Afternoon slump

I’m forcing myself to bang out this post while I have some time to myself this afternoon. The girls are at their grandmothers for a few hours this afternoon, but I’m not really motivated to do much today. Younger had a bit of a reaction to a vaccine she got yesterday, with a fever and aches, so I spent half the night in bed with her, and I’ve been dragging ass all day.

I managed to wrap up my latest Substack newsletter last night, a three thousand word post about reinventing oneself and which covered three book reviews: ChooseFI, Digital Minimalism, and Atomic Habits. It went out this morning and I’ve already gotten two responses from friends about it. One of them told me she was selling her house and moving into a sailboat!

Getting the piece finished was a challenge. I spent over a month actually getting it done, and wound up cutting a lot from it, including a partial review of the Alexander Hamilton biography. I didn’t want to include any books that I hadn’t finished. My time tracking indicates I spent about ten hours on it, which is probably very conservative, accuracy wise. I don’t think I’m going to take as long for the next one; I’ve already got a theme brewing for the next.

In addition to the Substack, I’m still cross-posting on Medium (tomorrow) as well as LinkedIn on Friday. I’m trying to figure out which one will be the most lucrative, so for now the extra effort is just an experiment. So far my last cross-post on Medium garnered a whopping two views, so I won’t be retiring anytime soon.

Work continues to be a slog, with most of my time spent managing a subcontracted printer service program. It’s a mess, and even if it does manage to be profitable, it’s the kind of hourly-rate limited opportunity that I’m trying to get my Boss to get away from. That is, even if it becomes sustainable, it’s not going to be the type of scalable work that we’ll need in the future.

I spent some time yesterday working on building a C++ development pipeline for a client that builds embedded systems using Texas Instruments ARM and DSP systems. It’s the challenging, and exhausting when I’m not able to get into an uninterrupted flow state that I need. I hope to get a couple of more hours on that this week, and work toward building a full CI/CD pipeline for the client’s new project, and have a nice accomplishment to put on my resume.

Speaking of which, I’m still musing over some job applications that have been coming through LinkedIn, and one came through my alma mater today that I need to look at later. I can’t let my fear hold me back. I fear that I’m not going to find a job that’s better than what I have now. By better I mean that offers me a higher paying salary, and the type of freedom that I have now. Even thinking about it, I feel a bit of anxiousness.

Also, I’m working through the AWS introductory training. I’m not sure if I’m going to go for the certification (it is cheap,) but it’s mainly for my own knowledge and to help me build out some systems that I’m mulling over for my cryptocurrency-related projects.

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