The snow is blowing in a right to left motion outside the office windows here on Greene Street. Double digit accumulation expected yet again. Sure do wish I had worked from home today, but no sense splitting hairs over that now.

It’s just been one of those blah-ass Mondays today. Not just me, either. I know I have at least one other commiserator in the office today. Why today is so infectiously gloomy I can’t say. Usually I like it when it snows outside. Not even that can cheer me up for some reason. Here I sit, stuck in the middle with Steeler’s Wheel and company. Meh.

Also, I’d like to announce that the grand New Year’s experiment is over. The new record for keeping my life and apartment in a clean and orderly fashion is 1.5 months. I’ll give myself the rest of the week off to enjoy my old slovenly ways before striking up the band wagon again.

Caught all the busses and subway trains with a minimum of fuss. Into the office and back at the desk. Man, I really should have stayed at the beach longer than I did yesterday, but that’s moot now. All wrapped about in the affairs of my world, fearing the knock on the door from the bill collector man per usual. He’s bled my bank account drier than I thought possible and left me with just a hair under enough for what I need to pay. Damn glad that pay day comes at the end of the week.

The workman’s odyssey I’ve started was stuck in dry dock the better part of the week, but at least things are starting to move. Slow and steady makes Andy go crazy, but then again so do 30 hour days and mass amounts of caffeine. Damn could I ever use a winning lottery ticket and an overseas trip right about now.

Just one of those anxious mornings I suppose. They usually turn after lunch and make things much more bearable, but they also foretell a rough week ahead. Time to grit the teeth again and dive back into the frosted waters.

In other news, there is no other news. Goodnight and good luck, chump.

I have a few emails that are going to be written tonight which will make official my shift from a full time employee back to the life of the freelancer. This is that big news that I’ve been hinting at the past few weeks, but it’s more than just that. The bigger half of the news is the one that’s going to hit my current employer a little hard, I’m afraid.

You see, for some time I’ve been feeling like the work I’m doing at Heartbeat is not going to get me to where I want to be. The jump from the design side of the company to the software side didn’t agree so well with me and I had some personality conflicts with my boss at first that made things much harder on me than I let on. That and some of the other issues I had have started to fix themselves in the past month or two, but still I find things lacking and it’s hard not to hide it anymore.

No matter how good the work I’ve done with the user interfaces it’s still not what I want to be doing for the next 50 years. Hell, I’m not sure I could do it for 5 years at this point. It’s a good skill to have and I’m glad I’m good at it, but I also need to be doing design work for public consumption and not just corporate tools. I need a change and have been looking since the start of the year for that change.

This has led to a new pasture, but the trip getting there has been hard. Many caffeine fueled nights have had me working to finish trial projects for the new company while still meeting all my deadlines for the current one. But the payoff seems to be at hand — both in a finanical and inspirational way.

I’ll be able to speak more as to where I’m going at a future date, but details will be short in coming until I’m sure things have settled in — I’m not going to jinx this like I did during my apartment hunt fiasco. I can say that I’ll be doing web sites again — among other things — and that they are of a political nature. Along with all of this, I can now start putting real time into my freelance projects. So long as they pay then they’re all on equal footing.

This is going to be a strange transition, considering all the financial and IRS woes I built up for myself the first go around as a freelancer. Well, the being in control of my destiny thing was kind of intoxicating and I know what pitfalls to look out for now. So long as I can keep the savings account happy in the process and put aside the fed’s share, then I should be fine. Now to look into getting my own health care and other such fun stuff.

Oh yeah, maybe I should also write those emails I made reference to. That might help things a bit.