Haven’t blogged in a while, but we’ll talk more about that another day. In the meantime, though, here’s the most recent (not so) skinny…
Leaky Car Fixed … ?
So last week I finally broke down and took my car in to have the leaky AC looked at because it was getting to the point where I had mold growing in the carpet on the passenger side one day and standing water on the floor the next, and with only 24 out of 73 payments so far on the loan, we can’t afford to ruin the thing just yet! Final bill came to just over $700, which is crazy, but still not as expensive as what the dealer wanted last time we checked … and so far, no more leaks. Don’t get me wrong – last week I spent far more time at the repair shop than I would’ve liked and it was a battle at times, but so far … no leaks. Gotta cling to that positive whenever it shows its face!
Weight Loss Woes
Not much good news here – I just started going to the gym again last week after taking a good two or three week hiatus fueled by depression for not losing hardly any weight at all. I went again tonight and boy, was it rough, but ultimately I’m at the point where I’ve decided that I’m going to do my best for a couple of weeks and if I still don’t see any results, I’ll make an appt. to see a doctor to find out if there’s something else that’s preventing the weight loss. I mean, four solid months of exercise even with a little snacking here and there should’ve lost me more than 8 pounds!
Building the Perfect Personal Site
One of my new challenges right now is building a new site for Sara and me now that the wedding is far behind us and the domain name will be expiring any day now. It’s kinda tricky because of all the variables to be considered – I’m not sure how often we’re going to update it, so it’s hard to decide what to put front and center; I want it to be easy enough for Sara to be able to update if she wants to; it needs to have a mix of content about both of us so it doesn’t look like just another self-promotion effort on my part; also, I don’t want to duplicate some content, like photos, that I may already have in my own personal gallery. Lots of questions, but I at least made a little progress over the weekend, so if I can finish her up in two weeks by June, I think I’ll be happy.
Our Refrigerator Sucks … Still
Last night it was making this weird chirping noise, and now it’s rattling like crazy, which in turn is driving me crazy. This morning we woke up to it warming up and got the scare of possibly having to throw out all of our food again, but fortunately it was just defrosting after my frantic 4:00am ice cleaning to try to get it to shut the fuck up and in a few hours it was back to normal temps. I think we’re still going to have to bring someone out again to fix the noise because it’s really getting unbearable – I’d just like to figure out a way to record it first because just my luck, it would stop making all that racket about 5 minutes before the repair guy showed up… 🙁
New Strategies to Overcome Creative Roadblocks
So besides the whole weight loss thing, the other major beast that I’ve been struggling with lately is trying to figure out how to get my creative juices flowing on a regular basis here again because while I’m quite happy that my humor column has been going up weekly now for several months, I’ve still got a whole ‘nother list of stuff that I want to do that’s just seen no progress whatsoever due to a lack of motivation, amongst other things. And at this point, I’ve got two ideas that I’m going to try for breaking through this barrier – the first is simply attempting to do one single thing on my list each day, no matter how big or small. I’ve done this for about a week so far and managed to punch through three humor columns for my buffer in about two days, which I think is a good start. Now I just need to apply the technique to other, more complex areas like web development, working on my upcoming books, blog posts, and so forth. Hmmmm.
Oh yeah, and the other thing is a bit of an extended work period that I’m trialing over the upcoming Memorial Day weekend – I’m taking an extra day off of work to give me a full four-day weekend to focus on creative stuff. Sara’s stuck working pretty much the entire time, so I’ll have the whole house to myself to concentrate and hopefully by the end of it all, I’ll have something awesome to show for it! I don’t want to spoil the potential surprise (or downfall) at this point, but getting my main idea done would definitely help to jumpstart a summer of creativity for me, so we shall see…
Yet Another Disney Site Redesign
And finally, I don’t know what it is with this particular project, but at this rate I’m not sure if I’m ever going to get it done because this evening I think I changed my mind about the basic design for the site … again! I mean, the basic premise about a monthly column or two related to Disney World hasn’t exactly changed, nor have some of the special project ideas that I want to do, but I guess just the overall layout is throwing me off because the more I put it off, the more I don’t want to commit to a blog-style format for the main page of this new site that I’ll then feel guilty about not keeping updated with fresh content all the time! I mean, I don’t have a problem writing my weekly humor columns over at comedic-genius.com, but I don’t necessarily always have blog posts to go along with them.
I think it’s another multi-faceted problem: a) we’re not going over there regularly right now and I’m not even listening to Disney podcasts regularly right now, so it’s not exactly on the brain as much as it used to be; b) overall, I’m really happy with the monthly format for each of the columns I’ve started writing for the site thus far, and it’s hard to justify the extra time needed to write both those longer columns and also still do regular blog posts several times each week … plus still do the fun, special projects, too! I think it’s too much, but then when I strip the blog component out, I start to wonder if the site will have the return appeal without it … despite not having the blog content to fuel it on a regular basis anyways.
Ultimately I guess I just need to try something and see where it goes, and since I don’t really have a specific business model in mind for this one (just another noodle in the spaghetti ball that I’m hoping will eventually stick), it kinda makes sense to go with the lower maintenance site to start and then maybe build up to a more regularly published blog feature later if I can find the time and/or interest to make it worth the effort.
Who knows, but in the meantime don’t be all that surprised if you see more activity taking place over here while I continue to sort out ideas for the Disney thing. Did my new target for that site just move from May 1 to the end of the summer???
