Just a quick PSA here to announce that the work I actually get paid for is finished for the season. I have nothing at all whatsoever scheduled for e next seven months except apparently having a baby. Of course, when I say "nothing at all whatsoever" that excludes trade shows for the business, other business marketing, new product development when I get a wild hair, this blog, and whatever pops up that I can't say "no" to. Even so, this is an improvement over my last pregnancy where I continued through the pregnant and postpartum months with a whole lot of commitments.
Having been squeezed through the summer and the past month in particular to tie up some work, I do have plans to post just a bit more on this blog. :) I have some food data I'm sitting on that I know people will find fascinating. Also, in a moment of mania I ordered some products to sell from this site to fund an assistant for it in the hopes that it become manageable. I'll be posting about that soon. They are interesting.
The book is all but ready and waiting for me to pull the trigger. I had a coauthor on a project many years ago who had a book ready for the press. I saw a mutual friend in January and was told he never pulled the trigger. My manuscript was nearly ready at the time and I said, "I've got to pull the trigger." I wonder if it's a sign of mental illness that I've had such a problem with this? Due to shame alone, I really must do it.
On the for-pay work in case anyone is interested, I do custom research projects for social service agencies with a focus on schools. In the past year I have been developing an e-commerce site taking an aspect of the custom work that I do and creating a process that allows me to sell it on the cheap to schools and districts in California. The business centers on graphic display of educational data. A busy administrator faced with a presentation on her student performance on the California High School Exit Exam can come to our website and order a package of graphs based on her school's data. The graphs are publication-quality and cheap enough that administrators should not spend their time making their own. In fact, right now we are giving away two packages to any California administrator who shows up at our website.
We've got a second type of product coming out of development now -- a full report with graphs and descriptions for a couple of different audiences. The most targeted is our QEIA monitoring report which provides the required data for any of the nearly 500 schools in the state receiving QEIA funding for the next five years.
I do all of the graph development for the business. It's about 90% monkey work, but most jobs are. The remaining 10% requires a great deal of focus as well as skill in programming and design that I've developed over the years. It is about as politically-neutral as work can be, a good thing for me. I also find that when my brain is that focused, it can't worry, have anxiety, or get involved in politics. That 10% is good to my brain.
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