On Sunday the 3rd I turned 50, same day my mother turned 76. The age doesn’t bother me in the least, oddly enough. I’m not depressed about it or anything, nor was I at 49. Perhaps my worst was turning 29, in the face of 30 coming at me. At 40 it was there, but less so. Now? Shrug.
Having kids made it wonderfully fun! They are so adorable. My six year old gave her mother specific, detailed instructions what to get me. This was an unexpected thing, since the plan was not to bother, given, you know, finances, and that the adults don’t care that much. No ulterior motives at all… Pens, including colored pens, and a new ream of paper. Because I “could never find a pen” because she had borrowed all of mine, and because they had used most of my paper. Mom did a great job shopping, and added a mug to hold the pens like a bouquet. I put them on a very high shelf to deter borrowing.
I made my own cake, because I am the cook, and I’ve modified in my head the cake recipe enough that Mom might not manage it by following the original on paper. I made the frosting and finally managed to perfect it. That’s one of Mom’s specialties, but I’ve had practice now. The trick is not to follow any recipe, just to know what goes into it and how it should come out and what will take it in that direction based on how it looks and feels along the way. Made one layer and cupcakes, by request. I applied frosting. The rest of the crew decorated. Very Jackson Pollock, but cool.
That I am not feeling down doesn’t mean I have no regrets or wishes that things might be different, or headed upward faster. Yet… things have been moving so quickly it got ahead of this rebooting blog and personal landing site. I restarted writing in earnest under my blog alias, and intend to keep at it, though there was a blow to the prospects for generating side income from it, and started exploring a book idea, probably best done under a pen name.
I “reopened” Welcome to Help, which I’d never taken down, just hung a virtual closed sign on. It still needs updating. Possibly even a complete rethink, since I have broader possibilities the name and domain might work for than simply computer-related support services. That had been my overlapping, me-only successor business to XTreme Computing. For minimal, not actually generating work and revenue values of business. Which is a whole other post, looking at the marketing and the resistance and factors, business, economic and personal, involved in the whole thing and whether it can work. Hey, anything is something, at this point. Since I am daycare, I continue to have the caveat, but I accept it now, of working around when I can get out of the house to do work, lack of space to work in or a place to have customers come personally. It’s just that saying “I am not doing this anymore” is less conducive to attracting any work at all than is “hey look, I am available for this type of work.”
Part of the impetus was freebie work on a dead laptop, which proved to need the hard drive replaced, but from which I was able to recover files first. Part of it was work on my own computers, albeit not completed yet. The thing is, how can I reject doing something that’s so much fun?
Yes, fun!
Seriously.
It’s not worth rejecting it because I can’t get enough of it, or am not as readily available as I’d like, or can’t charge as much as I’d like, or even because I lack the self-confidence to charge what I should. It’s not worth rejecting because to my perception my skills are old and decrepit. Especially since I can still run circles around most people, the parts I do bst haven’t changed, and I am almost intuitive about it. If you can lay proverbial hands on the machine and diagnose it, well… if you ask me, current knowledge and skills help too, but that puts me ahead of people with no depth – which may be the source of the “intuition” – or experience, but a fistful of freshly minted certifications for which they crammed and paid dearly. But I digress.
If nothing else, any bits of work I can do help counter my lack of currency, in both senses, are a good thing. It also gives me something current and relevant besides a part-time job to put on my resume, at the risk of being seen as one of those people who “freelances” to look like they’re not truly unemployed. Then again, I more or less gave up looking so long ago, and seem to be so drawn to self-employment, if not proper entrepreneurialism, I may as well tout myself as being in business. The odd thing is that the name of the business isn’t really more than a domain name and something that sounded good. There’s no DBA or bank account in that name. It’s just me.
All in all, I am feeling more ambitious and positive. Part of this is medical. I had such bad experiences with beta blockers for my blood pressure, I went off of them, then recently back on, but different ones. It’s like night and day. Taking the beta blocker for a week was enough to send me into a fit of depression like flipping a switch. And mood aside, it makes me unable to think straight, remember things, and downright saps most of my ambition. I’d known that, told my doctor that years ago, then somehow got on a beta blocker without paying attention to it being one. Stupid.
I’m like a whole different person! Especially before the doctor saw the need to increase the doses at my last visit, but that’s more a matter of questionable physical than mental reaction.
Some of that probably has nothing to do with drugs, either. I seem to be feeling my age, walking around sore all the time. Not just my back. Sleep seems to help, which is hard, between the kids and the hours at the part time job. I can get away with, say, six hours regularly, but not with four. Still, this got worse after starting the new combination and doses of hypertension meds, making me suspicious. Hey, the more I can make elsewhere, the less I have to rely on a brutally physical job that leaves me sore, even if other factors conspire to make the soreness worse.
What I really need to do is make all I can without leaving the house and with the ability to field interruptions. That sounds a lot like writing, more than anything. We’ll see.
As for the topic of this blog, rebooting my life, it hasn’t run away from me entirely. I still need and wonder how to catch up technologically. Some of that is about the money, too, being able to buy more current “toys” so I have had experience with what others are using and might want supported. It’s a catch-22. More on that sometime, now and then…
Update:
Forgot I’d already posted about the business! Oh well.