Day 236: Energized

So I kicked off the new year with a vicious cold. Not a flu, but just a mess of congestion, tiredness, and the usual.

Today, I woke up early and feeling about 85 percent of full on. So I decided to just start making hay. It's been a productive day, and it feels good to accomplish things. So here's another thing to accomplish.

In the many days weeks and months of being without a "real" job I finally reached the conclusion that maybe an "unreal" job might be for me. What that's going to be, hopefully, is as a writer. Some people tell me I am OK at writing. I've actually been paid a lot of my life to write, so that's encouraging. But I've come to this conclusion based on a number of things:

1) Obviously, I have enough ability to have been paid to produce words professionally.
2) I have some interesting story ideas rolling around in my head. And I've been a researcher most of my life, so it's reasonable to assume I can dig out the information for what I want to write about.
3) If successful, I don't have to report to anyone but myself. I like being in a teamwork environment, but if the team doesn't have you on the team, then there's no teamwork. Maybe I should be on Team Me.
4) I'm undertaking an exercise to hone my writing chops. It's called Figment (http://figment.com). Check it out!

My other list of items done today include finding an interesting job prospect back home, completing some volunteer work that had been lingering, touching base with some other job prospects, a little housekeeping and just generally feeling like a contributing part of society.

I'm also going to use this forum as a "thank you" to those of you who engage with me on various social media platforms. I keep those circles purposefully small; I'm not the sort of person who wants 500 Facebook friends or Twitter followers or LinkedIn contacts... that strikes me as posturing. I want my group to be strongly representative of my values regarding personal and professional relationships. If you're a good person, honest, trustworthy and progressive, I want to be associated with you. If you're not...