Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Lesson #33: The end of the road usually leads to the start of another

I've been quiet on the blog for a while because I've been busy. Real busy.

I finished my degree -- I can now add Bachelor of Science to my list of accomplishments. I am tickled to say I have a BS degree in communication. How ironic is that?

The degree was 10 years in the making. By the end of it, by my capstone class, I was sick of sitting in my room writing papers on crap I didn't care about for teachers I would never really see again. It's not that I didn't enjoy school. I did. I was just ... so tired of schoolwork. I had senioritis, bad.

Though it was hard to think because my brain was in overtaxed mode from all that work, I did wonder what I'd do with myself once school was over. I have applied for grad school, but I'm rethinking that option. I want more than a month off from school work. I'd like a semester off, at least. It's silly, really, for me to wonder what I'd do with all my "free time," though, considering my new path has already been paved with to-do Post-It notes.

Last month, I started a new business that has done so well it began paying for itself after the first month. My partner, Wife, and I opened a children's consignment boutique. It was a good idea. Our town didn't have one -- until another one opened up across town two weeks after we opened our doors-- thank you Murphy's Law. Still, we've had customers pour in, and most of them tell us how happy they are that we're there and how cool our store is. I think, competition or no, we'll do just fine.

My next project is to develop a non-profit parent resource association with Wife and one other partner. The three of us thought long and hard about this, and the commitment it would require. None of us have time to do it really, so everything we do for the non-profit has to be done on stolen time and scrounged dimes and whatever passion we have in our hearts for it. Though Wife and I seem to be doing well in our new business, we both still kept our day jobs for security reasons and have no intention of quitting any time soon. Still, given those limitations, we couldn't help but notice the lack of support for families in our area, and once we realized the opportunity we have to turn our store in to a "community" hub by having a non-profit side, we jumped. Over the next few months we'll be developing a parent magazine for our area, as well as a community resource database and information exchange system, and finding and writing grants to fund these and other projects we have in mind. It's not like I am doing anything else at the moment, right?

Anyway, this explains my absence on this blog, and now that my degree is complete and I have all this "free time" again, I should be able to get back to blogging. Here's to positive thinking!