2014…it’s actually here. It’s starting to sink in, finally. It’s happening, I suppose, because now that Ryan our beloved houseguest has left to go home and it’s just me, Coops, and Liz. Back home.

The holidays are officially over. It’s time to get down to bidniss.

Liz and I have really never made a huge deal of New Years Eve, it’s freaking amateur hour after all, but I *do* usually make a big deal about the new year. I’m big into fresh starts, after all. It’s also increasingly a good marker of time. Time really does seem to go faster and faster as the years wear on and we all get older. 2013, for example, freaking FLEW by. Like that. (picture I snapping his fingers)

But now is not the time to be thinking about what’s come before. Now is the time to look ahead, at what is to come.

It’s hard for me to do that when most of my brain is still in “holiday” mode. It makes sense with a quiet house, and only the familiar left around me, that it’s settling in that it’s time to plan, strategize, focus, and commit. I have lofty plans for 2014. I couldn’t really say that last year, being broke and only a few months into a major life change in managing an apartment building. That’s in the past now, thank god. The present is *finally* about the future.

I want to write. I want to intern/assistant/staff on a real TV show. I want to make as much money as I did during the last four months of last year, the amount of money I know I *can* make. I want to be more active, which includes work out on the regular, and eat more healthy, meaning eat more. And, I want to enjoy my time off, which for me, means earning it. Hitting my goals makes the golf rounds, or the afternoon naps, or the reading my kindle enjoyable. You know what, that’s really my ultimate measure of success; whether or not I’m truly enjoying my down time. If I am, it means my mind is at ease because I accomplished what I said I wanted to. There’s been a lot of that not happening these past couple years, which is absolutely a too-harsh way to look at it. I’ve truly accomplished a lot…I just want more. I want to accomplish the goals that gnaw at me day in and day out, not just the ones associated with survival. I’ve been surviving for the past two years, really. It’s time to live.

So yeah…this is what’s running through my head tonight, as I sit here in bed, ready for a day off tomorrow I only half-earned. I did half the work today I needed to. And I do have an excuse; there was a lot of apartment work that needed to be done, and it was Ryan’s last day here so I took time to eat his home-cooked traditional family meal he’d so wanted to share with us. It was delicious. And then, I probably could have finished up all the work I’d wanted to this evening, I’d be finishing right about now in fact, but the thought that this was the first time in literally three weeks that Liz and I would be home, just us, settled into my brain and I couldn’t get it out.

I needed to just decompress. Be with her and the Coops. It wasn’t really anything other than us eating food, going over her audition for tomorrow, and me sitting on the couch finishing the original “Lethal Weapon” that I’d starting watching a month ago. But it’s necessary. I can feel it; the old me waking up. And, in order for that to really happen, I need to take time. I’m a thinker. I need to sit, be quiet, and think things out sometimes. Now is one of those times. So, it was glorious to do that, and it seriously tempers any guilt of having not finished all my editing work today. I’ll pay for that over the weekend, most likely 😛

With that, I bid you goodnight. Tomorrow, thinking time, perhaps some rest, meeting with the Josh…and yeah. Get my mind right to really get shit done. Propel myself to where I want to go next.

Tonight’s artwork is courtesy of James Vaughn.