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Well, life is barreling on and getting better every day. 

Unfortunately a new job I landed will prevent me from talking too much about my freelancing career. I am a new blogger over at Freelance Folder, which I am very excited about. That means I am currently paid for my input regarding Apple products and freelancing, which if you think about it, is pretty insane. I am close to having to consider myself close to a freelance writer in addition to designer. 

So, the blog that no one reads (the one you're reading right now) is having to cut out all work-related type posts. I guess I could still post about personal stuff, like saying that work is so crazy busy right now that I can't keep up, but the timing couldn't be better. I'm trying to stay sane amongst the chaos of work and, for the most part, I am. I do get stressed out, but how stressful of a life can I be leading when I started every day last week with a cup of hot chocolate and a round of Mario Kart? 

London plans are still moving along at a pretty decent clip. Due to the mutt and the quarantine, we're looking at late April or early May before we can make the trip. While it's still not 100% certain, it's getting more certain every day. The wifey and I dream of spending our first anniversary in a foreign country, maybe sipping wine in France or Italy and celebrating our great life together. 

I do wish I had a little more free time. The bike refinishing project is stuck now with no extra time for me to get around to it and I always have several other projects I want to tackle. I'll get to everything, ya know, eventually.

It's been a while since I've posted a self-serving blog post about my freelancing career, so it's time to change that. 

I've been doing a lot of things right in my career lately, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I've been using social media to get jobs, following up on leads through Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook, staying on top of the leads I get and "closing the deal" as it were. In the same week, I stumbled into the Holy Grail of freelance jobs: CONSISTENT WORK. 

I've been trying to stick to a more normal schedule lately as well, trying to be at my desk and working by 8:30 or so. 

But, I've been making some mistakes too, and they're the ones I've been making since the beginning. I need to keep better boundaries between work time and play time, because all too often that line gets blurred and I find myself working all the time. I need to find the balance between not taking on more than I can chew, but still trying to find jobs while working on current ones. 

At the moment I may be in the "more than I can chew" territory. It all happened so quick, like an avalanche of websites if you can picture that. I find myself spending the majority of my "working hours" answering the phone, replying to email, drawing up contracts and proposals, and sending out invoices. Then my billable work starts at 7 or 8 at night. 

My weekends are usually the time I can play catch-up, but the weekends have been so booked lately I haven't had the chance. I'm thankful that this weekend I can buckle down and get things done. Also, my vacation is coming up! Of course, my vacation is simply camping out on the couch, throwing in a frozen pizza and watching as many horror movies in a 24 hour period as possible. It's my favorite day of the year, and it's coming up in about a week. The only problem I'll have this year is trying not to worry about work and money while I spend the day in the laziest way possible.

I turn 30 years young tomorrow. People keep asking me if I'm weirded out or concerned or scared of turning another decade older, but I'm really not. It's not that big of a deal to me. I mean, I guess if given the choice I'd prefer to stop getting older, but if I had the power to stop the clock I would have done it at age 24, not 29. But then the good stuff that's happened in the past 5 years wouldn't have happened either, so whatever. Life goes on, opportunities come and go, and with a little luck things keep improving and getting better the whole time. So no, I'm not worried about getting older, but instead look at it as a chance to keep up with my good streak that's been happening for me lately, keep improving things and keep on keepin' on. 

So anyway, 30 is no big deal and I'll be celebrating by doing a family work day, getting some stuff done around the house, then eating dinner with the family. Not everyone's idea of the best time in the world, but I can't wait.

One of these days, I'm going to start a blog entry without apologizing for lack of blog entries. It's been a common theme of mine to always start off after a long absence with an apology, and today is no different. I've been slacking. I apologize.

But man, life has been busy since getting married, in a good way. Work slowed down to almost a halt upon our return to Illinois, but has picked back up to the point that I can barely keep up. I go from frantically busy to waiting for client feedback to frantically busy again, but I'll tell you what, this is a great life I'm leading. A wonderful house, a fantastic wifey, 2 mostly obedient dogs, and a one-man-show business that is doing just fine despite the slow economy. It's as close to the American dream as I can think of. I spend a good chunk of almost every day appreciating how good I have it. 

And since our friends and loved ones (mostly) already know our plans, I'll put them on here for the whole world, too. The wife and I are considering a big move. Actually, let me rephrase that... we've considered a move, and decided to do it. All systems go. Not a move to Bloomington or Springfield, although those were discussed, but a move to London England.

Social workers are in high demand there, so I'm more than willing to ride my wife's coat-tails all the way to Europe. It would only be for a year since those are the Visas that are required/available, so we'd be back in Peoria before we knew what hit us, in time to see my nephews and niece grow up without missing too much. There's a lot of hoops to jump through and things to consider, and we're far from a done-deal on the relocation, but we're on our way and that's what matters.

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Yep, I'm a married man, and I have the pictures to prove it. If you're wanting prints, buy them through Wal-Mart here:

Trip around Vegas

Professional pictures (You need the release to get these printed)

Our Trip to LA

Horseback Ride

More are probably coming, and we're on the lookout for a permanent place for all the photos but for now Wal-Mart will work fine.

Anyway, words cannot do justice to our vacation, wedding, and honeymoon combination trip. We started off the fun with a trip to the Las Vegas courthouse to get our marriage license. It was a quick in-and-out number, and 10 minutes later we were ready for marriage. Then it was time for a trip to the world's largest gift shop, followed by a trip to Fremont Street for margaritas out of novelty footballs.

Thursday a chunk of our family got in, and we saw the Cirque show Love, based on Beatles music. It was great. Friday was our "rehearsal" dinner, although in Vegas there's no rehearsal. It was just a nice dinner with friends and family who had arrived. My friends Brian and Kathleen got in very late that night, so I went to hang out with them while Hillary went to bed. 

Saturday I fully expected to be cool as a cucumber, but I woke up in full-blown freakout mode. Fabish stopped by totally unexpectedly, but he calmed me down a little. I did get my nerves under control and the wedding went off without a hitch. Then we went on to take way too many photos, take a gondola ride at the Venetian, see the classic Vegas sign, and back to Luxor for our wedding dinner. Polk did an amazing job as best man, and the food was fantastic.

Sunday most of our family left, and Hill and I took a trip out to the desert for a horseback ride in the mountains. It was amazing, and my favorite part of the whole trip. Monday we rented a car and headed into LA to see the sights with Polk and Allison. We were only in LA for a couple hours, but saw some touristy places and that was good enough for us. Then we made our way to Anaheim to sleep and get ready for Disneyland.

Disneyland was awesome. We rode on 5 or 6 rides, wandered around and saw the sights. It was great for a day, but after a week of doing touristy things and being totally overstimulated, I think Hill and I both were eager to get away from the madness of it all and get back home. We made it back to Vegas for our flight home at around midnight, and spent some vouchers we'd collected in the casino before calling it a night around 1:30. Then it was back up and at 'em at 5 am to catch our flight home. 

Anyway, now it's on to the married life and some degree of normalcy. And life is good.

I keep thinking to myself I need to upload more stuff to YouTube. I don't know why. Just a weird motivation to put my stuff out there to the world, but it was always a hassle. Record something with a camera/camcorder, import it to the computer, edit it slightly, log into YouTube, describe and upload. Thankfully my fancy new iPhone 3GS skips all that, and includes a video camera that uploads directly to YouTube without any of the other crappy steps. As a result, you get videos like this.

When I first went freelance I said one of the reasons I was doing it was to give myself more time for personal projects. So far I've had substantially less time. To that end, I've forced myself to restart a project I got into last summer, which is redoing an old antique bike for Hillary to attach a flowery front basket to and cruise around the neighborhood. i didn't get that far last summer, but I'm hitting it hard this summer to wrap it up.

These pictures are from the eBay auction where I originally picked up the bike, followed by a couple taken last summer when I tore it apart and applied a healthy dose of paint stripper. My next post will cover the bead blasting, sanding, bondoing and primering that has followed since these pictures were taken.

I finally found the opening of the Rock Island Trail off Pioneer Parkway, and here it is. It was a great little bike ride I took down the trail, but the best part was the tunnel that went under the highway. Check it out:

The tunnel was pitch black except for some tiny little lights lining the sides, and it must have been 20 degrees cooler inside the tunnel than outside. I want to ride the whole trail again just to go through that stupid tunnel.

On my way home, however, I hit a curb or nail or something and my back tire was instantly flat. I could have slung it over my shoulder and walked home I guess, but 2 miles in the heat like that with a bike on my back seemed like it would have sucked. Instead I just wussed out and called a buddy to pick me up.

Still, the Rock Island Trail is a great ride and once my bike is up and running again, I really want to take one of those super-long trips down the trail. I did it a couple years ago and have very fond memories of it.

Well, I thought it would never happen as the gears must turn really slowly in the land of tech blogs, but I finally got my contract to start my part-time, contracted career as a blogger/writer. Who woulda ever thought that people would be paying me for my opinions and thoughts on my favorite company? It's pretty crazy. Now all I need is someone to pay me for my opinion on horror movies and my life will be complete. And, actually, the blog "family" I am now a member of has a cinema/entertainment division, so maybe that thought isn't as totally ridiculous as it sounds.

Anyway, in an effort to become a better blogger for cash I suppose I should take more pride in my personal blog. As they say, practice makes perfect, and if you track my frequency of posts here you can see that practice is not my strong suit. So this is another one of my many resolutions... update this blog despite the fact that I may have nothing interesting or new to post about. Since no one reads this thing anyway I can feel free to be random, right? So onto the randomness.

Hill grew up in a very girl-oriented home and has therefore missed out on many staples of important cinema. Now that all these sequels/remakes are coming out, I try to get her interested in the originals despite some of them looking very dated. Tonight, we watched Terminator. The music and fashion was horrifying, but it's still a classic. I think she'll be more impressed by T2.

It was a pretty dreary Memorial Day, but I still celebrated just a bit by heading out to my parents' house with my cousin to eat some brauts and eat some chips. We couldn't eat outside on account of the rain, but it was still a nice little lunch.

I'm having server issues in my career. Again. I think I found a nice replacement for my soon-defunct current site, but it does mean transferring all my hosted sites. Again. I'm getting sick of moving websites. It is absolutely my least favorite thing in my career to do, without a doubt.

I've got a handful of great web clients now and some relatively consistent income from my hosting/existing client base. It may be time for me to take a brief "time out" to focus more on my art and illustration and get some work in that field. Or maybe pursue an online comic or something... I'm keeping my options open since I haven't really pursued anything on that front since going freelance.

That's the end of this random post. The ultimate goal is for these posts to be more consistent, and focused, and funnier. I know I'm a long way from that, and man did I miss the mark with this post. But I'll get better, I hope.

... That is the question.

It's been a question I struggled with recently, as a job opportunity popped up that seemed perfect for me. It was one of those job descriptions where you read it, and it reads exactly like you're resume. It was with a well-respected company that I've wanted to work at for a very long time. They have a reputation of doing amazing work, as well as be a fun and interesting place to work. After my second interview I was excited about the possibility of working there and giving up the grind of freelancing.

One of the stipulations they talked to me about during my interviews there was giving up freelancing to work there, as my time would be limited in doing both and there is also some legal oddities that come with dealing with code written in my freelance life that I use in my full-time position, or vise-versa. I was open to the idea of giving up my current client base for a stable, full-time job, but it was a situation I was struggling with a little bit.

In the end, all my worrying was for nothing since the job didn't pan out, and now it's back to my freelance life. I spent a day or so being kind of upset, like this "full-time" job that I never even had was yanked out from underneath me. But I got over those feelings pretty quickly, really. This was the only company in Peoria that I'd consider taking a full-time position with, and now that the opportunity has passed, I can re-focus on my freelance career and make this work. In fact, now I'm forced to.

I'm seeing new opportunities in my freelance world pop-up constantly now, and seeing my career with new eyes and new energy. I chose this path for a reason, and I'm going to make the most of it while I'm doing it.

In addition, anther opportunity has popped up which I am even more excited about than the full-time gig. I'll be a writer for a popular tech blog! It's a paid position, but even more valuable than the pay is the exposure I'll get by writing for a high-traffic and highly respected site about some of my favorite products in the world. The gears are turning slowly in getting my contract and getting me accepted into the position, but I am quite confident that this will work out and I am quite sure I'll enjoy writing for site and the exposure that comes along with it. I think I'll be able to turn that exposure into some income/exposure for my other projects, and I'm excited about the possibilities there.

Anyway, I'm going to be tight-lipped about the specific details until they work themselves out and my contract is signed, but it's just another example of how life doesn't always turn out like you think it will, but it does work out for the best in most cases. I'm excited for the future in my life and my career. Life has never rocked more than it's rockin' right now.