Business, as in life, there are milestones.

A Roman Milestone along Israel Road of the Patriarchs

I’ve had two milestones here on my personal blog, a couple with Insanitek, and a few in my personal life.

Over the last month you can tell I’ve been fiddling with this or that on the blog. The first thing I started to fiddle with was a way to make it more convenient for people on the go to get the posts if they wanted to. After all, I get 90% of my content through email because I can’t be arsed to check the various websites as I’m running from place to place or working at one of my three jobs. Besides, do you know how hard it is to type in a URL in a phone when you can’t remember to bookmark them all? I decided to share my love of being efficient by putting an email opt-in over in the side bar so busy alt-pathers can get their weekly dose of motivation and tips via email.

The other thing I’ve done here on the blog is install Disqus commenting platform. Reason? You always know when your blog has hit a milestone when you start getting a lot of spambot visitors leaving links for Viagra, breast enlargement surgery, and a plethora of webcam services in your comments. While I could have paid a fee to use Akismet at $5 a month, I chose to go the free route with Disqus, which a lot of other sites use — including Insanitek’s Ink community. It’s harder to get spam through, but also has the added benefit of following lists and creating your own network of commenters. And we all know how important connections in anything you do in life is, so it’s just one more way I’m helping all of you lovely people out.

Insanitek, on the other hand, has been hitting a plateau. It’s our 5th plateau while things stabilise, but it’s still going steady at 2 science writers (the others have failed to produce or jumped ship for better things). Our professional marketer/PR girl, Alesi, left me in charge while she works steadily on her Ph.D. in communications, psychology, marketing, and our bookkeeper, Maria, has been training me to do the books in preparation for her leaving to go home to Mexico for a few months to visit family. In other words, it’s nearly back to being all me, but somehow it’s all going well. Somehow — until my sanity slips away.

Needless to say, I’m thinking about doing some more hiring to help take the load off, but who, what, and why? Ah, this would be Insanitek’s second milestone of a second round of hiring. Too bad without an HR representative, I have no idea how to go about using the Osclass platform the former one used. Interesting times ahead indeed.

Insanitek’s third milestone is that we started to send out the brochures for the Academic Infographics Service. This is our first big project, so it’s our first time for doing any “real” marketing that isn’t just content marketing and SEO or some strange internet advert trial. This is the real deal and a handful of brochures went out last week. This week we’ll send out another handful until our box of brochures is empty.

My personal life has been a wreck, however.

Sums up nicely how I feel some days when the alarm goes off. Plain coffee and toast, though, is the way I go.

For all the cheerleading I do here for all of us to follow an alternative path of our own making, I have to be honest. I’ve always told you it was hard work, and there are lots of decisions to make. I often try to give you a sneak peak into my own life with anecdotes about how messy it was, but how I got through it. Well, now I’m going through one of those “messy” times, so there are no words of wisdom other than “do as I say, not as I do”. (And we all know that phrase is a joke.)

Seriously, I mentioned last month that I overloaded my schedule. Well, the stress of the fact is making me an emotional cannonball, careening out of control towards junk food and a nap. Why I crave these types of food when stressed, I still don’t know. However, when I’m resisting the urge to shove an entire can of Pringles in my mouth or cave to the delights of fish and chips, I remember my friend Billy.

Billy is not only the one that lent/gave me the car to make this insanity possible, but he’s also going through some health changes of his own. He went from eating anything he wanted, any time he wanted, in whatever quantities he wanted to simply stating that he wouldn’t eat over 2000 calories a day and making healthier choices in food. And he does it without so much as a question as to the fact of the matter.

Surely if Billy can do that, I a paradigm of discipline can resist the siren call of grease and salt for some damned healthy food to actually nourish my body, right? Well, I’m trying. As of today, I’ve succeeded in choosing relatively healthy choices — and it depends on where you classify homemade Chinese food with low sodium soy sauce and frozen pizza on the nights when Travis cooks. And I do cave in to the craving for a good burger and fries once in a while, too. Apparently, discipline is not my thing when overloaded and stressed. :/

As for exercise, I was battling the urge to nap, so I kept it light. Light stretching, light weight lifting, light walking. Everything exercise oriented seems to be half-assed, but at least I’m doing something every day. Granted, I’m not getting very far on my health goals of, well, being healthy. *sigh*

In the words of my grandmother, though: