Friday, July 22, 2016

Scary week for America

Reading "The Way We Never Were" by Stephanie Coontz.  Last week was eye-opening for awareness of how much I don't know about history. I don't want to see America step backwards. From chapter three: "sentimentalization of middle-class family life justified terrible exploitation of those other families (African-American, immigrant and working class).

Last night the GOP launched Trump as their candidate. And I'm so sad.  This is no longer the party of Lincoln or Reagan. We used to try to move people ahead, and he wants to grind people under his heel.  Very much like Germany and Italy in the 1930s.

I miss the National Review when William Buckley and George Will wrote it. Political news nowadays is fear-mongering. No attempt to promote new ideas or vision. No attempt to bring people together.  I'm glad I left the GOP before the convention.

As for the people who question why I left the party (and am currently unaffiliated) I share this quote from George Will: "I joined it [The Republican Party] because I was a conservative, and I leave it for the same reason: I'm a conservative... The long and the short of it is, as Ronald Reagan said when he changed his registration, 'I did not leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me,' " 

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Even years

Not a fan of even years.  In fact I'm pretty sure this rant has been published before but it's time again. Made it to the end of April this year before stuff started to go south again.

I don't pretend to say that I expect life or work to be easy, but it is incredibly frustrating to have to drop everything I'm doing to manage a crisis that was created due to inaction or a failure to share critical information.  A real crisis is one thing, a crisis manufactured by inaction is another.  For some reason my view of the even year issues tend to be the latter.






Monday, February 29, 2016

Freelance Growth

So, 2015 was my best freelance year since 1998.

1998 is when I went back to work full-time so that I could stop working night/weekends and spend time with my family.  Most of the work from 1998-2014 were special projects that I did when tuition was due or when there was a conference in Buffalo etc.  Then last year my family got so busy that I had a lot of free nights and weekends to work at home again.

So, now I balance my full-time job with a lot of really interesting freelance projects.  The internet has created opportunities for me that I never could have imagined when I started to phase away from doing that freelance stuff full-time. Now I can see huge potential in the future and I'm really excited about where it is going.