career change

a few months ago i took the plunge and started up a political/government affairs consulting firm with a few partners (hence my abandonment of my blog). i never imagined that starting a business in and of itself would be such a huge learning opportunity. how naive was that? i thought that since i'd run other enterprises starting my own wouldn't be that different. of course i was wrong. not wrong in a bad way, but it turns out i've learned about so many things i took for granted when you're running someone else's business. 

the biggest thing i learned was that i was making a career change. even though i still do consulting work my job is running a business and going into it i thought i was continuing down the same career path. 

now that the year is coming to a close and i'm buried in financials, business development, marketing, and a whole host of things not previously on my resume i find myself happily surprised by the change in direction. now here's hoping we can actually keep this ship afloat!

if i cross something off my list am i really procrastinating?

the big move is coming and there's still a lot of packing to do. a bit overwhelmed by all that needs to get done, i sat down on monday and wrote out a very detailed to-do list. i thought it would help to see everything written down. i thought it would ease my mind to not have to worry about forgetting things. i thought i could prioritize tasks and be more efficient, but it hasn't really worked out that way.

i am a lot less stressed about forgetting things that need doing now that i have my list written, but seeing all those tasks scrawled out has led to more procrastination. every day i wake up and say - today's the day i'll get to no. 23 - clearing out the closet; or no. 14 going through the huge stack of papers that might require shredding. but somehow i seem to focus on other tasks first. am i really procrastinating if i'm doing other things on the list while ignoring the tasks i don't want to do? afterall i am making forward progress. i suppose i'll end up leaving the things i want to do least till the very end and when there's nothing else left on my list to do but those last tasks i'll have to get them done. maybe :-)

what is it with t-shirts?

for the past several weeks i've devoted my time to packing up our house for our big cross-country move. today i focussed my attention on the master bedroom and sorting through the dressers and closets for clothes that aren't worthy of the journey. even though i did this very thing 3 years ago when we moved into this house, and last year for purposes of holiday donations, i'm still amazed by how many clothes we have. and the thing we seem to have most of is t-shirts. 

where do they come from? why do we keep them? how is it that they pile up over the years?

going through my t-shirts was a bit like reliving various eras of my life - there was the high school tennis team practice shirt wonderfully decorated with a hand scrawled likeness of our team coach drawn by one of my teammates, the feminist slogans in big bold letters on t-shirts from my years at my venerable women's college alma mater, a policy 'wonks' inter-mural flag football team shirt from my grad school days, campaign t-shirts from candidates who won and lost, symbols of 5k walks and races completed on behalf of various charitable organizations, names of vacation locations and conferences attended, and a strange assortment of shirts advertising everything from the piggly wiggly to ralph lauren. 

so many shirts and so many memories. how do i part with these cotton blasts from the past? it should be easy, but obviously not entirely so otherwise i wouldn't have t-shirts from the mid-1990s still in my drawers.  i don't wear most of them, but that's not the point. i saved many of them because they represent happy times of the past. and even if i only relive those memories every few years it's worth the closet space. i'm weeding out the collection for sure, but i'll happily tuck away my favorites to rediscover next year.