No, I’m not dead. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. I haven’t gotten sick of people, sold all my worldly goods, and moved into a mysterious, off-the-grid cabin in the woods.

I have just been incredibly, horribly busy.

Reading? No time. Writing? I wish. Camping? Twice, maybe three times only . . . and it’s already AUGUST!

Instead, I’ve been busy with work, hubby’s health, and two side projects that have eaten up all of my time.

The first side project is that I made the terrible error in judgment of taking a summer class. Not a good idea. The class itself was great, and I learned a lot. But, it was a terrible time suck. I won’t be doing this again. I need my summers off.

The second side project is that I’ve decided that if I am going to no longer be a mouse-wrangler for my day job (long story, and still up in the air), I want to be a content writer. That means I need to brush up on my web development skills and learn some new marketing skills as those often go hand-in-hand with writing content. I have experience in both, but they were both a million years ago, and the marketing was hands-on, trial and error rather than via education (I ran my own business selling homeschool products). So I need some updating, especially on the programming/web development side of things.

Things I’ve said while doing this:

“Can you believe they have IDEs now? In my day, we had to write this stuff by hand. If you wanted to get fast, you had to be good with those copy-paste keys!”

“In my day, we had to format manually, not just hit three buttons and the IDE would auto format our code!”

“In my day, we had to do two semesters of Assembly before we could even THINK about learning to code!”

I think this is what I look like most of the time while I’m doing refresher studies:

A lot of the people I know are a little taken aback by my decision. The prevailing attitude seems to be, “So, you think you can just decide to be an <insert job title> here and then go do it?”

Yes. That’s exactly what I think.

No, it’s probably not a good idea to decide to be a brain surgeon and dive right in. But for a lot of careers, the world of the Matrix is a reality; you can literally take classes, watch webinars, and study YouTube and learn how to do a lot! I can’t just download Kung Fu to my brain, but I can get pretty darn close!

I’m not sure why there seems to be a disconnect for most people. Does it matter if I’m learning by sitting in a college classroom versus sitting at home in front of my computer? As long as the teaching is quality (and a lot of it is: LinkedIn, Google Garage, Udemy, etc.), it really doesn’t make a difference!

So, for now, writing is on hold while I focus on all this other stuff. Then, if I end up having to leave my mouse job behind, I will be ready for this next new chapter of my life! By the next posting, I hope to have a small content portfolio created and displayed on a site I completely created all by myself in HTML!

See you next month!