Sigh..........I never seem to be able to maintain a regular posting schedule, do I?
Well, let's get on with it, then.
Today's Chuck Norris Fact:
Chuck Norris invented Kentucky Fried Chicken's famous secret recipe, with eleven herbs and spices. But nobody ever mentions the twelfth ingredient: Fear.
------------------------------------------
So, as you might have guessed, I have a lot going on. First, I've been super-busy at work. For consultants like me, billable time is an absolute must. The idea is to get as much as you can. There's a certain amount of billable time you must make every month so that you're paying for yourself, at least in terms of salary and benefits. Anything over that is profit for the company. For me, the magic number is 8 billable days a month, or about 36% billable rate. For my first five months, I wasn't more than 15-20% billable, tops. So that wasn't good. However, for the last two months straight, my billable rate has jumped to around 65-70%, which is outstanding. I'm glad to have the work, to be honest. The only drawback is that almost none of the work is security work. It's all primarily network administration, with some system administration. Less than 10% of my total billable work has been security work, and most of that was writing monthly reports for our single managed security services customer. Being busy is nice, but being busy doing work I'm trying to get away from is not so nice...frankly it's a bit frustrating.
Second, home and family stuff, as always, takes a lot of time. Things are still unsettled with both the kids and my time with them, and that's very time-consuming. Throw in wedding preparations and all the associated stress, and stress from Heidi's life, and...well, let's just say that blog posting doesn't always jump so quickly to mind. I plan either to start making more regular posts, or just put the whole darn thing on indefinite hiatus. I hate half-assing something, especially when it's something I usually enjoy. I'd rather quit altogether than keep it up for the sake of appearances. Besides, I always said this was for me, so who really cares if it goes away? I figure I'll try to keep it up first, and if I just discover I can't...I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
------------------------------------------
So I've been learning a lot of difficult personal lessons lately, some very hard lessons. Here are a few:
1. People don't really want to hear your opinion, usually. If they really do, they'll pay you for it. If they act like they do and they're NOT paying you for it, it's usually just so they can either set you up to hear THEIR opinion, or so they can berate your obviously invalid and ridiculous opinion. Either way, unless they're paying you to tell them what you think, you're probably better off keeping it to yourself.
2. Faith in God really is the Narrow Way. It's an incredibly difficult road to follow, sometimes so narrow you feel you can't stay on it, sometimes so difficult to see that it's easy to wander off of it. Sometimes you wonder why you're following the road, because it's so narrow that the brambles lining it tear at your clothes, and others watching you clumsily trying to follow the road mock you. It's so hard to stay focused on the path, especially when so many things in life seem so pointless, when so many people you meet or hear about seem so lost (or worse, rude or even outright evil), and when so many bad things happen. Couple this with my inherent moral weakness as a human being, and maintaining my faith in God must be the most difficult challenge I've had to face, and probably always will be. I really envy those people for whom it seems so easy, so natural.
See? I couldn't even make it to the end of that paragraph without committing one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
3. There are things I really like to do, and things I want to do, but there are very few of these that I will actually ever get to do. Not because I don't want to, but because my life really isn't my own, and responsibilities and obligations to other things and other people are always there. You'd think this would be simple to accept, but it's amazingly difficult.
4. Sometimes you have to go a long time without getting any obvious blessings or really good news or having something really positive in life happen to you. I suppose some of it is merely point-of-view, but it seems like it's been forever since I've had something good, unusual and unexpected happen. The last good thing was my parents' visit, and that was wonderful, but before that there had been something of a drought.
5. I don't know if I'm ever going to get to a good place financially. I want more than anything to not make the kind of money I make and still have to live paycheck-to-paycheck. Unfortunately, I don't know if I'll ever get there. The divorce has been very financially draining, but here I am over two years after the original filing and several months after the completion of the divorce, and I still don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. I don't know if I ever will, at least not for several years.
6. I have a long, long way to go, to become anything like what I'd like to be. There are lots of things I need to change about myself...LOTS of things.
7. All of these lessons make it difficult to maintain my positive attitude and enthusiasm for life. I can't lie about it; I'd like some good lessons for a change.
I'll be trying some fairly life-changing activities over the next few months, hoping some of them stick and become habits. Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading along.
No comments:
Post a Comment