Perhaps the area I struggle with most as a freelance designer – balancing my work load and finding time for all of the management stuff as well. No matter how much time I allot for replying to emails, following up on leads and the daily project management type stuff… it’s never enough. There is literally […]
This is probably going to come as a surprise to many – tomorrow (Friday, March 2, 2007) is my last day as a freelance designer. Come Monday morning, I’ll be falling into the ranks of a fresh start-up where I’ll assume the role of “lead designer”. Crazy, right? May-be! But let me explain why I […]
Up until a couple years ago, I didn't move around much. I would settle into something and stick with it for years whether I was fully content with it or not. I'm not sure what happened as I grew older, but if something isn't 100% (or at least very close to it) I'm fuckin' gone! Which I'm not certain is a fully positive thing, but that's what happens none the less. I pretty much have a no bullshit policy for every aspect of my life.
Things have been so hectic lately, and yet I feel like I'm hardly moving in any direction at all. I've definitely been feeling like I'm living to work, as apposed to the opposite which I much prefer. It truly is a hard cycle to break - one that I've not even begun to figure out. It's one of those "you know what needs to be done but can't seem to bring yourself to do it" situations. And all the while I've been telling myself that I'm almost there. Just about in the clear when I can have my evenings and weekends back.
I've been working from home for over a year and I haven't contracted any sort of illness since. When I worked at MuchMusic, it seemed like I would always catch whatever was going around the big, stinky city. I guess that's one of the bonuses of not coming into contact with too many humans on a day-to-day. On Wednesday I ventured out of the my office that I like to call "the cave" into the real world to rock the latest and greatest Xbox 360 titles at X'06 (the Canadian version). Somewhere between chainsawing dudes in Gears of War and trying to beat Andrew's lap time in Forza 2, I became infected.
It's been a week since I've opened my feed reader and about the same since I last signed in to IM for longer than 2 minutes. My email client is only opened a couple times through-out the day and I have piles of stagnant emails dating back to June sitting in my inbox. I can't recall the last time I had a conversation with a friend in the real world or even over the phone. WTF happened? Where did life go and why didn't anyone tell me it was leaving? Shit, I would have baked a cake, had I known.
Deanna and I thought we had this moving thing down. We organized everything while packing and labeled every single box so we know where stuff was when we would need it. All of our moving day arrangements were made weeks in advance and leading up to the big day, we weren't stressed in the least. As a matter of fact, we were totally stoked at how smoothly things were going and really looking forward to getting into our new home. Moving day came along, and everything started to go to shit - and I do mean everything.
I've been in the same small apartment for a little over 5 years. When I moved out, I was a bachelor with hardly even enough stuff to make the place look occupied. Now I've got a wife, daughter, 2 cats, a bunch of fish and more stuff than we know what to do with. I work from home and since there's no other place for it - my computer setup is in the bedroom. And if you've been following my blog for a while, you'll know that I work from home. So yes, I spend the majority of my life in the bedroom. Just about every task I perform (hehe) takes place within a 6 foot radius. Simply put, we've out-grown our home.
If you've been here before, you might have a question or two for me right about now. For those that were using the Back in Black style, I apologize. It will be back (again). Let me explain just what is going on around here. Since July of 2005, I've been working from home. Up until recently, for other people. Some shit went down and I found myself in a situation where I needed to find a new source of income stat!
The past few weeks have been so insanely busy for me. I know I've said this before, but I really don't think I've ever had so much to do in my entire life. I've been working so much that I actually grew intolerant to my chair. I would sit down and immediately stand back up. Just couldn't do it any more. And since this chair is home base for work and play, I found myself in need of a new avenue for entertainment. Since selling my Xbox back in July and Hannah claiming the GameCube as her own, I've only really had my PC for gaming. For whatever reason, I haven't been into watching movies for months now and we might have rented a handful of movies since the summer. Deanna and I used to watch a few movies a week, but for whatever reason, that just stopped. I decided it was time to re-establish some old relationships with my DVD player, GameCube and even picked up another Xbox. And that would be a regular old Xbox, not a 360. Even if I wanted to get an Xbox 360 right now, I couldn't as they're still, 2 months after launch, hard to come by. Now that's just fuckin' ridiculous!
I'm not going to make a New Year's Resolution this year. Last year, for the first time, I made one. I didn't even come close to following it through. While I exceeded my expectations in other areas, the one I had promised myself to improve on was left hanging and has pretty much diminished. And as such, I broke a New Year's tradition this year. Instead of going over to a friend's - who has hosted a radass New Year's Eve party for the past 5 or 6 years, Deanna and I went and saw King Kong. We'll ring in the new year with our daughter Hannah at the stroke of midnight while sipping on our drinks of choice - a cool Keith's for this guy and Spumante Bambino for my lady. Sounds good to me! It's been quite a year. On the family front, we sorted out everything we needed to in regards to our daughter and Deanna's ex. All the paper work is done and things are great. We received the official government document verifying Hannah's name change on December 23, which was by far the best Christmas present we could have asked for. She's now an official Brett! When they moved here from BC nearly 4 years ago, we all had last names. Deanna used to call us a mutt family. Hah!
When I left off, I still had some significant PC hardware to pick up. I’ve since upgraded to a 520 W PSU and a P4 3.2 GHZ processor. Battlefield 2 is running pretty smooth now. I could still use some more ram, but that’ll come in time. I love getting new hardware because it always […]