Temper Tantrum Tuesday: Aiming higher

It’s a weird thing actually hitting all my goals for the year. I think the secret is to be so far down that any movement is an improvement.

I started 2009 in a pretty rough shape, my only income was $55 a week from giving blood minus the $10 the trip took. Creditors had raided my bank account wiping what little money I had, and at interviews I was asked why a former Securities Broker/ Insurance Agent would want the job they were offering and they weren’t impressed with the answer, “I need to eat.”

The place that I had been turning to for both emotional support and to post some of my writing was a site called thisisby.us TIBU and it shut down, and no agent would look at my book.

With a start like that it was pretty easy to set some goals to reach in 2009.

1) Survive – Done I’m still here.
2) Write another book – Wrote 2 so I blew that goal out of the water.
3) Get a job that pays the bills – My current job pays the bills even if I don’t have anything left to play with, and I found out that working 40 hours a week doesn’t have to leave me mentally exhausted. Without being mentally exhausted I can spend 30 to 40 hours a week writing.
4) Get some short stories published – Done
5) Not become a crazy cat person – This has been the hardest of my goals, every time I go outside and see the evil minions I want to bring them inside and take care of them, but I know I can’t. I make sure that I feed them less than their daily requirement so they still need to hunt and give them places to rest that marginally better than sleeping outside, but I make sure they don’t get totally dependant on me.
6) Get bill collectors to stop calling – I tape my calls with them so if they dare to sue me I can play tapes of them saying things like “No, we don’t honor our agreements” and “Yes, I was lying before”. It’s amazing how few of them want to talk to me knowing their ridiculous lies will be recorded. I also get a chuckle listening to one of them saying he will call the people across the street and let them know a debt collector is calling, I live across from a cemetery.
7) Start a blog and get over 100 hits a day (more than any other website I’ve had) – Done, since joining Entrecard my hits are nearly always in the triple digits, and more importantly I’ve got a steady 35 to 40 people that check on this site regularly. It’s you guys that keep coming back that make this blog worthwhile. Just know that if you leave a comment it makes my day, if you don’t that’s cool too.
8) Lose the last lingering 5 lbs – I guess this was a sort of hit goal, I lost the 5 lbs I wanted to lose, plus 10 I didn’t, in February, when I didn’t have the money to eat properly. Once I had the money to eat regular meals I gained back that 15 pounds and plus 5 so I’ll have to be more specific for 2010.
9) Get my book published – “Invasive Thoughts” comes out this summer.
10) Be happy – Even though I’m making a tenth of what I made 3 years ago I’m much happier now. I feel the end of 2008 beginning of 2009 threw enough crap at me to knock anyone down and I survived, barely. I just have to remember how bad the beginning of 2009 was and how much better a place I’m in now.


So my Temper Tantrum today is that I didn’t set my goals high enough last year, and I need to up the ante for 2010. I’ll post those goals before the end of the year.