Links:

Link to Day 1, Link to Last Post

For those who followed my previous crazy journey’s, here’s the post the Friday before I started this one, which puts it in the context of this blog as a whole: Christian Influence Peddling.

Welcome Back

Welcome to Saturday. It’s been a exhausting but mostly positive few days.

As anticipated there will be days when I just can’t get something posted (even though I’ve given myself permission to post less than perfect copy b/c it’s a blog after all). I’ll try to give a fast update of the last 3 days, but here’s a little recap of what I’m trying to do with this blog series.

Feel free to skip down to the update section if you’re all caught up on this blog.

Quick Recap of this Blog Series

I’m a writer (fiction/non-fiction/copy) who’s turning 50 in June. When I have a season of big changes to adapt to and big projects to take on, I like to combine it all into a plan I call a journey. I’m calling this journey Spring 2021: Cleric Journey – (It includes such things as turning 50, remodeling a house, expanding my writing business to include entrepreneur & life purpose coaching). I typically journal me progress, big wins/big flops, but this time I’m blogging it so I can…

• Inspire or help some folks facing similar life situations.
• Share tips I’ve learned or that people suggest to me that I decided to try out.
• Stay committed to progress by stating to all my readers what I’m doing and if it’s working or not.
• Eventually turn it into a written resource for the Creative Christian Entrepreneurs I coach.

Note: The thinking behind journeys is this. When facing busy seasons in life, we need to impose some routine on life, and be flexible other places. We need to decide what our life is about, that authentic to us, and not lose site of that while taking on those big projects of crazy seasons that happen to all of us in life.

Goal Recap

My goals/priorities this season–addressed in one project (One Big Thing), include
– Losing weight & getting younger, (soon auditioning new diet/exercise plans).
– Bed by 9:30 PM & getting up at 5 AM every weekday and spending time with God (which includes writing this blog).
– Launching the coaching arm of my writing/coaching business, and faithfully stewarding opportunities with my church.
– Remodeling a new home so that we can start living multi-generational with my mom.

Update

Let me just say, there are awkward ways in which we notice things in life. For example, I brought a 6 pack of TP over to the new house the day we got the keys. Ironically, my buddy Jeff brought some rolls and some paper towels as an early housewarming gifts (he said its the kind of thing you forget when moving until its too late.)

We’ve had contractors and subs, and we’ve been there a lot working ourselves–it’s time to bring over another 6-pack and it hit me in that odd way life does sometimes–we’ve been working on this place for a long time, AND we ain’t done yet. Holy cow.

I continue to “sleep in” to about 6 AM, weighed in one day at 295.2 lbs. I continue to be blown away by the favor God is showing us with Subs being suddenly available and coming in at or below their estimates. We’re exhausted but still on schedule. Did I mention we’re tired.

The crazy parts aren’t the time at the house crossing things off the list. I mean, yes, we’ve hit some walls there. For my wife, Kristin it was a banister that had to be painted in place (couldn’t remove it) but first had to have the gloss stripped off. It took a total of four coats (including the liquid sandpaper) and since it was all just one 4-foot section of our house over and over for two days Kristin was so frustrated. Normally she might have done part of it each day and then circled back after she got something done, but this had (ideally) to get done before carpets go down tomorrow.

For me it was a set of vertical blinds that I think were installed by the devil himself. I pulled window treatments off every window as we prepped to paint and only the blinds are going back up, so typically it takes a little longer to take it down than put it back. But this particular room was a theater room with a bunch of extra curtains (big holes to putty) and the window is 8 feet wide so it had vertical blinds instead of horizontal. The header was screwed through the valence and you couldn’t get at the support because of the center channel speaker shelf… it was a puzzle. So I had my arms over my head working for 4 hours trying to get this thing unclipped. I finally got a part loose and did a pull-up with my finger tips to tear it out–mostly. If you weigh almost 300lbs I recommend against fingertip pull-ups.

But as a I mentioned the thing that has been most challenging this week is the stuff that pulls us away from the work site. It’s my daughters spring break so we didn’t have to work around school trips and we all could sleep in a bit. But we also had scheduled her dentist (two visits b/c we went back for a seal coat?) And we established care with a new pediatrician. That guy is great but all the way out in Washougal. Then there was an appointment with the bookkeeper for my writing business (two of those as well). And I took on another writing client–for which I’m super excited because she’s in my target market/ideal client type. I can’t wait to do more writing for her agency. The timing was just crazy, LOL.

So that’s about it for catching you up. More next time… oh wait. First here’s the plan going forward. We’re down to just the thousand little things in the main house and my friend comes back from AZ at the end of this week so we can get to work on the ADU in earnest. And the carpets go down tomorrow–the vinyl is already in the new laundry room. It’s fun to finish each room one at a time. (I carried 8 loads of construction trash down the stairs yesterday–ugh. More next time.