New Year, Same Jon

As is always the case when I take off the last part of the year from work – there’s really no reason to be there, as there’s nothing going on, and the place is a ghost town – I had a checklist of tasks I wanted to accomplish during my largely-uninterrupted time at home.
(As an aside, when I’m at work, my life seemingly revolves around checklists to an ever-increasing extent, and when I’m away from work, I don’t seem to be able to escape them.)
This is probably as close as I get to making resolutions.
So how did I do?
Ehh, better than I did last year, I think.

Things I accomplished:

Thoroughly cleaning the house
Drawing my annual holiday images for Threshold
Maintaining a regular workout routine
Sleeping
At least starting on fulfilling the art request I got from Jamie
Bagging and boarding the comics I’ve accumulated since the last time I bagged and boarded

Things I partially accomplished:

Rearranging/organizing the house

Things I didn’t even start on:

Editing and revising my 2009 and 2011 NaNoWriMo novels
Organizing my comics
Becoming independently wealthy
Gaining super powers
Getting back into a regular blogging groove, with meaningful and insightful posts
Quitting smoking, or at least fully moving to the electronic cigarettes
Making some additional updates/changes to heroicportraits.com
Getting a long overdue oil change

So, yeah, not really great, but probably better than previous years.
Ultimately, I may have been a bit too ambitious.  I mean, organizing my comics?  That’s probably completely outside the realm of possibility.
Some of the things on my list I didn’t accomplish simply because I lacked resources.  For example, I couldn’t find a radioactive spider anywhere (though I did find several dead, presumably non-radioactive ones in the course of cleaning the house), and the rearranging/organizing of the house was kind of dependent on having an easy way to dispose of some of the…stuff that’s just cluttering up the place, like all of the things in my Closet of Forgotten Technology, which will need to be hauled to some sort of electronics recycling facility.
Conversely, while there’s stuff I need to get rid of, there’s also stuff I need to acquire in order to rearrange things.  For example, I really need a new desk for my office (though, of course, that also means getting rid of my old desk), and I need some new shelving and storage, but until tax/bonus time rolls around, my budget is rather constrained.
Then there are – as is the story of my life – the mistakes I’ve made in the past that come back to haunt me.  As a for instance, I probably should have set up my office in the larger guest bedroom, but now, with the way things arranged, it would be difficult to completely shuffle things around.
Beyond that, there’s the fact that I have longer-term plans for how I want the house arranged, which actually involve some amount of construction and renovation, and my short-term plans for rearranging things would actually interfere with those plans, so I found myself at a bit of an impasse.
Also, I’m lazy.

Funk Week Continues

I haven’t really done much today, which is pretty well in line with what I decided to do this week after getting shitcanned.
Basically, my plan has been to be in a funk through the weekend and not do much of anything productive.
Which isn’t really much different from what my plans for the week were like before getting shitcanned, but I do have more time to spend at home doing it.
The only thing I really did today was fill up the 300 or so comic bags I had previously boarded on my long boring Saturdays at work.
Now I’m out of bags and boards (and long boring Saturdays at work), and I still have so many more comics that need to be bagged and boarded.
I want to get the bagging and boarding out of the way before I try actually organizing them and entering them into my database.
At a guess, I’d say I need at least 600 more bags and boards.
I was awoken this morning by Kathleen calling to inform me that she was on her way to a meeting and that I was her Plan B for lunch when she got back to Leesburg, with Plan A being to have lunch with Brian.
She called back later to let me know that she’d gone with Plan A.
There have been no new developments on the job-hunting front today. Yesterday I was contacted by another IT recruiting service, though he didn’t have any specific potential jobs in mind.
I did get a call from the job placement company whose services are part of my severance package. I have to go in for an orientation on Tuesday, after which I will be set up with a counselor and will have access to their computers for job searches and for printing resumes and so forth.
They have a job fair specifically for ex-AOLers lined up on November 1st.
After I finish funk week, I’m going to start putting some serious effort into doing things like upgrading the Heroic Portraits site, and potentially launching a comics-related site that could, conceivably, generate some revenue via selling ad space.
The Heroic Portraits upgrade would involve not only overhauling the site design, but also cranking out some more pictures to flesh out the gallery and to add some more graphical elements to the look of the site.
I’m not really inclined to get into specifics about the other site idea just yet.
The plan for next week also includes doing some non-Threshold writing.
To execute these plans I’m going to actually draw up a daily schedule.
That’ll be the easy part; actually sticking to it and performing the scheduled tasks will be the difficult and, honestly, unlikely part.
But you never know.
(Okay, with me you pretty much always know, but things can change.)