Resume’s terrify me.  It’s irrational and irritating, but it’s true.  For as long as I can remember, the words “submit your resume” have filled me with the same kind of panic that most people associate with root canals or major surgery.

Even more of a stumbling block for me is that now I am having to write resumes about my writing skills, not the web design skills that have kept me afloat up until this point.  I’ve entered a new career field where I am no longer well established.  I can’t just point out that I’ve held 22 positions in three companies and worked my way from upper management to owner of my own company.  I have to start over.

The part of this that frustrates me the most is that if you were to simply ask me what it is that I’ve been doing with my live for the past few years I could tell you easily:

• 2007 – Present : Owner and sole writer for Cooking, by the seat of my Pants; a food and cooking blog with 866 articles and a readership in the thousands per day.
• 2007 – Present : Owner and sole author for JerryDRussell.com, a blog about blogging
• 2008 – Present : Owner and sole author for A Father Speaks.  A blog about Family, Autism and the challenges associated with it
• 2007 – Present :  Ghost Writer on several projects of 50,000 words (NDA agreements preclude specifics)
• 2004 – 2007 : Owner and sole author for ADHDFamilies.org – Now retired.  500 articles published

This is who I am and what I do, but when I try to put that information in the form of a resume, I choke.  It can take days or weeks for me to get the information penned in a way that makes me happy.

I don’t understand where the fear of resume’s came from.  i’ve worked in positions that required resume’s and portfolio for the past 15 years, but yet I still get a knot in my stomach every time I find the need to update or write a new C.V.

Maybe its because I started out in the workforce in the blue collar world.  Resume’s weren’t needed then.  You simply showed up and asked the foreman if he needed anyone on the crew.  Resume’s were for white collar workers.  You know, desk jockey’s.  Those guys that got paid to sit around all day.

I know now that they worked just as hard as I did, but that doesn’t change the thinking pattern that started when I was younger and pounding nails all day.  I know it needs to be done in the world I live in now, because I am one of those guys who gets paid to sit around all day.

I’ll do it, but it’s going to take a lot of coffee.

Are there any seemingly simple tasks that you despise?  I’m sure everyone despises doing something that others find simple.  I’d love to hear your secret work-related fears.  At least we’ll know we’re in it together.

I have to apologize about the lack of content here lately.  There’s a LOT going on around here right now and I simply haven’t had time to maintain this blog in the manner I would like to.  We just got word of our next station, so I’ve been busy getting things ready to make for a smooth transition to our new home in the Great State of Alaska.

Yep, Alaska.  The last frontier.  land of bears, moose, wolves, polar bears, 24 hour days and 24 hour nights (depending on the season.)  The move is still several months away, but there is a lot of preparation involved before we can be sure that it will go smoothly.

So for a few more days at least, I’m giving as much attention as I can to handling those things that I MUST get done on my end.  During that time, I’m afraid I won’t be posting much.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

It’s time I attack one of the least favorite items on any of my checklists, changing a blog theme.  Sure, when I was just starting out in the world themed sites and blogs I thought it was cool to change my theme fairly often, but I’ve come to have a series of different thoughts on the subject over the past few years.

Changing themes is a pain.  It’s a bigger pain when you have to change it before you’re really ready to, as I’ve had to do in this case due to a plugin conflict.  I prefer it to be a well thought out process with a nice tidy unveiling at the end, but I was unable to do so in this particular instance and to be frank, that irritates the hell out of me.

Changing a theme too often also dilutes your brand and should not be undertaken lightly.  Your visitors really should know what to expect when they stop by, not be confronted by a never ending series of changes to design, layout or flow.  Familiar is good, especially if the experience was good to start with.

The reality is that change is inevitable.  In this case I’m changing to a new theme because my previous theme simply placed too many restrictions on my creativity.  Image and attachment sizes were limited to incredibly small sizes or worse, squashed by the theme’s overly-strict CSS rules. I started writing this blog to share my thoughts, my acquired knowledge and to let my creative side out a little.  A theme that holds any part of that back becomes stifling after a certain point and that’s what happened here.

So I’m asking for just a little patience as I get things tidied up around here and get all the little details put in place.  Everything will be back up and running the way it should be within the next few days.  The new theme (and I’ll let you all in on what that is as soon as I’m positive I’m going to stick with it) is up and running.

Peace. I’m out.

The last month has been hectic, and not in a good way.  I’ve been dealing with a bout of health issues that have kept me mostly pinned to the sofa watching reruns on either BBC America or the DIY channels. (BBC America has wonderful programming to doze-through.  not bad programming, but soothing voices at low volumes… Peaceful.)

I’m very glad that I had a series of articles already written and ready for posting, it’s the only thing that’s kept this blog alive during this stretch.

I’m not going to sit and bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that at one point my doctor and I discovered that I have a new allergy to certain antibiotics, which tends to make a problem worse, rather than better!

For now it seems that I may actually be on the road to recovery, with all but the most minor of symptoms having left me alone for the past few days, s with any luck, posting on at lest a daily basis will resume here, though I doubt with any kind of razor-edged focus.  I think that for the next week or two I’m going to devote my posts to randomness and see if anything seems to strike a chord.

Planned chaos.  gotta love it!

Peace.  For right his second, I’m out.

I’ve been doing a lot of gearing up for change this year, both here and at my other blogs.  One change I’ve been considering is a switch to a theme framework, rather than a standard theme.  One such option is of course, the venerable Thesis theme famework, but for my personal needs at the moment, I wasn’t necessarily looking for that level of customization.

After much poking about, I found the Thematic Theme Foundation, and I’m giving it healthy thought.  It seems robust enough, and even though there aren’t currently a whole lot of child themes available right now, creating my own from scratch doesn’t look like it will prove to be all that difficult.  I may even switch over to one of the “out of the box” child themes for a few days, just to see how things play out.

I know that I could just spend the money for thesis and have the one single WordPress platform that everyone in the world is talking about. I know that they all say it’s simple to use, easy to configure and to be honest, just looks plain great right out of the box, but in the end, I like to be a little different and I’m kind of proud of that part of me as well.

Peace. I’m out.

So I wrote an eBook and sent it off for edits.  That was almost two months ago.  I’ve got nothing back from my editors. It’s frustrating to say the least, as I had hoped t have the finished copy out before Christmas. I’m glad there isn’t anything that has become irrelevant between now and then, but the longer it sits, the greater the likelihood that something will become dated and need to be rewritten before the book can be published.

I’m not sue what the normal turn around time for edits on a 74 page book are, but I’ve been dwelling on it for far too long now.  It’s time to get back into the game and start writing again. I have more ideas that I think might appeal to others, as well as a ton of bookmarked sites and jotted notes for this blog that have simply sat and waited for me to get my head out of… Errr. To get my head straight.

Have any of you ever gone through something like this? If so, what was the editing process like? How long should I expect to wait to get the first round edits in my hot little hands?  I’d love to know.

I never should have hooked up the PS3.  The kids begged.  I gave in.  They played.  I went to turn it off and saw my copy of Resistance…  It was all over.

Two days wasted.  Beware the non-humans.  They aren’t going to take the earth by force.   If they are intelligent they will make a game as addictive as Resistance or Guitar Hero and the next thing you know, even John Scalzi won’t be posting any more. (This would be a terrible thing, mind you.)

For today I’ve unplugged the evil machine, at least for the morning, so that I can get something done that doesn’t involve blowing the hell out of a few non-zombie mutants.

But I want to.  It’s crack for me.  I NEED it.  It’s like a Heroin fix.

Just… One… More.. Clip…

Argh!

Back to work.

Peace.  I’m out.

Even the most fanatic workaholic needs a few good reasons to waste time now and then and I am definitely no exception. The latest in my absolutely nonproductive pursuits is a free online game of conquest and world building sort of like a cross between Civilization® and Sim City® meets Age of Empires®.  It’s a combination that could have fallen flat, but in this case it worked, and I’m hooked.

Evony has all the hallmarks of greatness.  If you’re a strategy game freak like myself, you’ll have a hard time walking away from it once you get started.  There are a lot of things to think about as you go along, with the added worry that you’ll get wiped right off the face of the map if you don’t get it done fast enough.

Game play is pretty basic.  Sign up for a free Evony account, pick a server and start following along with the quests to get your city up and running. (If you’re gunning for me, go for server 67, you’ll find me there as Lord Galen.  My wife is on the same server though, so if you’re feeling like getting frisky I have the most dedicated backup there is!) After a few minutes you should be rolling along pretty well on your way to getting a few awards and free gifts.

Like most massive multi-player games, the world of Evony is packed with players who are far more experienced than you will be when you’re starting out. If you’re a first time player, you’re in luck.  You have a one week period of safety in which to get your city in shape before the hordes of the world at large are allowed to pummel you into the ground. Be prepared to spend a lot of time with Evony on the first day.  You’ll need to get a population going and then get them to work.  Just watch the task window closely and follow along for the first day or two while you get your resources built up.  You’ll need them, trust me.  Don’t worry about trying things on your own at this point unless you’ve played Evony before, jut follow the quests related to resources, wealth and the ability to get more of each.

For the first few days your attention should be on getting your resources as high as possible and your population levels as high as you can manage, but at about day four it’s time to start worrying about your military.  Don’t forget that on day seven (or when you’ve upgraded your town hall to level 5), you’re at the mercy of other players.  You’d better make sure you’ve go a defensive force that will make them think twice about coming after you before they go after someone else or you may just find yourself in a very bad situation quickly.

I would suggest that you save any speed-ups that you get for later in this process when upgrades can take 5 hours or longer to complete. (This is experience talking, people.  I’m currently waiting for an upgrade that won’t be done until late this afternoon and I used up everything I had earlier in the game.) The plus to this is that the time-wasting factor of the game becomes less excessive as the days go on.  Things take longer to upgrade so you can get a few things rolling and then get back to more pressing tasks while you wait for projects to be completed.

So you build up, you prepare, you stockpile and your army is ready.  What happens when your 7 days of safety are gone?  Do you get owned or do you stand tall as the master of your domain?  Only you can answer that question.  In the end your strategies and alliances will determine whether you stand or fall.  That’s the beauty of a game like this.

Go sign up for an Evony account and see if you’ve got what it takes to be a king in the realms of Evony.  While you’re at it, send me a “hello”.  I’d love to see you there.

If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to that is so much more important to me than making money (and we all know you’ve been wondering), I’ve been up to my eyeballs in personal issues and angst.  There really isn’t anything else that would keep me away, after all.

This marks the first full week that my wife is deployed overseas.  The weeks leading up to, and the week after this event have kept me very occupied in the world of personal matters.  It’s a hard life that we live at times.  Separations make it harder.

So now I have to get myself back into the world of work.  At the same time, I’m a full time father, so I’ve had to juggle schedules to get myself planted back in front of my monitor, but hopefully I’ve got that settled now and can return to the task at hand.

I need the work, it keeps me sane.

And you can expect an awful lot of it from me over the next Fifteen months.  Aside from being a father, missing my wife terribly and running a house, it’s all I’ve got to keep me moving.  At the moment I consider it a dear friend that I plan to embrace.  Working means less time for feeling lonely or powerless.  At least until late at night.  Then it’s just me, a small dog and a picture of my wife on a  nightstand.

But that’s a tale for a different venue.

Has it really been over a month since I last posted here? With all that’s been going on, is doesn’t feel like it.  Then again, date stamps don’t lie, do they?  It really has been over thirty days.  What in the world could possibly keep me from updating for so long?

In short, anything and everything. It’s been a very hectic month for the Russell family in many ways, all of which conspired to keep me from getting much in the way of work done here, or on any of my other blogs and if you will indulge me for a moment, I’ll fill you in on some of the highlights.

Firstly, for those of you who aren’t aware through twitter or my food and recipe blog, we’re gearing up for a move. This is a military move, and one of the more complicated types.  My wife is moving to Incirlik Air force Base in Turkey and my son and I are moving to northern California to be close to family.

The logistics of a move like this are staggering, not only from a family standpoint, but from a paperwork standpoint.  Much of my time has been spent making sure that everything I can do to help my wife get things in order has been done.  After that it’s taking care of my son. In what little free time I have left, I’ve been handling the paperwork for the home we’re buying.

If there’s anything left after all of that, I’m usually content to spend my time mowing down hordes of parasitic alien beings in Resistance and Resistance II: Fall of Man, or creating and destroying cities in Civilization IV. Getting all technical minded just hasn’t been on my high priority list after a day of pushing to get things done.

I’m happy to announce that almost al of the paperwork side of the move is done.  On my side at least, there is little to be done now except wait for the movers to come and pack our things.  We should get word on the house sometime today or tomorrow.  If we got it, great!  If not, I’ll rent in California.  Either way, there won’t be much to worry about.

Now I can get back to work. I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.

Over the course of the next month much of my blogging will be done from locations other than my trusty Mac, which will be packed for moving by Father’s Day. I can’t promise that I’ll be posting in great length, but blogging from a hotel room or while I watch the kid play in the park will pretty much guarantee a heavy posting frequency.

In any event, this station is now resuming its regularly scheduled programming.  We apologize for any inconvenience that our technical difficulties may have caused our viewers.

Peace. I’m out.