My Work

I work for Kentucky Housing Corporation, and have since 1999.  I have a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Kentucky, and my job is to assist developers, mostly nonprofits, with designing and securing funding for housing for people with disabilities, which we term permanent supportive housing, or PSH for short.  Luckily, again, I have always been a telecommuter, with my work station in my home, 130 miles away from Frankfort, where Kentucky Housing Corporation is located.  Most of my job I can do from home, since I'm connected to the KHC computer network, but from time to time, I have to travel around the state to meet with nonprofit agencies to discuss their housing initiatives, then assist them if what they want to do is compatible with the mission of KHC relating to PSH.  And once a week I drive to KHC for  meetings of various types, and let me tell you, KHC does love to have meetings.  Often I'll have two days of meetings, so I'll stay overnight in Frankfort. 

So, this has been my job for 14 years now, and I love it.  As in everything else, I'm lucky to have a job that is fulfilling, and challenging, and requires creativity, and consists of working with like-minded individuals, a job which doesn't pay badly and  has really good benefits, and good retirement which I may or may not get a chance to take advantage of some day, and most importantly, a job that is accommodating to someone who has had a stroke.

I work in a department of KHC called Specialized Housing Resources.  I'm the only one who does the type of design and consulting work I do, but all the others, about 25 staff members, administer federal and state programs of various types which benefit people with disabiliies or other special needs like homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, HIV/AIDS and victims of domestic violence.  The programs have names like HOME, HOPWA, Continuum of Care, Emergency Shelter Grant, Money Follows the Person, Recovery Kentucky, and mine, the Olmstead Housing Initiative.  We all work hard, and for the most part are a close-knit group.  We support each other, and I relied on them to keep my program up and running in the months after my stroke when I was, literally, getting back on my feet.

SHR, as we call our department since we do love our acronyms, has a staff meeting once a month.  My stroke occurred October, 2011, and the first staff meeting I attended after that was in February.  I hadn't driven that far before, so my wife, who is a teacher, took off work and went with me.  There was a potluck at the staff meeting to celebrate my return, with all the food laid out on tables placed against a wall of the board room.  A crock pot full of little wieners in barbecue sauce was placed under the room's thermostat, and until someone realized what was going on, the heat kept making the air conditioning in the room come on.  Now, pre-stroke, this wouldn't have bothered me a bit; in fact, I prefered a cold room, but post-stroke, my internal thermostat doesn't work so good, so in spite of having on a long-sleeved shirt and a sweater vest, I soon was chilled to the core.  I had to leave the meeting about halfway through, so I missed my own potluck, but my wife and I went and had a nice lunch in Frankfort.  Everyone understood why I left, and several told me they were tempted to do the same.  I've attended all the subsequent staff meetings, except for those that conflicted with other meetings, and I've established a regular KHC attendance schedule again.  I've discovered that when you work for a big bureaucratic agency, a stroke becomes a minor blip, and that's actually been a good thing for me, because it has helped me put what happened to me in perspective.