cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Plans Progress

For the next few days I'm just going to keep posting starry-eyed things about how awesome these next 2 years can be.

Trish will be able to get out of the house more and take trips of her own. It won't be a big deal for her to get in the car and drive out of state to visit friends while I look after the kids. The lawn will start getting mowed with some type of regularity. I can exercise more regularly. There will be no reason for me to not get a full night of sleep almost every night.

A whole new chapter of my life is about to start. I had begun to fear that such a thing would never happen. That the rest of my life would be a slow evolution of barely getting by and years passing and the kids getting older and nothing much changing except for my age and what a dollar buys. Ha! I'm escaping that. I am going to be in almost full control of my life for the first time ever.

To be honest, I have already mentally checked out. I'm at my desk but don't see myself doing much of any work today.

I'm going to read lots of books that I've always meant to get around to but never had the time. You know I've never read Plato? I think maybe I'll take a day or 2 in October to go sit in a secluded corner of one of the university libraries and read Plato.

Next week I should start clearing things out on my computer at work. The pictures of nekkid ladies and so forth. I need to bring in some flash drives and bring home all of the mp3s stashed here.

Wow. I'm really doing it. I announced it on Faceb00k so it must be real. This feels like jumping off of a cliff.

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During my lunch break I renewed my AAA membership, since I'll be doing a lot of road trips. Then I renewed my hunting and fishing licenses. I bid on a High definition Flip video camera on eBay. Rather than getting 1 camera with 120 minutes of memory, I intend to get 2 of them with 60 minutes each. They cost much less and this way my bets are hedged. If one craps out on a trip then I can pull out the other one. I'll also have the option of shooting the same thing from 2 different angles.

Tomorrow I'm taking my car in for an oil change, flushing of the fluid in the clutch and transmission, and hopefully getting the AC charged back up. No fucking way I'm driving to Chicago in the middle of summer without AC. Also my CD player just crapped out and I'm going to see what can be done about that. There's no place to plug in an mp3 player but if I can get the dash open then I might be able to wire something up myself.

I'll transfer a few thousand dollars into my Paypal account so I can use my card with them for emergencies on the road. This also keeps Trish from spending it.

Shit, I am probably going to need a crossbow. I don't want to have to buy another sort of big ticket item. One really can't get one suitable for deer for less than $300. I'd be using this mostly for things like monitor lizards in suburban neighborhoods where firearms can't be used.

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I had an idea yesterday afternoon while I was driving home from work. I should do some part-time consulting and training so that I have something to scale up into a full-time business if I need to. An exit strategy in case my writing and TV career doesn't pan out at the end of the two years. With 11 years of experience in my field, having trained many employees and being certified to teach continuing education to professionals in my field, that should be worth something.

What I think I'll do is be available to come in to an agency or office that has just had a key employee leave and they don't have anyone who knows how to do the very specific things that I know. I'd spend up to a week on-site while I train someone on the necessary software and teach them how to write this particular type of business and how to navigate a particular large company's bureaucracy. If I did that for a week out of every month for the next year I think that would be a reasonable pace that wouldn't interfere with the other things I need to be doing. I could probably charge $500-$700 a day for this, especially given that by definition the clients will be pretty desperate.

Working only a week a year, it won't add up to a ton of money. I figure around $30k or so. But that would be on top of the $35k a year I'm getting for the next 2 years for sale of my stock, plus book advances and tuition from classes. If the consulting/training thing is even slightly successful then I think we're going to enjoy a much improved quality of life for the next few years.

3:52 p.m. - 2010-07-12

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