It’s Sunday, March 28th.
Big week. Last Tuesday I had the idea to look for distance photography courses, and came across Hallmark.edu which is an intensive 10-month program suited to provide folks with the skills necessary for a career in photography. My attention has been captured, and I have a new dream with all manners of energy pouring forward for it.
After pondering, talking and consulting, I’ve decided to apply. Now, this of course means that after applying comes acceptance, and after acceptance comes payment, and after payment means attendance. If you know me at all, you’ll know that I have made a concerted effort since my childhood to remain solvent. While I’ve done a lot of silly things and made a lot of rediculous mistakes, I’ve done OK for myself. But, even still, the tuition/fee of Hallmark rings at just shy of $60,000. That said, Heather and I will be leaving our employment income and pursuing school for 10 months, and our goal is to remain debt free.
So, now is when the rubber hits the road. I have around 3 months to execute something astounding; I will create a passive income to the tune of $1500-2500/month so that we can pursue the opportunity. I think it’s possible that I could liquify the assets that we have as well as receiving scholarships & grants in order to pay for tuition/fees. However, as we’ll be in a new place with no certain source of income, we will produce a business in the next three months that will finance our lifestyle.
It will be an amazing learning curve. We live in the USA, the greatest country in the world with the most amazing resources available to us. It will require radically altering our pursuits, but with the newfound motivation, my past experience, and the help of friends and mentors, it is absolutely achievable.
We’re still in the scoping stage to figure out how much money will be required to make the dream a reality. If everything goes to plan, orientation starts on September 8th with our departure on approximately August 25th.
I don’t really know when this was articulated; I found it in a steno notebook and had cut it out, for documenting, but there was no nearby date mentioned. Just pages after this, there is a note indicating “2005”, but that’s pretty vague and doesn’t give context for this posting. At any rate, here it is:
Dreams
What could be? Without resource limitations; without mental barriers. With a team of World Wide Special Forces, what will we accomplish?
June 6, 2004
I think it’s more like the 5th since I haven’t yet gone to bed for the night, so that might be another consecutive day… If so, cool! (the other possibility is that the other entries were also in the same late night setting so they were actually tracked as the following day…)
Anyhow, during the last entry, I was thinking that a technique that Amanda Sauro used when doing her weblog. She had different categories that she put down and then spoke to each of them with the recap of the day. She had: First Things First, Sleep Log (just when she woke up and went to bed), Humor, Struggle, Beauty, Kindness, Classes, and Goals for Tomorrow. If I recall correctly, she got the idea from watching Oprah. Even stranger, Oprah is not spelled incorrectly according to MS word – I guess if you’re a TV personality, you can have your name added to spell checkers! Neat!
Alright, so back on track now… I was thinking of instituting a similar process, but in my thinking, I was considering changing it slightly to help me develop as a person. It might be good to have sections like: Something New (learning), Something Old (application), Something Neat (daily story?), Something Spiritual (did I do anything spiritual), Something Physical (what activity did I do?) Something Emotional (what emotion do I recall from the day?), Something Relationship (notes from my relationships), Something directional (goals for tomorrow or otherwise).
It seems like a longer list than I thought it would be, but lets see what it would look like (I’ll include Amanda’s/Oprah’s list as well…) Here goes!
First Things First
I like the effect of Journaling – It’s a nice way to reflect on my day.
Sleep Log
Um, got up at noon (was up till 5 or 6 am yesterday so I only got 6 hours of sleep.) Planning to go to bed right after this – it’s 2:36 AM right now. I did get to take a nap this evening, but I have no clue how long it was.
Humor
John and I were talking about the potential skits associated with winning the Home Incentive Promotions – Like doing parody songs or movie scenes… That was entertaining to put a cleaning twist on songs like Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice…
Struggle
Communicating my interest level clearly without hurting others (in reference to the relationship I have with Helen. We went to Costco today, and I just didn’t have a hang out be social type aura to me.)
Beauty
Hmm… I don’t think I recall anything right off… I guess I did see a nifty little mazda mx8 or something like that – a little red sports car for broke people I’d guess.
Kindness
I was nice to take Helen to the Post Office and to the Bank before going to Costco.
Classes
I don’t really have any, though I was thinking of approaching the homework that is associated with the PADM class that I took over the summer. I also need to review that homework.
Goals for Tomorrow
Attend my little Brother’s graduation. And be nice with the family – even if it leads to dinner or other activities.
Something New (learned)
Goofed around looking at the registry of my computer and found some neat spots – though I only disabled some startup services and removed some registry entries for startup items.
Something Old (what did I apply?)
Hmm… Dunno.
Something Neat (daily story?)
Something Spiritual (did I do anything spiritual)
Something Physical (what activity did I do?)
Something Emotional (what emotion do I recall from the day?)
Something Relationship (notes from my relationships)
Something directional (goals for tomorrow or otherwise).
Ack, having too many items really leads me to not want to write any more… I guess I’m already 2 pages in almost so I’ll just call it good at that. It’s 2:44 am now. I’m planning to get up at 8:30 am.
G’night!
Our schedule at school today was lame. It took the longest time to reach lunch today. Luckily that time was productive. Eli & I have scheduled an appointment with him on thursday (him being Larry Holland) to help us with our Orange Project. So far he’s a cool guy. We had a sub in math today. His name is Sammy Sims. He wouldn’t let us sit on desks, wear hats, or be tardy or leave. The weird thing is that he was awesome!
I’m still squandering with my 2 large, make that 3 large projects: Russian Home Page, Technology Proposal for Phoenix and the Science Fair Project. We wen’t to a meeting today w/Bill & he covered a lot of the things we’ve already heard, not what we assumed we’d be doing.
On a sour note my mom’s being an ass about the business. Automatically she assumes that I dislike her partnership just be cause I’m tentative about the options which are unknown to me at this point. That’s what we though we would cover in today’s meeting.
Crystal didn’t get her luggage.