Taking Off June

tl;dr: Dave Kerber will not be seen often in June, he has set aside the month for his family.

A little while ago I was struggling with understanding why we were just SO busy.  I felt almost powerless thinking about how it seemed that I never had time to spend with my family.  A few minutes thinking through our schedule helped me realize that we have standing obligations Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings every week.  We also had obligations three Sunday nights a month, and some Saturday mornings.  I also have three to five user groups meetings a month I attend.  On top of all of that our company has been demolishing, moving into, and renovating a new office, which means I've been working nearly every weekend for the last 90 days.

I do not want people to think we ignore our kids.  I have one night a week set aside where I spend the evening one on one with my daughters and alternate between them every week.  Abbie and I spend time together whenever we can, usually when everyone is sleeping.  James is still a little to young ( 10 months ) to really understand spending time together.  So it is not that I never get to spend time with anyone in my family, we just rarely spend time together as a whole family.

So one night I mentioned to Abbie that I had a "Crazy Idea" to share with her.  The idea was that our family would declare temporary bankruptcy from all of our commitments for the month of June and take our evenings and weekends and just spend the time together as a family.  That means no dinner with my Mom or Abbie's parents, no church activities outside Sunday morning, no user group meetings.  Just time together as a family.  To my surprise, she liked the idea!

I don't really have any specific goals for the time, I just want to spend lots of time with my family.  We will see how it goes.

Yesterday was the first day, it was pretty good.  We planned out what we want to do with the week, had a silly string fight in the back yard, and started a 1000 piece puzzle.  The girls wanted to have a water gun fight in the rain, which actually turned out to be a lot of fun!  We had some down time where we sat around and read and then we played Super Mario Bros on the Wii for a while.  Abbie and I had a great time, Elizabeth did too.  Katherine will never admit to having fun, but I distinctly remember seeing her smile more than once.

So if you do not see me around or I miss your big event, please do not take it personally; I will be back soon and look forward to telling you some of the fun stories from our adventure.

Fear

I'm no stranger to fear these days.  Last February, I started a consulting business part time and after some hard work, a lot of luck, and a ton of help from other people, I went full time.  I knew it was what I wanted to do, but that didn't make it easy.

It's was easy to say "I want to go into full time consulting", it was not easy to leave behind people that I won, lost,  laughed, bled, cried, and sang karaoke with.  It was difficult to leave behind a well paying position and give up my stock in a high profile, high growth company in exchange for paying my own insurance, finding my own work, and having no guarantees.  It's exciting but the fear is more than I expected.  I assumed I would find a new surge of courage after I stepped out on my own and became "free" to do what I wanted.  I should have known better.

I think the easy part is over.  I seem to have a whole list of things that scare me now.  Recently, I put together a list of things I needed to do and instead of rating them by importance or urgency, I rated them by how scary they are.  Here it is:

• Contract with client A (very scary)
• Contact people about part time work (very scary)
• Invoice Client B (not scary)
• Remaining hours for Client B (not scary)
• Email guy I went to church with who now may be able to send work my way (very scary)
• Follow up with potential client who keeps blowing me off because they think I'm too small (very scary)
• Invoice Client C (not scary)
• Finish reading book (not scary)
• Write employee handbook (kinda scary)
• Client D system restores (not scary)
• Work on open source project I want to help with (kinda scary)
• Follow up with people now that I'm gone (very scary)
• Redesign website (very scary)
• A blog entry (EXTREMELY SCARY)
• Business budgeting/ book keeping for 2011 (very scary)

I want to acknowledge my fear and be real about it.  When my kids are afraid I tell them that courage is taking action when you're afraid.  I have to set the example.

So here I am with this domain I've owned for almost two years now, I don't like the design and it is definitely not how it needs to be.  But I know myself, if I wait until it is "just right", I'll never get started.  So here I am, diving in.  

I hope the kids are proud someday.