Several weeks ago, I stepped away from a very intense role.  I had climbed a rung on the corporate ladder but decided later at least in this situation that the price was higher than I was willing to pay. Now, I am invigorated because I cashed in on some of my options and foud a short term assignment to continue the cash flow. I'm learning about 1099ing it and even wrote my first invoice. There's a bunch of things I can now write off and my mom being an accountant will help me capture every single one of them, Also, in my new assignment, I've got a chance to strengthen my non-datawarehousing skills. There's a lot of business analysis, data analysis, process automation, and code/script fixing and writing.

I'm going back to the skills I am weaker on and strengthening them. I've also got several new open source tools on my laptop -  nVu is so far a great HTML editor , InstantRails was an easy to install installation of MySQL,PHP,Apache,and Ruby on Rails.
I'm also finding with the decreased job pressure, I have the energy to go back to my side projects and make some noise. I haven't proven anything to myself yet but I've decided to ride the consulting work as long as I can and stockpile money while I invest the time over 45 hours a week to my own projects. I will follow the agile/scrum philospohy of putting out a little functionality at a time over 30 day committments.

I will build things as product building blocks. Everything I do must be reusable. I am going to spend the next 5 years of my life (if income circumstances permit) building up a bank of reusable code and skills. I am going to build out the vision for a decision support systems architecture, culture, and operations that I had for my last job. Maybe one day, I will take all these tools and take a plunge on one of the many ideas I've stored in this blog or other notebooks lying around over the years. I looked at one of my notebooks and saw ideas from 2000. I look at turning 40 the same way a lot of my friends do. My life has been on cruise control working hard for someone else. It's time to turn around everything I've learned to help myself. Right now, the economy is right for this kind of attitude.

You know I'm invigorated when I get excited about writing Perl scripts and installing development environments. My first goal is to get my LockAndKeyId.Com project turned around. I had a plan to get the business sponsor involved and I will need to follow through on some promises I made to get him a content management environment he could work in.

I've just got to do more and talk less.