So when did time leap ahead a year and a half?

I was trying to set up schedules for all of my projects back in August 2008, now its February 2010!!! Twenty-Ten! There was so much I wanted to have rolling by now. It seems like I just can’t get on top of the pile of work to be done.

Today was a relatively productive day, in a clean-up-the-straggling-loose-ends kind of way. Moved years of data from an old computer to a new one, that took most of the day. I was hoping to use the old one for another project but that is not going so well now. The partition is all goofed and I have been having trouble formatting one of the hard drives. I’m waiting on a low level format now.

I went through a big pile of saved pocket change, picking out anything that I could add/upgrade to my us coin collection. This is more of a diversion hobby than an investment one; I don’t have much worth anything more than face value yet.

Cleaned off the desk. That was a chore, but it always feels good when I recover desk real estate. This project of course resulted in shredding, filing, shifting, and putting stuff back where it belongs.

Scanning old photos for the genealogical archive was another little project for the day. It’s amazing how much time it takes to prepare 30 photos for archiving. The scanning itself takes about an hour with keeping the glass clean and the photos dusted off while swapping them out. The meta data takes another hour to an hour and a half. So for those 30 photos I was busy for nearly three hours. This brings me to about 300 photos from one box with about 800 more to go, in this box.

Over all I have thirty thousand plus photos and over five thousand documents to scan in my genealogy pile. This one is going to take a while to get through. I have no illusions about that. Another part of that project is to enter all of the collected genealogical data for some six hundred names. My grandmother had done extensive research but it was all on paper. I have added significantly to the data but it is not in an easily ported format, so I created a web accessible database. Now all I have to do is get the data into the database. Some where in here I also need to get a negative/slide scanner as well, oh and a AV capture device that works with my laptop and Vista. I’m trying to get myself in the habit of doing a hundred scans and ten data sets entered per week, I’ll settle for fifty and ten.

As for my aviation endeavors, well I need to get back to my reading which has fallen off the map. I need to get my knowledge back up so I can get my Advanced Ground Instructor (AGI) and Instrument Ground Instructor (IGI) certificates current. Then I need to get back in a plane and get my Commercial Pilot certificate current, oh and I need to get my medical certificate current as well. Instructor certificates can be brought current with little cost, the medical is less than one hundred fifty dollars, its the flying time to get my pilot certificate current that will run about a thousand dollars. Then it’s back to work on my Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) certificate, that will run somewhere around another five thousand dollars. The plan was to get all of this done by the end of the year so I can get started teaching again by next year.

I also have a few writing projects in the mix as well, a genealogy blog, an aviation blog, a community activity blog, a community organization blog, two books, and a screenplay. Granted, the books and screenplay are lower priorities, but I still should be generating two thousand words a week on the blogs at least, and It would be nice to do a thousand a week on one of the books or the screenplay.

If all of that wasn’t enough, some where in there I need to generate at least a thousand dollars a month to cover basic expenses on top of the seven thousand dollars for flight and genealogy expenses. That comes out to a base in the neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars to get us through the year. Also in this mix I should be working on the fifteen thousand for next years base. If I finish my CFI this year I can be working next year as an instructor and with my base covered I can use any extra from instructing to cover the expenses for expanding my teaching certificates, CFII, MEI, etc. If I am working as a CFI my needed flight time for currency is built in to the teaching time, which saves me a lot of expense.

I can schedule all of the no-cost stuff fairly easily. It’s trying to get and accommodate gainful revenue generating work lined up, self employment can be a bitch. Some how I have been able to keep us above water, just barely, since 2003.

It would be really nice to be able to do some stuff for my family this year. A real vacation would be nice, it’s been over fifteen years, my son has never been on a real vacation. I would like to do something special for my wife this anniversary too, it’s our seventeenth. As always, we do what we need to do to get through, and I am very grateful for what we do have, it’s more than many others. I do truly appreciate all that we have. There is just a feeling deep inside, the desire to provide more for my family. It feels lousy when I have to tell my son “we can’t afford that right now” and it’s something simple like craft supplies or going out to lunch or dinner on the weekend.

As it stands the basics are thus; I need to set up a productive but flexible schedule form studying, writing, genealogy work, and making money, I need to come up with twenty grand for this year, and start working on fifteen for next year for a total of thirty five thousand dollars before the end of the year. Piece of cake. :-/