My Fourth of July was just fine, thank you for asking. In Ireland they call it Fourth O’July. Bet you didn’t know that, huh? I actually spent the day mostly at work. I was warned when I took four days off in a row recently that I would end up making up those hours over the holiday weekend.
If you remember my Easter column, I ended up stuck at work because my relief called in, but it worked out cos I got to go see The Psychedelic Furs without losing any hours. Well, that’s the odd thing about the security guard profession. If you like having your holidays off, don’t become a security guard. Everyone else is off on holidays, and it means that places that normally don’t need security, need security. You don’t get holidays off without pissing off the boss. I’m not a huge fan of holidays (or pissing off the boss) so it doesn’t bother me at all.
The last time I had two jobs, I tended to have a lot of hours at one job and not so many hours at the other. That hasn’t so much been happening in my work life lately, and holiday weekends don’t help. But as far as the security job goes, the company had to hire a number of guards to meet the holiday demand. Part of me wonders if this means that what has been my second full time job will become less of a second full time job now.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m caught up on a few financial things now, and I won’t complain if I’m able to continue to fix my finances. I’ve been thinking something though. I tried to share the thought on Sunday, but I did a pretty horrible job of it. I think I know what I was trying to say now, so I’ll try again.
I spoke with Nathan before things got really noisy last night. He said, as he said earlier in the week, that he’s having a little trouble writing for the blog. And you know what? So am I, but not for the same reasons. His work situation gives him very little downtime, while my work situation gives me enough downtime. He’s taking some online college courses, while I rarely get online these days, much less to take college courses. My problem is that I simply have no life.
Again, I’m not at all complaining. I think that debt of any kind means that you’ve had more life than you were supposed to prior to this time. In a way, I’m simply working for the life I had when I shouldn’t have had it, for however that may fairly or unfairly apply to me. In spite of everything, I really don’t mind work all that much. You know – apples in Albania, and all that.
What I am saying is that half of the year is gone, and in trying to look back and assess how well we are doing goal wise, it’s a very confusing sight. The goals that Nathan and I had at the start of the year are a far cry from what has ended up happening. And yet, I’m not too sure that what ended up happening has been all bad. Just very lopsided. Nathan is accomplishing goals. I am accomplishing goals. Nathan and I, as a group, are not accomplishing goals. Except for this blog.
Sure, we have done some work on things like Season Two, playing all of Nathan’s games, and even some Net Runner stuff, but mostly, our crowning achievement this year is daily postings to this blog.
I always try to balance my goal achievement, because anytime I focus for too long on one goal, I get behind on everything else. I know that the self-help elite would tell me that good time management often means focusing on one goal until it is complete, but that can be really hard sometimes. Like I said, I’m getting my finances in a much better place, but I have no life. Without a life, I just don’t have as much to talk about on the blog.
When we got together to shoot some Season Two stuff recently, I was able to type up a pretty good blog post that night. No listing possible topics and then trying to make it interesting, I just sat down and wrote about what happened. Same with Comicon in Irving. Same for Nathan with Comicon in San Antonio.
The problem I’m running into is that I’m working on projects that I could actually write a lot about the process and progress on if they were projects that were already released to the public in some way, or in some cases, if they weren’t for such a narrow audience. I’m not suggesting that we have a very wide audience here, but we do hope to attract one eventually. The projects I’m limited to right now fall into those categories.
What I hope is that we have the ability soon to do some group work, so that we have stories to tell in the blog posts. I could get by on 65 hours of work a week, now that I’m somewhat caught up, so in some ways I wouldn’t mind if I was working more like the last time I had two jobs. We’ll see what happens. I was sure that the hours would dry up long ago, and they haven’t yet. Some people are out of work, so I do see it as more of a blessing than a curse.
Regardless of what happens in my work life, I have sat down and refocused my thoughts to bring in the new half-year. I believe in many checkpoints in goal accomplishments. It makes things like course correcting happen more frequently. One of the major areas I’ve decided to focus on is writing for the blog. I have various writing for the blog that is buried in the mess of writing that I’ve done the last few months. I’m excavating it and organizing my writing better. Other than that, I’m going to push to have my reserves caught up, even if the subject matter doesn’t come easy, like on Sunday. I hope that this was a better version of what I wrote then.