The Start and The End

It appears this will only be my second blog post here for 2014.  I don't think that's a bad thing, considering the topics I post out here are mostly bitching and ranting about things in my life.  And I've not flooded my main blog with too many details of my struggles with distractions.

Let's just say that I am really wanting and will make an effort for 2015 to be a year where any posts here will be praise for what happened.

It's been an interesting year, based solely off my first post, where I applied for a job but didn't get it and have been stuck at my current job since.  There was always a hope to leave.  I had a couple of phone interviews and one in person.  I realized I am not prepared for an enterprise IT job, at least on a Goldman Sachs level.  Nothing like knowing you blew a 2 hour interview 35 mins into it.  Learning experience, that's what it's called.

Stuck is an interesting verb to use to explain a situation that's almost entirely in my control.  Yes, I applied for jobs this year, but I could have pushed harder.  It's most certainly not because I don't want a new job, which I most sorely need for 2015 to be a better success story than 2014 was.  I had several job opportunities presented to me, but either I applied and wasn't qualified or I spent too much time pontificating over the position and my confidence level that I never applied.  Yes, you read that right.

One of the first courses of action while looking for a professional counselor that understands where I am at is to push for a new job.  In fact, I'm making it a goal for January to find something.  I feel I have overstayed my welcome here and need this change more than anything to help me get out of my comfortably unhappy state and take that first risk into changing.

Let's see what my next post out here will say.  Hope it's a step in the right direction towards gaining a positive foothold back into my life.

Rediscovering Passion

This blog is many things to me, but for most of the posts I've created out here, they have been complaints about my life.

My last post talked about making changes.  Most of these changes are related to things I am passion about, which is changing what I do for a living.  After 28 years as a Network Admin, I am needing/wanting a change.

I am very passionate about wanting this change.  But more than anything, I am passionate about the many projects I have going on.  I want to complete them. But I let too many other things in life get in the way of working on them to completion.  This eats at me a lot.. multiple times a day as I encounter the things that distract me.

I keep thinking I will reach that point of "I CAN"T FUCKING TAKE IT ANYMORE!!" but then another day comes along where I deal with these things that block me from moving forward.

I've come to the recent conclusion that I can't let these distractions worry me or prevent me from completing my personal and business projects.  While I've been ok to let them make me feel a lack of passion at my day job, I've let that lack bleed over to my own personal life outside of the day job.  That is where my main frustration level grows larger by the day and the hour.

I must simply find the best and most effective way to work through my personal life and day job responsibilities, while rediscovering the passion I used to have for making videos, writing stories and blogging my life's adventures.  It's the only thing that I can see that will relieve me of my complaints, stress and irritations.

Procrastination

One of the main reasons that allow me to go months without posting here is the fact that I've always treated this blog as a secret blog, even though it contains my full name and is not private.

Surely there has been enough that's happened with my life in the exactly four months it's been since I last posted here.

- Of my 4 active blogs, the other blog that's been ignored is Scooter Sunday.  Not on purpose, mind you, but just naturally inactive due to the lack of editing of Scooter Sunday episodes.

- The other 2 blogs that are active - Chillywilly.org and Banal Leakage - have remained at their normal pace of postings, with a few days in between posting being part of that normal pace.

- I should also mention another blog I update, where my alias is a LEGO minifig stormtrooper named Cooper...  Cooper Trooper.  It gets updates less frequently than I plan to.

- I've traveled a lot.  Seattle, northern Oregon and Vancouver, WA at the end of July.  Vancouver, WA again two weeks later, Irvine, CA a week later for my 30th high school reunion.  And Las Vegas and LEGOLand at the end of October.  All trips were good, with the exception of my spouse giving her driving instructions, which bothers me on many levels.

- I've been writing fiction, but not without procrastinating a lot.  I start a good story, then get busy with something else, come back to it and get it mostly finished.  Then wait till the day or two before it's due and scrambling to make final edits.

- Speaking of writing, I joined up to NaNoWriMo to give me some incentive to finish my novel I started in September 2000.  I'm still at chapter 3, with chapters 4-30 still in my head.

- As for my day job, the frustrations I deal with there still have not pushed me to a level of wanting to go somewhere else.  Perhaps I'm more at ease to let things be, given I have flex time and vacation days still left to burn for 2011.  Plus, it's not as stressful as it normally is.

- Daily exercise eludes me most days, with the treadmill now tucked into the corner of the downstairs family room.  My wife put it there... honest.. I'm not just dumping on her (only her driving instructions deserve the harsh retort I give her).  I just might have to join a gym again to give me some motivation.

Which leads me into the very reason I put things off a lot.  It's a matter of managing both my time and my many distractions.  When that day finally arrives, except some miraculous results posted to my other blogs.  And a nice mention here, of course.

Wish me luck.