too.

Before I could use it in the classroom, I needed to practice a bit at home, so I started sewing together a bunch of little scraps leftover from the girlfriend pillow project. I liked the way they looked. When I stumbled across an embroidery project I’d mostly completed two to three years ago, I realized the scraps would make a perfect frame. So I made another pillow.

I’m really happy with the way it turned out. I wish I’d made the border on the girlfriend pillows as wide as the border on the snowman pillow. Another lesson learned through practice. LOL.

Travel is another spice in my arsenal. Motorcycle travel is like my hot Hungarian paprika. Car travel is more like cumin or chili powder. Add some friends into the mix, as I did last weekend, and you get fun. For a bit of extra zing, I added a roadside oddity or two.

This guy just happens to stand in front of one of my favorite eateries in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, a town in Lancaster County.

The food at Katie’s Kitchen is your typical, home-style Amish fare. It’s priced cheap and tastes good. I consider it a “favorite” because I love, Love, LOVE their fried green beans. Yum-Me!

Just down the road from the barefoot boy eating with pigs (speaking of LOVE, isn’t that label awesome?), is Big Amos, Barefoot Amish Giant. I had to go and visit Amos. Roadside oddities like that exist because people like me go to see them, appreciating them for their wonderful, wacky, weirdness. If he, and other oddities like him, didn’t draw folks in, there’d be no reason for the oddity’s continued existence. I feel as if I owe it to humanity to visit and get a photo with as many roadside oddities as possible.

Even if there are no oddities to see and/or the trip is short, travel is great medicine.

My dogs really, really love their daily walks, but so do I. It’s good to have a reason to get out there into the world every day. You never know what, or who, you’ll encounter.

Yesterday, on a whim, I decided to walk the girls early, while it was still daylight, which is a rare treat this time of year. A few blocks from home, I saw a guy exit the bakery who looked very familiar. After following him for about a half block, it hit me. I said, “Are you John Walsh?” He responded with, “I am!” (In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, it was this John Walsh.)

I introduced myself and we chatted for a bit. He does not live in my part of Virginia, he was just visiting. Know what he said? “What a wonderful little town.”

The whole encounter was a bit surreal.

I suspect folks get tired of me talking about how nice it is here in Warrenton, but it really is. 🙂

I guess that’s enough spice for now. Thanks for your patience with my lateness and inattentiveness. I really do appreciate all of you.

There was a time when I enjoyed using cursive (aka longhand) script when putting pen to paper.

I was going to say I print more than I write nowadays, but then I looked through three legal pads full of work-related notes and discovered that I use an odd mix of both.

I think my handwriting is clear enough for most people to decipher. What do you think?

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This Year’s Brave, Bold Bloggers…

Be sure to visit their blogs to see how each interpreted this challenge.

• Richard’s Page
• Fuzzygalore
• ScooterInTheSticks
• markneustadt.com
• Life on Two Wheels
• PrincessScooterpie

My blog doesn’t really have a “name” per se. I mean, “toadmama.com” doesn’t feel like a blog name to me.

I’ve tried things like “ToadMama’s Web Abode” and “ToadMama’s Interstitial Space.” I even published under “Appalachian Tours” before, which was really a separate moto-focused blog. That’s back when we spent a lot of time in West Virginia AND I was operating under the delusion that I could maintain a personal blog and a moto blog at the same time.

ToadMama is my nickname. Kind of. Maybe it’s more like my creative alter ego. (Not very creative apparently considering I can’t come up with a name for my blog!)

To be honest, I still kind of like ToadMama’s Interstitial Space. What do you think?

As for the origin of ToadMama, that’s a long story. Somehow, some of my girlfriends and I fell into the habit of calling each other “Mama.” Not in a motherly way, just in “Hey, Mama” fashion.

I wish I could remember how the whole Mama thing started with us. We’ve been doing it since the early 90s. So, sometime in the mid-90s, when I finally decided to sign up for an AOL Instant Messenger screen name, it seemed natural to incorporate “Mama” into the moniker.

As for the Toad part, well, I’ve always liked frogs and toads. At the time, Toad.net was my Internet service provider. After trying somewhere between 10 and 300 different screen names — remember, AOL IM was VERY popular at the time — ToadMama was the first that wasn’t taken. I hit the ole ACCEPT button and have been ToadMama ever since.

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This Year’s Brave, Bold Bloggers…

Be sure to visit their blogs to see how each interpreted this challenge.

• Richard’s Page
• Fuzzygalore
• ScooterInTheSticks
• markneustadt.com
• Life on Two Wheels
• PrincessScooterpie