The Next Thousand Days

The Dawning — Day 1 of 1000

It dawned on me last night during my walk that I am in a rut.  There is no excuse for my current mood and mode of operation centered around whining and complaining.  I am generally a “glass half full” kind of a guy so I can only image how disconcerting it is to those who have to put up with me when I am in this state of mind.  Still, I know why and when it happened–not to excuse myself, mind you, just to put down a marker and get back on that positive track.  If you have read this blog in the past, you will know that I spent about all of my spare time (along with my wife, Lorena) homeschooling my kids.  That ended in June of 2010.  It took about six months to get them established at the community college, but the real effort to make that happen ended over a year ago.  I spent some time and effort on volunteer and learning projects, but really, I have not aggressively focused on anything for more than a week or two at a time since homeschool ended.  The dawning that occurred last night was excellent because it made me realize two things:  1) The kids are only three years away from going off to graduate school and 2) I am going to go nuts if I do not set myself some goals and make a plan to accomplish them.

The Next Thousand Days

During my walk, I thought about some stuff that has gone on here in North Carolina that is just wrong.  It is not North Carolina itself.  We love North Carolina in general and Raleigh in particular–best small city in America in our humble opinion!  This lead to the thought that we need to get our family out of here as soon as we can.  The problem is that we would have a hard struggle to sell our house in this really bad economy with this really, really bad president who is making it daily worse and doing everything he can to kill unborn babies, take vacation, and play golf while he is at it.  The economy probably will not get better until and if he is out of office for a couple of years starting in 2013.  That pretty much means we are stuck here until 2013 or 2014.  Well, not stuck–we have really great schools for the kids, the best guitar teacher in the world, a great neighborhood, interesting work, summer opportunities for the kids, some good friends, great weather (except in the misery of summer) and a lot of other super cool stuff here.  Now that I put it that way, I wonder why I have been in such a funk these last several months.

The time we need to be in North Carolina corresponds almost directly to the amount of time it will take for Kelly and Christian to graduate from college.  They have a great university here for the applied math and statistics they want to study.  The time is almost exactly one thousand days from today!  That is a good chunk of time.  Not so much that you cannot see the end of it, but enough to accomplish some significant stuff.  I have even identified some stuff that would be good to accomplish.  Of course, we have to get the kids out of community college with a great education, summer internships, jobs, summer school (maybe necessary so they can graduate in four years) and good grades, then into NCSU for two years with the same challenges and opportunities.  That is not a full time job…

So that leaves me with some time for some very cool stuff.  Most of it has to do with the start of a business–one that does not interfere with my day job, but that still requires a lot of learning and work.  I have at least a thousand days of work and learning if the market accepts our concept, but only about 500 if it does not.  I do not have to worry about that for another 500 days or so.