New season of Corner Gas

I'm not going to write about Corner Gas. Titles are the hardest part of blogging so I've decided to just name the first thing I see and get over the grief. But to those who care the title of this blog tells you what you need to know and all together now: "woo hoo!"

Its been a while since my last blog and the downside of that is that it leaves me with too much to write about.

In response to the subject of my last blog. I continue to be employed by the same company but not for much longer. We are winding down for the year. Now is the time of year that my mother has turned into a cliché "Joel wonders what's next" which she writes in the church bulletin. I hope thats the end of it. I really have a quite justified fear that my personal trials will become a regular feature for the Lord's body to ponder.

Anyway... I had an epiphany the other day. I had just come from my financial Bar Mitzvah. Now financially speaking I am an adult. How? you say. Well I bought an RRSP. I had a conversation with my banker and we looked over my situation and all in all its not a horrible mess. Now don't start sending application for grants, I'm not loaded. I just can't feel my live scraping the bottom anymore. But thats not what I want to talk about anyway. I'm not going to gloat about my less than ... well there you go.

What occured to me and it required a banker to do some simple subtraction for me. But I have 37 years until I reach retirement age. Actually probably closer to 39-40 if the current trend continues. Thats longer than I have been alive already. And the first 20 years were kind of a unfocused foray into ignorance. So that means I have about 7 years of actual focused life experience. And I'm pretty sure thats not very significant. So anything that I may have done in that time is valuable experience but it it by no means the lion's share of my life's work.

What I mean to say is that in kind of a "Scrooged" sort of way I still have time to make changes. Even if I am not satisfied with my life or my job or whatever. I still have time to do something else.

So I have hatched a plan... and like any hatchling it is now incubating in my brain. But unlike something that incubates I am exposing it to the elements. SO... what I hope to gain from this is at least two-fold. 1) I hope to gain some feedback from people who actually read this blog, who know me and are willing put in their two-bits. 2) I think that if I actually publish this idea it will be harder to simply let the momentum of this idea evaporate.

Vince Lombardi once said, "The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender."

I saw that quote painted on a wall. It struck me that maybe thats what has been missing from my life. Maybe thats why I find it pretty easy to move from idea to idea. I think often I treat the stuff that I focus on like hands in a poker game. I always just "limp in", I never get "pot commited" to that point where I will see the hand out to the end. If this summer has taught me anything its that hard work is the same as an investment. The work environment wasn't the best but the work I did was honest and showed a result at the end of the day. I think the reason that I have decided to stick it out is that I think walking away would make all the work I put in this summer seem like a waste.

But having said that, I'm sick of grunt work...

The idea that surfaced while I was on the tractor logging whatever thousands loop of whatever fairway was this... Journalism.

So thats the idea that I submit for your perusal. I was thinking, I like to write and take photos. Plus I have the travel bug. It seemed like a a good fit. But thats as far as I have gotten. Well, I did look at some schools and I have enrolled in an online journalism training site.

So now its your turn.

In other news,

My dad has had a second set of tests. Despite our hopes that he was doing really well. His tests show that his Leukemic blood cell count has increased. Indicating that treatment will likely be neccessary. We had been encouraged by the way he seemed to have plenty of energy this summer. So these tests came as a big stunner. More than that I really feel that for the first time in my life I actually heard dejection in my dad's voice. If you know my dad, you know he's even and cool tempered. So I ask that people pray for him to be encouraged.

Well, thats all for now.