Before:

After:

Here’s a quick example of some possibilities of what you can do. It’s nothing too elaborate, but should be impressive if you know what to look for.

Click on the image for a closer look of the before/during/after. Enjoy!

Cliff’s Notes version of this summer:
It’s been raining an awful lot so we haven’t spent much time outside. Thankfully we took this year off from gardening. Went to Chicago for the 4th (still have yet to fix up, resize & upload photos from that trip). VNV Nation concert in NYC a few weeks ago – always fun. Finally made it to Connecticon – got to meet the guys/gal from AppleGeeks, Johnny Wander, Questionable Content, and xkcd. Steve’s been traveling a lot for work. Leaving town to attend an old friend’s wedding in less than a month. Still haven’t finished renovating our bedroom.

I think that generically sums up everything that we’ve done. Not sure what’s in store for the Fall or Winter yet. Still trying to “get my sketch on” – and making progress! More on that soon I hope.

This time it’s semi-local and in my favorite city – Boston. So that just makes me want to go even more My other justifications for going is that it would be a GREAT opportunity to network, I’ll learn a ton, and it’ll give me an excuse for a solid target date to work towards a few things … like finishing up my website design

I won’t have to pay for airfare, so that will help keep the price down. But the other variables… That’s what’s killing me!

Do I find a hotel nearby and pay the extra $$ for the convenience? Or do I borrow a friend’s couch for a few nights and hope that our schedules work out so that he’s home to let me in? If so, then I’ll either need to drive into the city and pay for parking ($$$), or walk to the T stop and commute in. Do I drive up to Boston so I have the freedom of going wherever, whenever, as I see fit – or do I take the train to save on parking while putting my commute to productive use?

My tax refund initially looked pretty promising to cover everything and I was really jazzed about going. Then I received more tax paperwork which made my refund significantly lower, and I started to wonder if I should just stay home and use the money to pay towards debt. I’ll still be able to cover all this – and more comfortably if I wanted to commute into the city and sleep on a friend’s couch.

Ok – that’s it. I think I’ve finally decided. I’ll buy the tickets.

I’ve started reading up or stumbling onto more technical “blogs” and have toyed with the idea of moving to something more along those lines as I learn and find solutions to various problems. For now I think I’ll keep up what I’ve been doing and just categorize my entries and add technical posts as I have in the past. Probably “news”, “journal”, and “tech” for things like SharePoint, Powershell, and WordPress customization, etc. Maybe a “review” section for movie/game reviews? We’ll see.

The economy sucks, but we’re making our way through it without too much difficulty. So far. Steve found a new job that he loves. It has stability, is a bit of a challenge for him, and he loves it. I can’t help but feel a little jealousy, but that’s drastically outweighed by how happy I am that he’s finally found a job that he really loves with a great team of people.

One of my oldest friends relocated for a job about 2 years ago? They sold their house and moved everything 10+ hours from anyone they knew, bought a new house, etc. Only to be laid off due to the economy and budget cuts. It was a long search for a job even for someone as knowledgeable and talented as he is, but he finally found something. Congrats to him. Even though it’s a 6 month project, it must be quite the relief.

We had the pleasure of spending a bit of time with these friends over the holidays. The drive was long, but it was nice to get away for a bit. Oh, and there was Steak & Shake I took a number of photos (though not nearly as much as I probably should have). I’ve been hoping to upload those to my Flickr account soon. Keep an eye out for those.

Meanwhile, (back to the economy) my company has been laying off on average once each month since… June-ish? No layoffs in December though. I think we’re finally getting more projects, but they’re also giving away quite a bit of service for free as “value add”. This is both helping and hurting us I think.

I originally only took the job because it paid the bills. I didn’t want to get back into IT, but you need to eat, right? I’ve stayed because I love the people – though I still long for a career in something more creative. Now that probably 1/2 the employees are gone, there’s more fear about stability, and less reason for me to want to stay as my friends either leave or get let go.

In today’s economy, do you try to hold on to the job that you actually have, or actively look for something more “rewarding”?

The geek in me loves building VMs for Windows Servers to setup SharePoint environments and tinker with development. The artist in me wants to finally start my webcomic, do more illustration & graphic design, as well as finally build up a web design portfolio. Perhaps the combination of the two will help lead me into a career for branding SharePoint?